Be a Patriot

The Atlantic

10-04-2025

Professors Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley are leaving Yale for the University of Toronto. Some of their reasons might be personal and professional, but these well-known academics—two historians and a philosopher—aren't just changing jobs. They're fleeing America as they see it falling under an authoritarian regime. They're watching the rule of law wither and due process disappear while a chill of fear settles over the country's most powerful law firms, universities, and media owners. They're getting out while they can.
So are thousands of other Americans who are looking for work abroad, researching foreign schools for their kids, trying to convert a grandparent's birth country into a second passport, or saving up several hundred thousand dollars to buy citizenship in Dominica or Vanuatu. Many more Americans are discussing leaving with their families and friends. Perhaps you're one of them.
When I heard the news of the Yale exodus, I wondered if my failure to explore an exit makes me stupid and complacent. I don't want to think I'm one of the sanguine fools who can't see the laser pointed at his own head—who doesn't want to lose his savings and waits to flee until it's too late. Perhaps I was supposed to applaud the professors' wisdom and courage in realizing that the time had come to leave. But instead, I felt betrayed.
Snyder is a brilliant historian of modern Europe; Shore, his wife, is an intellectual historian focused on Eastern Europe; Stanley is an analytic philosopher who has refashioned himself as an expert on fascism. In the Trump era, Snyder and Stanley have published popular books on authoritarianism— How Fascism Works, On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom. All three professors have traveled to wartime Ukraine, tirelessly supported its cause, denounced Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and explained to their fellow Americans what history teaches about the collapse of free countries into dictatorships. Snyder says that his reasons for leaving are entirely personal, but Shore insists that she and her husband are escaping a 'reign of terror' in America. Stanley compares the move to leaving Germany in 1933.
Snyder's best-selling pamphlet, On Tyranny, is an instruction manual on how to resist authoritarianism. Lesson 1 warns: 'Do not obey in advance.' It's hard not to conclude that the Yale professors are doing just that. Cutting and running at a difficult moment, before the state has even targeted them, feels like a preemptive concession to Trump—a decision that Shore says she and Snyder made after his reelection.
Very few people are capable of heroism under oppression. For anyone facing death, arrest, or even persistent harassment, fleeing the country is the sane course. But the secret police aren't coming for Snyder, Shore, or Stanley. Yale, like other top-ranking universities, stands to lose millions of dollars in federal funding, but its scholars—especially those with tenure and American citizenship—are still free to speak up on behalf of an unjustly deported immigrant, defend a trans student against bullying and humiliation, protest the destruction of the federal government, and even denounce Elon Musk on X. They can still write books about fascism—more urgently now than ever. Snyder, Shore, and Stanley are deserting their posts in this country just as the battle that they've warned us about and told us how to fight is coming to a head.
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Following Trump's first election, in 2016, a British journalist published an essay in The New Yorker explaining why, after decades in New York, she was returning to London. Having shown its best face during the Obama years, America had let her and itself down, so it was time to leave. She had obtained United States citizenship, but she was exercising her option to get out now that the going here was no longer good; if the winds shifted again, she might come back with her American passport. Abandoning a country that had treated her well at just the moment when it ran into trouble defined citizenship as a transactional relationship. The essay seemed written to confirm the right-wing stereotype of the coastal elite with no real commitment to this country.
You don't have to be a dual citizen for your attachment to be transactional. Many Americans—I'm one—believe that our country's identity rests on an idea, but an idea can be corrupted and betrayed, and then disillusionment might break the bonds of affection: I'll stay with you as long as you're beautiful, good, and true. Let yourself go, and I'm out of here. In an essay on the website Persuasion, a former government official, writing under the pseudonym William A. Finnegan, says that he is going to expatriate himself because America has broken its promise and his heart. His essay is a farewell love letter from an American who served his country for years: 'And so we grieve—not just for what we're leaving behind, but for the version of America we once believed in.' This pseudonymous public servant isn't leaving because of any personal danger. His America was worth staying for only as long as it remained the America of the Declaration and the Constitution, Lincoln's last best hope, Reagan's shining city on a hill. Trump's gargoyle nation is unrecognizable to William A. Finnegan, and it's too late to do anything about it: 'If you still believe change is possible from within, I envy you. I truly do.'
How will you know when it's time to go? When Trump deports an inconvenient American citizen and ignores a court order to bring him or her back home? Or when Yale is intimidated into firing a law professor for teaching civil rights? Or the Justice Department invents a pretext for FBI agents to confiscate computers in the offices of an independent publication and take down its website? Or the 2026 midterms seem certain to be unfree and unfair? Or when none of these extreme possibilities happens, but life in America becomes so rotten with injustice and corruption, so colorlessly orthodox, so unavoidably compromising, so impoverished, so shitty, that you lose the will to stay here? When your children plead with you to move abroad?
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What if you decide the time has come to leave and find that it's too late?
I can't answer these questions for myself, let alone for anyone else. But I don't believe the time has come—not even close. Americans are just beginning to find their voices against the destruction of our democracy. They're raising them in town halls, city streets, schools, media, courts, Congress, and conversations across the country. The awakening is slow and incoherent because the assault is coming so fast and on so many fronts: constitutional, legal, bureaucratic, economic, cultural, moral. Above all, moral. Trump's greatest weapon is his power to convince Americans that their country isn't worth saving. Some public intellectuals already seem persuaded.
The belief that America stands for an idea beyond blood and soil makes its identity fragile, because an idea lives in people's minds, where it is subject to lies, hatred, ignorance, despair, even extinction. But for this very reason, as long as enough Americans continue to believe in the idea with enough conviction to stick it out here and fight, the country that you and I once lived in will still exist for the generation after us. Even with Trump memes, tariff charts, Signal chats, and masked police, America will remain my desecrated home. Snyder's Lesson 19 is this command: 'Be a patriot.'