Should I stay or should I go? On living in America on the brink

Everyone I know is worried that Donald Trump will steal the election. So, why don’t we leave?

The first time it occured to me that Donald Trump might refuse to leave office next January was on Sunday March 15th this year, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to hit New York City.

It was after New York’s state governor Andrew Cuomo had closed public schools, but before he released his executive order instructing all non-essential workers to stay home. A few days after most people I knew had decided it was probably best we didn’t move about the city the way we usually did, but before any of us understood how far the virus had already spread… or how many of us already had it.

I was sitting in the backyard of the home I share with my husband, my three-year-old son, and four housemates — most of us Australian expats who moved to the United States between 5 and 10 years ago for work, and for whom New York was now home — when it began to occur to me that our “sheltering in place” might not be a brief and voluntary preventative measure, but might be legally enforced and drag on for months.

Visions of totalitarianism danced in my head. What would happen to our emotional wellbeing if we couldn’t see our friends or family for months? If childcare and schools were shut down, would women be forced out of the workplace and back into the home, 1950s style? Would police patrol checkpoints to stop us from moving beyond our designated zones, like had happened in Italy, or forbid us from leaving our homes at all, like would happen later in Jordan?

Worse still, what if the virus was used as an excuse to postpone, and then cancel, the US presidential election?

Back then, these fears felt psychologically real but practically speaking otherworldly, like scenes from a fictional dystopia. Seven months later, many of them have come true, albeit in different forms than I imagined. The virus hit harder and lasted longer than most of us expected, killing 20,000 New Yorkers in two months, and now a total of more than 226,000 people across the United States, with no signs of abating. Lack of reliable childcare and schooling has pushed a lot of women out of the workplace, to the tune of 865,000 in September alone, even as employment numbers rose overall.

And although next Tuesday’s election looks set to take place on schedule (Trump did in fact suggest at one point that it be delayed, but few people appeared to take his suggestion seriously), the pandemic means that it is unlikely to unfold the way most of us have come to expect elections to happen: where people vote safely and freely, the votes are tallied and a winner declared that night, and the loser congratulates the winner and concedes gracefully, even if with grief and disappointment.

My fears started to move from “theoretical concern” to “impending threat” some time in July, as tensions over civil rights escalated around the country and skyrocketing case numbers made it clear that the coronavirus would still be a factor in November. For months, the US postal service had been moving at a sloth’s pace, to the point that if I saw something had been sent via USPS I had begun to assume it might never arrive. On multiple occasions, I had watched online as a package that had initially been sent through a different shipping service stopped moving altogether as soon as it was transferred to USPS for final delivery. When packages did arrive, they were weeks, sometimes even months late. The lines at the new privately owned mail center in my neighbourhood grew longer.

These might have been trivial annoyances were it not for the fact that a highly contagious and deadly pandemic meant that a lot of people required a functioning postal service in order to vote safely.

For months too, I had been receiving emails from various activist organisations warning that the US postal service was running out of funding. In the stress of the lockdown, these emails had seemed relatively unimportant, the kind of conservative government starving of public services you see all the time. But now, with Trump repeatedly claiming that vote-by-mail was illegitimate, dangerous, and would rig the election, they took on a more sinister turn.

On Twitter, people posted images of mailboxes being removed from the streets. Meanwhile, when Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would accept the results of the election, he replied that he would “have to see.”

Now, the visions dancing in my head were all too realistic. Of an election where we wouldn’t know the outcome for days or weeks afterwards. Of a winner declared before a representative sample of the votes were counted. Of Trump looking ahead in the votes counted on the night, but Biden pushing ahead later, leading to confusion and distrust over the outcome. Of the swing states in the midwest remained contested for weeks, people from Left and Right taking to the streets to protest, and some of them bringing their guns. Of Trump winning the election clearly and legitimately, and sending in troops to clamp down on the inevitable protests after. Of Biden winning narrowly, and Trump crying foul and refusing to leave.

Was it time to start preparing for a situation where we might have to leave America quickly, I asked my husband one night after we put our son to bed. Don’t worry, he replied. He was already on it, and we could get out in 48 hours if we had to. There were still flights running from LA to Australia each day; the main challenge, he said, would be getting to the other side of the country. If flights stopped running domestically, we could get a car and drive across the country, or fly east over Europe.

In August, it was all we talked about, late night between ourselves, and with friends over the phone, in person, and via text. What the post-election risk scenarios were, how likely each one was, and what we would do if it became clear it was time to leave. One couple we spoke to, fellow Australians who had been in New York for five years, said they were looking at British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, where they already had friends and where they could work across relatively similar time zones. Another friend, a gay American, us his partner was looking into a work transfer to London. My hairdresser, a Black woman who had grown up in Brooklyn, was organizing visas to Germany for herself and her children.

