'Slink away like a coward': Academics slammed for abandoning Trump's America

New York Magazine columnist Ross Barkan urged against Americans bolting to the shores of foreign nations to escape Trump’s many attacks on civil liberties.

“[F]leeing the U.S. isn’t the answer,” said Barkan. “This is not the Vietnam War, when young men of draft age fled to Canada to avoid dying in an unpopular conflict thousands of miles away. … Fleeing is a cheap, ego-flattering maneuver; it helps no one.”

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“Death camps are not being constructed, and opposition political parties are not being outlawed. This isn’t Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. America is, for all its flaws, a republic that has lasted more than 200 years,” Barkan said. “In nations bereft of any genuine democratic traditions — or those, like Hungary, that are quite small in population — versions of fascism are possible. But it’s very hard, despite the claims made by these histrionic academics, for it to actually happen here.”

Fascism “has happened here: in bursts, over and over again,” Barkan concedes, referring to former president Franklin Roosevelt tossing Japanese Americans into internment camps, and Abraham Lincoln suspending habeas corpus. Woodrow Wilson, a segregationist who appointed racist Southern politicians to cabinet positions, ordered the arrests of thousands of left-wing immigrants. And then there’s the rampant destruction of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and J. Edgar Hoover’s “long reign at the FBI” and “George W. Bush’s surveillance state.”

Barkan referenced three prominent Yale professors who announced with much fanfare they were emigrating the United States for positions at the University of Toronto to escape Trumpism.

“If every left-leaning American adopted the posture of the Yale academics and trundled abroad, the nation would be hollowed out, with MAGA left to pick over its carcass,” he points out. “The U.S. is larger than MAGA and Trump and will outlast him. Trump is unpopular, and his party will not control the federal government in perpetuity. There are more elections to come, and Republicans could very well lose many of them. And the destruction Trump has wrought on the federal bureaucracy can eventually be undone: Executive orders, unlike legislation, are easy enough to reverse.”

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Read the full New York Magazine column here.