Expatriating Won’t Fix It

I understand the urge to leave, Americans. But escapism is one part of how we got here.

I am going to jump into this ongoing conversation with some perspective for anyone who is looking to GTFO of America after Trump’s win. What follows touches on logistics and politics but also something larger and deeper and wider.

First, a large caveat right up front: if you know that your immediate life and safety is at risk under the coming horror, protect yourself and your family at all costs. Bail. If you have received death threats or have been a whistleblower, do what you have to do. Political refugee status is a thing that exists, and depending on your actual situation, it may be worth looking into whether you qualify. (Sadly, “I have a teenage daughter and I live in a Red State” does not count.) What follows is not addressed to any poor souls in very clear and present danger, even as my heart goes out to you.

This piece today is for the rest of you. The ones who want to leave because what’s coming is just too awful and you want to be anywhere else but in America, where everything we bled and died and marched for since the mid-20^th century is being dismantled before our eyes, and the dream of a multiracial democracy by the people and for the people has just taken a possibly existential hit. (Only time and a lot of effort will tell.)

Metaphor alert. Outside the chateau of La Ferté Vidame, November 7, 2024

The saying “wherever you go, there you are” applies. I have lived in France since 2006, and I am as connected to America now as when I took my first steps in my family’s apartment in upper Manhattan. Maybe even more so. I am American in my bones. I am American in my ancestry. I am American in where I put my attention. I am American in my culture and my cooking. Deeply. I follow American politics like a hypervigilant hawk. I can’t quit this bitch. I mean that in a galactic sense as well. When I was last home in Southern California, in August, I discovered from my uncle that my maternal lineage owned slaves. I thought we were Huguenots from France. Nope, we were Brits who peddled human flesh. I am American in my karma. I own this problem.

Half of your life as an immigrant to somewhere else is explaining the vicissitudes of your homeland to curious people. Especially if you are American, because people are fascinated by us. The very elder French are a different story, but the kids love Americans—ask me how I know. They hate our governments and our loud talkers, but our soft power is everywhere. Being a native informant from the top king badass empire in all of human history is sexy as fuck. Our sizzle is impactful. Now that the country has voted to downgrade its status again, and destabilize the rest of the world right after it got back on its feet, the benevolence of that interest may change—though I don’t think we’ll ever lose our charisma and swagger.

Didn’t we almost have it all?

I expect that if you left now you wouldn’t be able to quit America either, because the homeland as a mental-emotional-psycho-spiritual construct is a real thing. And when that space is threatened, no matter how much you fantasize about turning away, you should not disconnect. I know how I felt in 2016. I reconnected and doubled down, and panicked to staunch the wound, even from across the world, where I was almost powerless to help, except by voting and sending checks and soothing texts, and calling my elected reps. If you leave, you can’t participate meaningfully in any general strikes that I hope will be coming if Trumpian cruelty achieves any of its goals. You don’t have the same weight in pushing back from far away. You might dissociate for a while if you’re halfway around the world when the mass deportations start, but that will wear off and then you will be worse than homesick. You’ll be wispy and distant at the same time that you’ll be enraged and despondent.

Here's an example of what I mean. I lived in New York City on September 11. I walked among the trauma-stricken zombie stream of commuters ambling up Fifth Avenue from the Financial District covered in cement dust and ash. My apartment was around the corner from the main missing persons center at the Park Avenue Armory, so every day on my way to work at Glamour magazine in Times Square, I passed walls and walls blanketed with “Have You Seen Me” posters with photos and names of the as-yet-undiscovered dead. Around the other corner from me was Bellevue Hospital, where the refrigerated trucks were lined up on First Avenue because there were too many bodies for the morgue.

Yet I was less distressed by 9/11 than one of my best American friends who had moved to Paris a few years before that horrifying day, who called me in a state once we could use phones again. I could sleep. She couldn’t. Displacement isn’t helpful for mental health when you’re panicking. Trauma is going to happen, but we have incredible mental health tools to work with that today.

There is isolation in being a foreigner in a strange land. When things go really, horribly wrong, we have a wise instinct to huddle in our clans. Unless you go back to a place where you have family, you will not have a clan other than whoever you bring over with you if you leave for somewhere you do not know. You will be inviting further instability at a time of peak instability. And you will be signing yourself up for increased vulnerability when what you may mostly need to do is toughen up and get strong for the people in your community who will need you. Take breaks when you must, but by and large, don’t look away.

This might have been the mood until recently, but I promise you, this ain’t going to be it now.

If you have been reading this tale since its beginning, then you have seen my version of how complicated (and ultimately rewarding) it can be to throw out the old and build a new life in a new place. It took three challenging years to get to where I am now, snuggled in this enchanted forest without a mortgage and with neighbors who have become like family, and whom I know have my back. But I started this adventure with papers, assets, ongoing work (more or less), a solid grounding in French culture, and I spoke the language fluently. I had no dependents. I had no burdens other than personal heartbreak and shock.