For me, the first choice was always Australia, where I have friends and family and citizenship. But Australia was looking less and less like a viable option, with its strict limits on international arrivals, unaffordable flight prices (over $13,000 per person as I publish this essay), and growing number of expats stranded overseas. I told myself that if the worst happened, the Australian government wouldn’t abandon its citizens, but the horror stories from elsewhere piled up, I wasn’t so sure.

Yet for all that escape plans were on our minds, no one I knew had actually left. I knew people who had relocated to the suburbs when the coronavirus hit NYC, and even some who had returned to Australia temporarily. But I knew no one who had left because of their fear of democratic collapse.

One of the reasons for this dissonance, I theorised, was that we didn’t fully believe what we were seeing in front of us. It seemed too dramatic, too extreme; still too much a part of a fictional dystopia and not tethered enough to reality. We could register the signs unfolding before us, but we didn’t fully accept our own interpretation of them.

You might be reading this essay and think I’m suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome — a phase used by Trump supporters to describe people who have let their opposition to Trump distort their perception of reality — as a conservative friend of a friend told me on Facebook a few weeks ago. But truth be told, I wasn’t fully convinced that I wasn’t suffering from it myself.

I tried to make sense of the situation by attempting to examine it from an emotional distance. A sitting US president calling into question the legitimacy of an election before it happened was objectively concerning, surely? We could agree that a presidential candidate encouraging their supporters to vote twice to test the security of the electoral system wasn’t normal. It wasn’t typical in a democracy for a politician to tell their supporters, many of whom had guns, to go to the polls and “watch very carefully” for any signs of impropriety.

It wasn’t the sort of behaviour you expected in a democracy. It wasn’t the sort of behaviour I had ever seen in a politician before.

But Trump’s extremeness was part of what made him so difficult to process. The things he said and the threat that he presented were so beyond reason that they didn’t seem real. He had to be joking, right? And if he wasn’t, surely someone would step in and stop him from getting away with it.

This process, by which a person is made to doubt their own reality, is known as gaslighting, and is a common tactic employed by both emotional abusers and political dictators. I had experienced it before, at the end of a friendship in my twenties in which my former friend had engaged in a series of brutal but plausibly deniable attacks, all while claiming she desperately wanted to maintain our friendship. Then, as now, I had emotionally recoiled at what I was experiencing, while questioning my interpretation of events. It was only when she told a lie so obviously malicious and untrue that it could not be explained away as a misunderstanding that I was able to end the friendship and process what had happened.

In a 2016 essay for Teen Vogue that would make her famous, political commentator Lauren Duca claimed that Donald Trump was “gaslighting America.” But Trump’s gaslighting wasn’t the only reason we were having trouble fully digesting what was happening in front of us. It’s that even as we fear and prepare the worst, on some level we also believe that the worst can’t happen — not in America, at least.

We tell ourselves that Biden will win by a large enough margin that the result will be uncontestable. That if the election is contested the law will come down on the side of truth, whatever that might turn out to be, even though the Republicans now have a 6–3 majority on the Supreme Court. That if things get bad, enough people on both sides of politics will recognise it, take to the streets, and refuse to legitimise the regime. That if we did take to the streets, we would be listened to. That perhaps even if Trump did win again, it would be bad, sure, but not as bad as we imagined (and silently, or at least not that bad for us). That someday America will look back on Trump with the same hazy glow it looks back on Regan and George W. Bush with — presidents who were polarising at the time, but who are now remembered as upstanding statesmen.

And if we look at the current situation purely in terms of our own lived experience, many of these assumptions are entirely reasonable. We are Australians, Americans, Canadians, Brits: people who have been lucky enough to grow up in countries where the continuation of democracy, however flawed, was a given. We may have had elected leaders that we disagree with or even despise, but we have never had to worry that they wouldn’t leave office if they were voted out. That idea that Trump might refuse to leave — and that he might get away with it — is still on some deep-seated and fundamental level unimaginable to us.

Yet, there is an arrogance to these assumptions as well. The ugly truth is that what we find unimaginable happens all the time, around the world and throughout history. That it is not uncommon for people who are living rich, joyful, peaceful lives, to suddenly have the rug swept out from under them; to be forced to pick up what remains and flee to safer territory, where they are drained of their history and humanity and labelled “illegal.”

The truth is that the continuation of democracy is not something unassailable and assured, but something that must be watched over and protected.

Why should America be the exception, when it so closely follows the patterns of so many other nations on the verge? Why should we assume that our own lives will continue to be sacrosanct, just because they always have been until now?

Which brings me to another uncomfortable truth. That the transition from democracy to failed state usually doesn’t play out as dramatically as we expect it to. That what we anticipate as intolerable is often in fact something that we are willing to tolerate when it becomes our reality. We might complain, march, express horror to our friends and on social media, but we usually consent to endure it, because the truly powerful will make enough concessions to keep the lives of the relatively powerful palatable… so long as you have money, and so long as you’re not a member of a targeted group.

