It’s a staple in presidential elections that people will proclaim their intent to pack up and leave the United States if an undesirable candidate is elected - be he Bush, Romney, Trump, etc. - but most of them don’t actually do so, and even on the SDMB, a left-leaning board, and with Trump, as abhorrent a candidate as there has ever been in modern US history, the vast majority of Dopers stated that they would not leave the USA even if Trump were elected.
So - just how bad a presidential candidate would have to be elected for you to leave the United States (for Dopers who are US citizens and residing in the US, that is)?
Would it have to be a truly Hitler-esque candidate, on the right? A truly Mao-esque or Stalin-esque candidate on the left?
Would it be the margin of victory that makes the ultimate deciding difference? I.e., if a Trumpish candidate were elected in a narrow victory, that would be one thing, but if a Trumpish candidate won in a massive 60% to 40% landslide, with 500+ electoral votes, you’d say, “That’s it, America’s hopeless, let’s go?”
Yes, and it would be too late when I realized that.
Ask me Nov. 9.
Can’t imagine an election result that would cause me to move.
I guess if the country took a certain turn, and remained on that tack for a decade or so, I might consider it. No idea where I’d go to, either. If America turned so bad that I’d consider expatriating, the world would have become an awfuly ugly/unstable place. Doubtful that places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada would be putting out the welcome mat…
This is a very resilient country, and we are protected by Constitutional safeguards from absolute dictatorship. I have lived through some very bad Presidents and some even worse Congresses. We will survive. I will not leave just because someone whose ass I dislike is sitting in the Oval Office.
I would leave the country when my president:
a. begins to murder his/her own citizens for being undesirable. Forced abortions would fall into this category too
or
b. invades a nearby country as part of a world domination scheme
or
c. seizes the minor children of citizens to train and conscript them into the military, probably as part of a b scenario
or
d. reinstitutes slavery
Yeah, it would take a Hitler/Stalin level of person and I really doubt I’d move before it was too late to be allowed to leave.
Besides patriotism, it’s just not a move that would be easy for me. I have no family outside the US. (Well, there is that cousin I haven’t seen for 20 years…) I’m an accountant, so my general skills are portable, but I’d have to relearn all the specifics (like the tax laws for a new country and IFRS standards) before I could actually do any productive work. My only foreign language is barely enough Spanish to find the bathroom and order food. I’ve never even traveled outside North America. So, our hypothetical Hitler/Stalin would have to make things really, really bad before moving would look attractive.
Nothing would make me move. I would join the rebellion instead. Now wanting to move, well, I’ve already been through a few like that.
To paraphrase Michael Bolton, “Why should I have to leave? SHE’S the one who sucks!!”
It is not the bad presidency that worries me. It is the remedy if we ever truly have one, which could be a military takeover or a dictatorship by a charismatic member high on the succession list. People like Donald Rumsfeld come to mind. Americans would find a way to protect themselves from a bad president, but the manner of doing so may be neither pretty nor temporary. The rebellion that several posters above have referenced. And very prudent to distance oneself from.
Sadly, we may soon learn that freedom itself is the enemy – the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the evil and selfish to work unfettered toward their own ends.
People have this idea that it’s easy to move to Canada on a lark, but I get the impression that it’s not. I once knew an American citizen who became a permanent resident of Canada, but he had to go through a lot of bureaucratic nonsense to make it happen.
The country isn’t immediately screwed on Wednesday morning. In fact, I don’t even think it’d be screwed after four years of having a moron in office. President != King; Congress and the Supreme Court are there to work as sea anchors against whatever a renegade president might want to do.
It would take a sequence of presidents, voted into office in fair elections and supported by a sympathetic Congress and SCOTUS, before this country could truly be messed up. if that came to pass, it would only be with the consent of the voters, which would mean the entire people of the US were complicit and worthy of abandonment.
