The Situation: Abandoning America

The Situation on Monday pointed out some of the less obvious problems with the president accepting a $400 million flying palace from an authoritarian potentate.

Today I have a bone to pick with three former Yale professors.

The New York Times today features a video by Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley about why they are leaving the United States.

The video is a warning by three prominent American antifascist intellectuals that the time has come for tenured professors at elite institutions to become professors at elite institutions just across a border—an undefended border, by the way, that won’t offer much protection if democracy fares as badly in the United States as they darkly warn.

“I’m leaving to the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words,” Stanley says in the video.

“The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner, rather than later,” says Shore.

As to Snyder—author of such works as “On Tyranny” which warns, “Do not obey in advance”—he still denies that he has fled in advance. “I did not flee Trump,” he says. “But if people are going to leave the United States, or leave American universities, there are reasons for that.”

Count me unimpressed.

I kept my mouth shut when the Yale Three announced their departures back in March.

I am not interested these days in picking internecine fights with people who are struggling with The Situation, as a general matter. And in any event, people should live and teach wherever they want. Groucho Marx once said that, “It’s better to run to Toronto than to live in a place you don’t want to.” And if the Yale Three think they are better off in Toronto than in New Haven, who am I to tell them otherwise?

In Snyder’s case, in any event, he made reasonably clear that he had not left his Yale position for political reasons. He left before the election. “Had Kamala Harris won the November election, I would not have come back,” he wrote only a month ago. “I did not leave Yale because of anything Trump is doing; the chronology and the psychology are all wrong; I was not and am not fleeing anything.”

But while Snyder then wanted to avoid blame for fleeingTrump, he now seems eager to get credit for it. Why else does one make a video entitled, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.”?

At the point at which leaving the United States becomes a performative exercise complete with carefully-edited video about how it’s 1933 and it’s time to go, the theatrical gesture is going to provoke theater reviews.

Here’s mine: Two thumbs down.

The best that can be said for a video like this is that it’s kind of like a resignation in protest. The individual official can’t do anything to change policy, but she can resign and make her resignation a moment. Similarly, three Yale intellectuals can’t do much about the state of American politics, but they can “resign” from the polity and move to Canada and make a kind of moment out of it to warn of America’s democratic decline. 

But the comparison is a weak one. One resigns in protest because one doesn’t want to be a cog in the machine doing evil, and because one doesn’t think one can meaningfully mitigate the evil—the individual official having such limited power and authority. In other words, one resigns because the moment of resignation, and the message it might send, is worth more than the good one can do by staying in government.

But a professor is not refusing participation in a system of evil by teaching in Ontario, rather than in Connecticut. The “moment,” rather, is not one of conscientious objection, it is one of fear. Shore and Stanley articulate this clearly in the video. Snyder hedges, but none of the three casts the departure as refusing participation in America. To hear them tell the story, rather, they are evading arrest.

Which would be all very well and good were the situation remotely as bad for tenured professors as they seem to think. But the Hannah Arendt chic they have going on is really weird coming from some of the world’s most privileged intellectuals. These people have the ultimate job protection from a university with an endowment that would make a hedge fund blush.

There are people in this country who face real dangers. Video clips of some of them run through the Yale Three’s video oped. None of those people is positioned remotely like Snyder, Shore, or Stanley. Does Jason Stanley really imagine that his work is so important that the Trump administration is going to come after him for it? I can’t tell you whom Stephen Miller is gunning for next, but I doubt very much he’s thinking too hard about the author of “How Fascism Works” and “Erasing History.” Not throwing shade on these books, but please.

These are the people who should be out there doing stuff, taking risks so that others who actually have real vulnerabilities don’t have to. They should be leading from the positions of incredible safety they occupy. If they don’t want to do that, fine, no judgment. As I say, we should all live where we want. But making videos congratulating yourself for abandoning the United States is just thumbing your nose at the people you leave behind in situations of much greater risk than you ever had.

I put my money where my mouth is on this point. I don’t have tenure. The political environment scares me too. And I’m as vain as the next guy who writes in public. Yet I try to remember that those videos of Rumeysa Öztürk being abducted off the street and the Venezuelan prisoners at our rent-a-gulag (both of which show up in the Times video) aren’t about me. And I try to use my position of relative safety—I’m a citizen, I’m a public figure, I’m white, and I have resources—to be loud. And I have tried to continue being so—in much more legally confrontational ways than Yale professors tend to. And no, the police have not come. Nobody has told me I can’t do the things I do. Because the risk of our current political decay isn’t borne by people like me. It’s what the kids call “privilege,” and it conveys a certain obligation.

The flight of the Yale Three is their own business. Their asking for congratulations for it in the pages of the New York Times, by contrast, is a public matter. And it sends a terrible message to their readers and to students. The message is that America is doomed, so give up now if you have the means to do so. And if not? Good luck.

Well, I’ve got news for the Yale Three: I’m not ready to give up yet. I’m staying. And if and when I ever have to leave, it will be because I face real risk in saying the things I need to say. I won’t line up a cushy job first. And I won’t congratulate myself in the New York Times.

One other thing: the Yale Three shouldn’t get too comfortable in Toronto. Do we really believe that democracy in Canada will survive if democracy in the United States does not? Historians making blithe comparisons between The Situation and 1933 should remember how many refugees thought they had reached safety from Germany in neighboring countries only to have those countries overrun a few years later.

If 1933 comes can the Anschluss be far behind?

The Situation continues tomorrow.