In January 2017, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, Russian-American journalist Michael Idov published an article for New York Magazine on his life in Moscow. Putin’s regime was able to maintain itself, Idov argued, in part because it permitted Moscow’s elites to live a “near-complete facsimile” of a Western life, so long as they didn’t complain too loudly, and so long as they didn’t require anything from the state. The message, he wrote, was: “Sit quietly, enjoy your new bike lanes, or face a carefully randomized punishment.”

Democracy or not, we all have things we choose not to fully engage with or process in order to make the experience of living bearable. It’s what — contrary to what you might see on Reddit — Morpheus in The Matrix really meant when he talked about the red pill and the blue pill. For progressives in United States, that might be the drone strikes under president Obama, or the mythology that (as New Yorker journalist Masha Gessen puts it in their recent book Surviving Autocracy) it is a nation of immigrants, rather than a settler country built on a foundation of slavery. In Australia, it might be failure to reckon with the genocide of our indigeous people, or the fact that we lock up our asylum seekers on islands offshore.

As humans, we have a remarkable capacity to process the unimaginable and fold it into our understanding of what’s normal. It’s how we survive. But as a country falls apart, the list of things we have to overlook — and the compromises and accommodations we have to make — in order to continue feeling “normal” grows ever longer.

In May, I watched in horror from the safety of my laptop as police arrested four CNN journalists live on camera in Minneapolis as the city raged from the murder of George Floyd, realising that the America I kept fearing was going to descend upon us after the election — the America that quashed free speech and dissent — was already here. It just wasn’t evenly distributed.

In August, in the wake of protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the shooting of yet another unarmed Black man, a 17-year-old by the name of Kyle Rittenhouse showed up to counterprotest, gun in hand. He shot three people, killing two. Again, it felt like a preview of the worst that I feared might happen after the election. But the election hadn’t happened yet, and again, that future was already here.

In September, the US Department of Justice declared the cities of Portland, Seattle, and New York “anarchist jurisdictions,” to the confusion of New York residents for whom the city did not feel anarchistic at all. The mayor said it was an excuse for the government to withdraw funding, but it was the language — and what it created permission to do — that worried me most.

Which begs the question, if things are so bad, why am I still here? To which I respond: why does anyone hesitate to leave a place they call home?

I wrote at the beginning of this essay that I moved to New York City for work, but that’s only a partial truth. The real truth is that I moved here for love. Love of the city and the energy of its streets. Love for the way that people here live life in public, butting into conversations overheard in passing, and singing sober as they walk down the streets. Love for the way that its residents make the city their own, making and remaking in their own image. Love for the fact that at its best, America lives up to its mythology as a place where anything and everything feels possible.

And although COVID-19 has reshaped the contours of the city over the last seven and a half months, many of those things that drew me to New York, and to America, continue to be present. When the pandemic rendered a large proportion of the city unemployed and without income, a man in my Brooklyn neighbourhood responded by setting up a community fridge in a friend’s front yard. After the riots in lower Manhattan in May and June, artists painted over boarded up storefronts with messages of solidarity and unity. When I take my son to the playground, the parks are filled with people playing music, on instruments or on their stereos. The city may be changed from what it was pre-COVID, but it still feels very much alive.

In February, just before the virus took the city, my then 2-year-old son turned to me smiling as we waited for a bus one afternoon and said, “I love New York. It’s my place.”

To give that up and to leave behind the life I’ve built here would be to be filled with grief. It is not a thing that is done easily. So long as there is the possibility of hope, it springs eternal.

And I am more hopeful now than I was in my darkest days of August and September. Not that Biden wins in a landslide and that Trump leaves gracefully (although that would be nice, and the quickest way out of this mess), but that we are collectively prepared to face the challenges that may await us in the coming days and weeks.

I see hope in the record numbers of people lining up to vote early to make sure their votes are counted. I see hope in the urgency with which people of all political persuasions are phone banking, and texting, and showing up to vote: unlike 2016, nobody is taking the results of this election for granted. I also see hope simply in the fact that people are talking and writing about the dangers of the post-election period. A threat must first be recognised, after all, in order to be averted.

I still teeter between hoping I’m overstating the threat and fearing that I’m understating it. Between worrying that I’ll leave it too late to get out if it comes to that, and thinking that to leave is cowardly — that if you really care about a place, you should stick around and fight for the sake of those who don’t have the option of leaving. Between loving my life in this city and country, and worrying that my love for it makes me blind to reality.

And I’m still not sure that any of the (non-)decisions I’ve made are the right ones. No matter who wins the election in November, America remains vulnerable to divisive leaders.

But love makes you crazy, I guess. And so for now I stay, and hope that the worst doesn’t come. And that if it threatens to, we have the will and the wherewithal to stop it.