Thing is in the US we have congress, senate, and the supreme court to keep the president in line. After that we have the governors. Plus their is a thing called an election.
Looking back, the closest we have had to a dictatorship was Abraham Lincoln who did alot of things like declare war on the south and put alot of people in prison who opposed him. However looking back I’m glad he did or the north might not have won.
But I dont see that happening again.
I simply own too much property and such where I cannot see how I would be ahead by moving to another country.
PLUS, if things are that bad in the US, you can guarantee that its also going to be bad in other places.
Whenever I travel, I’m always on the lookout for places I couid re-retire as an expat. Thre are a lot of nicely liveable places, but getting papers to stay there legally is an increasing problem, Even banana republics now have universal health care, and arriving Americans are seen as health care refugees. I was in Brunei a few weeks ago, and that would be very livable and affordable, but I understand that they do not permit retirees, nobody gets a residence visa except productive workers. Moldova and Ukraine would be nice, but an overly cold climate for my liking. Sri Lanka has some dicey aspects to it, but might be acceptable. I think I could deal with Ethiopia.
Any American can go to Mexico with no papers needed, ever, as long as you remain in the 20-km strip along the US border.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable living in a country where 45% or more of my fellow citizens could vote for someone like Trump. Any number above 5% scares me. I’m not leaving, though.
What specifically would you hope to be avoiding by moving?
Read Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Except that the government tried to seal the border to prevent people escaping to Canada.
I’m in the opposite situation. I was preparing mentally to move to the US (I had made no actual preparations, but my daughter would like me to talk to a rental agent when we visit her at American Thanksgiving). But no way if Trump is elected. I don’t know what he will do but I am sure it will be a disaster. End medicare? Maybe. End social security (I get a little)? Perhaps. Who knows. Lower taxes for the wealthiest for sure. Appoint a Scalia clone, certainly. Start a nuclear war? Probably not, but who knows. Allow Putin to retake The Ukraine and the Baltic countries? Probably, although it doesn’t impact me.
I visited my relatives in Czechoslovakia when Reagan was president, and considered staying with them for a while, but really, even Reagan’s America was better than a Soviet bloc country. We also stopped in the UK for a while, and I idly asked someone if an American could live there, and that’s when I learned how bad unemployment was in the UK at the time.
Realistically, the only country I could go to that would welcome me would be Israel.
A Trump presidency would be pretty bad, but as other people have pointed out, the constitution provides check and balances that prevent dictatorships. FWIW, I’m not sure Trump understands the limits of the powers of the president. The chief justice of the supreme court may be a more powerful position than the president, and the workload:power ratio certainly favors the chief justice, since the president is in a pressure cooker all the time (unless he’s Bush, fils, who took a LOT of vacations on his ranch in Texas, which may be why Cheney was in the news a lot more than most VPs).
Anyway, I personally think that Trump will stumble his way around so badly that Pence and the cabinet will actually be running the country-- and as much as I don’t like Pence, he’s not stupid, and he will be a competent VP-- he’s no Dan Quayle. I mean, my problem with Pence is that I don’t agree with him, not that I think he can’t do the job.
Now, the last time we had someone really unprepared to run the country stumble into office was Reagan, if you ask me (and Tip O’Neill) but the thing about Reagan was that he took other people’s advice. He know what he didn’t know, and surrounded himself with good advisors.
It remains to be seen whether Trump will be able to do that-- surround himself with people who will give him good advice-- or whether he’ll take on a bunch of yes men. If it’s the former, then he won’t do much damage. If it’s the latter, he will probably resign after six months when he realizes the president doesn’t get to do whatever he wants, the way a CEO gets to do whatever he wants with a company.
So I doubt I’ll have to go to Israel.
I’ll give it three years and add that Congress will at least have to play a role.
Charles Manson.
I actually did live out-of-country for a few years during the Reagan Administration.
I lived in Canada for 15 years, which conveniently coincided with the Viet Nam war.