This is a post and comments I found on Facebook. The paragraphs at the beginning are by Sara Robinson.
--Kim
Sara's Post
I know a lot of people thought I was nuts when we upped stakes and fled back to Canada as soon as we could after the election.
But this is why. I understand this pattern. I know how fast it moves. I knew that we wanted to be out before the inauguration. It was 77 days of hell and hard losses to get ourselves to the border in some kind of intact state -- but I haven't regretted it for one day.
Not a thing that has happened since has surprised me. Especially not the speed with which they've moved.
The Atlantic is all over the place, but this is a good warning, and I have to say I'm not sure what we should be doing beyond what the we that is civil society are doing, but I suspect that while organizing will lay the groundwork something will spark an unanticipated uprising/response. Everything we do do to resist, including holding onto truth, fact, science, history matters, strengthens the groundwork. And yeah, the Democratic Party "leadership" should be doing so much more, though individual members are doing a lot.
(I'd also note that her first example is Duterte, the authoritarian who ruled the Philippines with brutality from 2016-2022 and he's now a prisoner awaiting trial by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. A second piece on rising authoritarianism is posted in the comments: "Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism" from NPR. I totally agree with her about the immediate threats. But the Duterte example is a reminder that authoritarians are precarious, staying in power through threat because they're almost always unpopular--and while the Philippines elected someone terrible recently, they also had the 1986 People Power revolution that overthrew the Marcos dictatorship.)
Anyway Adrienne LaFrance writes:
Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you'll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.
People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a "slide," but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country's democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.
Shortly after Trump was reelected last fall, I called Ressa to ask her how she thought Americans should prepare for his return. She told me then that she worried about a failure of imagination. She knew that the speed of the destruction of institutions—one of the first steps an authoritarian takes to solidify and centralize power—would surprise people here, even those paying the closest attention. Ressa splits her time between Manila and New York, and she repeatedly warned me to be ready for everything to happen quickly. When we spoke again weeks after his inauguration, Ressa was shaken. President Trump was moving faster than even she had anticipated.
I heard something similar recently from Garry Kasparov, the Russian dissident and chess grand master. To him, the situation was obvious. America is running out of time, he told me. As Kasparov wrote recently in this magazine, "If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin's budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too."
The chorus of people who have lived through democratic ruin will all tell you the same thing: Do not make the mistake of assuming you still have time. Put another way: You think you can wait and see, and keep democracy intact? Wanna bet? Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic—and it's understandable that they'd have a sense of inevitability about the dangers of autocracy. But that gloomy worldview does not make their warnings any less credible: Unless Trump's power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that's if you're lucky.
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Jill Cozzi
I wish leaving the US were an option for me. It isn't. When you are elderly and have no spouse or partner, it becomes far more daunting. Add being Jewish to the equation, and there is LITERALLY nowhere in the world where I would be welcomed AND safe. And as a secular Jew with NO history of even the rituals, never mind the religion, Israel doesn't feel like an option over (and certainly doesn't fill the "safe" criterion).
I made my "big move" after my husband died over a decade ago and built a new and wide circle of friends. The thought of having to do that in a new country with a new culture is just too daunting. I'm at a point now where I'm taking stock of my life, figuring I've had a good run, and hoping that whenever the end comes for me, that the people perpetrating it make it fast.
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Dave Johnson
"Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic"
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Edrie Irvine
I'm looking to the time when my Tina the Cat passes over as the point when I can flee this devolving country. She's too old to move away from her multiple vet specialists. But when the time comes, and I suspect in the not too distant future, I hope to have built enough financial cushion to make a move. This isn't wishful thinking; I'm being pushed out of my country not just by the current "leaders" but by the third of my fellow citizens who chose this chaos.
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Wendy Schultz
But if everyone of good conscience leaves, who will remain to fight back?
We are retiring back to the United States, for a myriad of reasons, and the first thing I plan to do is march into my local chapter of the League of Women Voters and ask where on the ramparts they want me to work.
Sara Robinson
Wendy Schultz My mom was president of the largest LWV in the country (LA) and months away from being the next national president when she had an unexpected (VIOXX-induced) heart attack and retired. So I literally grew up in the League, and it was very formative for my politics.
I followed in her footsteps, though they led through some different trenches. I started warning about this very future 20 YEARS AGO. I talked about it until I and everyone around me were sick to tears of it. I did what I could to head this off.
But now it's here. I know as well as anyone can know how it's going to go -- but if I couldn't stop it then, I'm going to be of no use whatsoever now. From here, we need other skills. I'm exactly the same age Mom was when she retired. My name has appeared on a lot of right-wing hit lists; and once the gulag is built, they're going to need to feed it. So I need very much not to be in the US right now.
I'm surprised you're coming back -- won't you miss Oxford? I would, terribly -- and most of the folks I know who have the option to be elsewhere are taking it. It's good for America that you're returning, but please don't underestimate the risk involved in being who you are here right now.
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