Immigration is the touchiest subject in every country in the world right now. For ten million complicated reasons (and a lot of un-reason), natives are not welcoming outsiders. The doors are not being thrown open unless you can prove you bring quantifiable value to where you’re hoping to go. Back in the day, I immigrated to France relatively easily because I am a journalist with a strong grounding in subjects here that I could report on for press outlets back home. (Remember those?) The dossier I had to assemble was gargantuan. I needed letters from clients saying that having me in France where I might take a job that would have otherwise gone to a French person could be worth it because my work as a travel and fashion writer could sprinkle glory on my future home. I had to submit a stack of magazine articles I had written on French subjects, submit years of bank accounts, a police report from my last known American address to prove I didn’t have a record, and proof of (expensive) international health insurance so I wouldn’t be a burden on their services. Then, I had to form a company in France to employ myself, which was costly and time consuming. I pay thousands of euros and dollars to two accountants in two countries every year for taxes. I have to calculate personal and work expenses across historical currency exchange rate tables. And I can manage all this now without my French partner (who was an amazing paperwork sherpa) because I have years and years of experience in France, and his valuable teaching, sedimented onto me. Unless you’re thinking of going somewhere that is an already very well-known quantity, please promise me that you will think again.

A gift shop near the Lac Rose in Senegal, January 30, 2017. I traveled all over the country with the chef Pierre Thiam for a story for WSJ magazine.

For those of you dreaming of Europe, know also that if Trump makes good on what he ran on, NATO is about to get weaker while Vladimir Putin gets stronger. Elon Musk has the keys to the kingdom, which means the treasure trove of intelligence held by the Anglophone Five Eyes information sharing agreement will soon be on its way to Moscow and Beijing and Riyadh. You are all likely aware Musk just sat in on a call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Even if all they did was talk about satellite logistics, this is a first step to normalizing a hard-right ketamine-addled megalomaniac who wants to move humanity to a feudal colony on Mars as the de facto National Security Advisor of the greatest military armada the world has ever known. Having your life and assets on European soil under this new reality is not a fast track to serenity.

Emmanuel Macron has made vain but valiant efforts to establish some kind of common military defense at the EU level. I can promise you that French people, who are already taxed as far as they can be, have extremely high expectations of their social services, and blame Europe for many of their financial woes, are not going to calmly accept being told that they need to reroute even 5%+ of their underwater national budget to beef up a European army. Ask any more austerity of the French people and Marine Le Pen is the next president. If you think you’ll be safer in France as an immigrant when that happens, well, you won’t be. Especially if you are a marginalized person—in a gay marriage, transgender, of any kind of African descent.

But here is the most pressing issue. That urge to escape pain and ugliness is partly how we got here in the first place.

Thursday, after two days of unhinged catastrophizing, I woke up with the clearest head and eyes I’ve ever had. I have been, like so many of you, constructing my information silo as a way of self-soothing and reality managing. It was self-indulgent and hypocritical.

I just spent the last six months ghost writing a book that is drenched in the thinking of Carl Jung, in particular, his concept of the shadow. Briefly, in the Jungian mainframe, the shadow is the part of us that we reject, deny, vilify, and project onto others. It’s our evil, our cravenness, our pettiness, our bloodlust, our greed, our will to dominate. (It’s also a lot of our rejected brilliance but let’s hold that for another article.)

Jung, who witnessed two World Wars and saw the creation of the atomic bomb and the rise and fall of fascism, was terrified at how modern life facilitated an even greater denial of our shadows. We cut ourselves off from nature and our instincts and moralized and projected rather than understood that inside each of us lives a tyrant, a rapist, a thief. The more we run from that essential truth, and shunt it onto the people and outgroups we don’t agree with, the bigger and more powerful that evil becomes.

MAGA is my shadow. I revile those people and did everything I could to exorcise them from my life. Being in their headspace and fucked up low vibe felt bad, and I was smarter and more enlightened and caring and evolved. I could create my own reality. Fuck them. They’re over there and I’m over here. Unfriend. Unfollow.

Big mistake. The biggest mistake. Because I stopped paying attention to them, and I stopped understanding how they thought and felt and what messages mattered to them and, most importantly for democracy, what might reach them. I was unprepared for them, like some of you were too, and like Kamala Harris was. (Blessings on her forever.)

I’m not talking about empathy and turning the other cheek for people who need to own the consequences of their decision making. I’m not pretending to like them now. I’m not denying their racism, their misogyny, their venality and the danger of their bad information diet. I still straight up hate them. But I’m no longer willing to other them. I’m no longer willing to abandon my consciousness and awareness and curiosity about people who are as American as I am, and who lay claim to the same national inheritance that I do.

I had a bad information diet too, one that I created and fed myself. I siloed myself and saw those people like human dirty diapers when, if I were more conscious and perceptive about them, and more curious, I would have better understood what they were looking for. Many of us who were shocked by the results took our eyes off the ball because of their ugliness. We were being too precious and too cute.

One of the things that helped me get out of the doomspiral of the immediate aftermath of the election and to this more hopefully productive place was listening to an excellent discussion that Elise Loehnen led on her Pulling the Thread podcast. She speaks to Thomas Hübl, PhD, a trauma therapist whom she describes as “a spiritual teacher.” They talk about the shadow, and the need to understand evil not as something disowned and externalized, but as a part of our shared human origins and destiny since the beginning of our species. They talk about how the collective human shadow lives in our bones and in our planet. And that until we learn to hold space for it in humility and with patience—which isn’t the same thing as indulging its misbehavior or making excuses for it—we are feeding a literal demon. Loehnen has been doing a lot of her own excellent research and thinking on the shadow, and her podcast is full of episodes that get into it.

If you have the time and want to think about something besides the ongoing vote count in Pennsylvania, I highly recommend this discussion.