I recently watched the video (below) of what looks like a delivery guy on a bike barely outracing ICE agents trying to capture him. This was in downtown Chicago yesterday. Smack-dab downtown, very nice area, I’ve been at that intersection countless times.
And now there are goons on street corners picking and choosing who to chase. Not because they have done anything wrong but merely because they are there and “look” wrong.
Which got me wondering, when is it people need to decide it is time to leave the country? Not because they should but, rather, for their own safety?
As a white-guy I am pretty safe but Trump and company have already made noises about going after liberals too (and have to some extent). When is it too much and you just have to go even if it means completely upending your life?
I imagine thing is something many German citizens grappled with in the late 30s.
1930s Germany and the US in the 2020s aren’t the same.
I feel like we are just beginning to see inklings of resistance against fascism in the US. Grand juries are refusing to indict. Eventually trial juries will refuse to convict.
More governors and mayors will refuse to cooperate.
Right now the national level democrats are clueless pussies, which sucks.
But if I lived in Germany in the 1930s (since thats the topic) I would’ve left when the highly intelligent people started leaving. Also Germany transitioned from a democratic government to a full dictatorship within a year or two. The US is still a democracy.
Democracy is backsliding in the US, but even with the backsliding, we’re still doing better than we were in the 1970s.
I see no reason it needs to be a slow process. Indeed, I think such dramatic shifts in government are a little slow to start but they creep along and then there is a tipping point and it all happens very fast after that. Germany is an example of this…creep along and then BAM…it’s done (see Kristallnacht above). Once that shift happens things get a lot more dangerous and it is a lot harder to escape. And it can happen in one night.
If you were perspicacious, or at least had half a brain and did not think Nazis were cool, the time to get out of Germany in the 1930s was in the 1920s. Even the early 1930s were super dangerous, let alone the “late 1930s”.
I’ll wait till the midterms. What happens then will inform my future. (To be honest, I am not able to bolt easily but I will think more seriously about it).
I have almost no faith in the Dem party either. Basically republicans who support reproductive rights. Fuck them. Have you seen Adam Schiff’s speeches? Not meeting the moment. YAWN!
Dems = milquetoast
If the “other side” can’t oppose the authoritarian creep then we are all screwed. And they are not doing that job.
I think I would leave as soon as it was obvious that Hitler would remain in power more than a fortnight.
But that’s with the benefit of hindsight, without it who knows?, I don’t have the timeline of atrocities fully memorized but probably Kristallnacht would be the breaking point.
I’ve mentioned before that we’re trying to build a house in another country. Our plan right now is to start work this March and be gone in about a year, to be honest, I suspect we’ll be too late. I think waiting for the midterms is a mistake, look at how fast the change is coming. We have troops on the streets in blue cities and I suspect they’ll remain through the mid terms to suppress Democrat voter turnout. The time to leave Germany was the minute he was made chancellor after the Beerhall Putsch and the time to leave the US was after Trump’s reelection after January 6.
The latest point at which leaving Germany should have been seen as imperative was 1933, after all parties but the Nazis were made illegal. Kristallnacht (Nov. 1938) was way too late.
As for Martin Niemoller, he was OK with anti-Jewish persecution for a long time. From Wikipedia: “In his autobiography, From U-Boat to Pulpit published in the spring of 1933, he called the time of “the System” (a pejorative name for the Weimar Republic) the “years of darkness” and hailed Adolf Hitler for beginning a “national revival”.”
Niemoller turned against the Nazis after perceiving that they were interfering with Christian churches, and was arrested in '37.
Really dark times in the U.S. would be heralded by GOP rigging of elections in revenge for their fantasy that Dems fixed the 2020 election for Biden.
I think the is the right answer. Once the in-power party makes it impossible for them to be peaceably removed from power, you are stuck with whatever their agenda is. And the Nazi agenda was very clear at the time.
So the analogy would be some combination of election interference (including, but not limited to, extreme gerrymandering) along with any sort of direct banning of candidates or parties.
So if you start seeing the GOP attempting to keep certain candidates from running for office or attempting to invalidate election results that would be a very clear red flag that democracy is no longer the underlying political system.
I agree with @Whack-a-Mole that the midterms will be telling. Both for the results (which will give a view into the political climate) and for the reaction to the results (how far the GOP is willing to push the legal limits to stay in power).
Germany passed about 11 laws converring the democracy into a dictatorship in about a year.
having said that, I don’t know how bad it’ll get in the US. the american voters keep rewarding incompetence and authoritarianism in the voting booth, and the opposition party is incompetent.
I have some friends who are Hispanic. They voted for Trump.
I asked them a couple weeks ago if they would still have voted for Trump. They said no but, ISTM, they took too long to think about it (they really did).
Your timeline for Germany is a little confused; the Munich Putsch was on 8–9 November 1923 but Hitler wasn’t appointed as Chancellor until nearly a decade later in January 1933.
But aside from that nitpick, fleeing a country, especially as a persecuted minority, is not as easy or clear of a decision as the question of the o.p. assumes. Aside from the agony of cutting cultural and familial ties, the reality is that immigrants, even financially independent and well educated ones, are not generally that welcome (as many Jews fleeing Nazi Germany infamously discovered) and the majority of developed countries have a pretty arduous process for permanent resident status unless you are extremely wealthy or have a privileged status of close family or an ethnic ‘right-of-return’. Even a country that has long been pro-immigration and is seeking well-educated professionals such as Canada has a lot of bureaucracy and restrictions that makes it difficult for Americans (and indeed, most people outside the British Commonwealth) to immigrate with assurance of permanent residence and the ability to purchase real estate. It is also the case that the United States is far from the only nation experiencing democratic backsliding and a rapid erosion of civil liberties, and it may be that you find the nation you have emigrated to suddenly find itself under the control of a home-grown autocrat or far-right repressive party as has happened in Poland in the last decade, and is threatening Germany, Britain, et cetera. ‘Fleeing’ a repressive regime may find one jumping out of the pan only to end up in the fire.
It is also the case that because of the outside influence of the United States, merely leaving its borders does not make on immune from the consequences of rising autocracy within the country. Of course, to continue the German example, it went on to initiate a global conflict of unprecedented death and destruction engulfing nearly the entirety of Europe, much of Asia, and with their alliance with the Empire of Japan, almost the entirety of Eastern and Southeastern Asia and across the Pacific. The United States, as both a dominant global economic giant and one of the major nuclear powers with the ability to strike virtually anywhere on the planet in a few scores of minutes, is a threat under authoritarian rule even if you retreat to Portugal or New Zealand. There is nowhere in the world that is ‘safe’ if the often-uneven light of democracy flickers out in the United States and what remains is a multipolar conflict between nuclear armed autocratic kingdoms led by paranoid aging despots.
I’m pretty pessimistic about the future of the United States (and industrial society in general not specifically related to democratic backsliding), but while there are disturbing parallels between the rise of Nazi Germany and that of Trumpism in the United States, there are also some prominent differences, chief among them being a broad recognition and concerted resistance here that effectively did not exist in the late Weimar Republic. More to the point, if we do not want to experience a repeat of World War II, except instead of ending with a couple of atomic bombs potentially ramping up to a global nuclear exchange, it is imperative to resist and undermine aspirant theocrats who might gain control of the the American apparatus. There is nowhere you can go that won’t be affected by a rising American autocracy, and as an immigrant you are likely to find yourself unwelcome where you intend to go.
I think he means that the voters are not being ‘rewarded’ in voting for would-be autocrats––certainly not economically––but the point remains that it is far easier to pull down the institutions of democracy than it is to build them. And if polling is to be believed, then general view of democracy as a principle of governance is also falling in esteem among the voting public. What they think they are going to get out of a system that gives them less participation is unclear but it isn’t as if people are rational animals.
