- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.
The one’s leaving are generally mostly the group of people who have been trying to fix it.
I don’t think they owe anyone shit.
The ones leaving tend to be the professional class with the excess income and transferable job skills, typically with family abroad who can take them in once they depart.
The ones left behind tend to be the young and unemployed, the pensioners, and the minority-majority working class who can’t afford the bureaucratic cost of updating their citizenship.
Flies in the face of Contractualism as a theory of civilization. I hope you’re not a big fan of Rawls, Locke, Proudhorn, or Kant.
At some point, we each have a moral debt to one another that is within our capacity to fulfill. I might argue that people who feel the urge to expatriate are driven by their belief that they can no longer productively benefit their communities.
Are we telling someone “you have an obligation to feed your children”? Sure. Reasonable. But what if they’ve been banned from entering the grocery store?
I don’t think anyone is obligated to martyr themselves in the face of a murderous paramilitary. Certainly not when both major parties appear happy to extend this American Gestapo a blank check for materials and manpower. But, at some point, we gotta fight them over here if we don’t want to fight them over there.
Fascism doesn’t end at America’s borders, as anyone in Cuba or Venezuela or Iran or Gaza can tell you.
Which are also usually people who voted for Harris.
I think there was once a time I could have been in favor of this as at least an opt-in as it would benefit everyone to work collectively. Before Trump won a second time.
But now I’m seeing that the average US person is either aggressively anti-intellectual or petulantly virtue ethicist. And I don’t want anything to do with most of them. If they’re drowning, they’d drag me down with them if I tried to pull them out of the water.
Right now, realistically if I moved out I’d be pretty poor, so I’m just banking on the democrats winning in 2028 as they are very likely going to, then before shit starts collapsing anyway hopefully that will provide a few years to save up and move. I’m not waiting for another republican presidency to potentially happen after this. I know I might be fucked anyway but that’s the best plan I can execute.
Every option is a risk. Some are better odds with better payouts.
Not by much
If you’re living in LA California and you turn to your neighbors, which went 64/31 for Harris, and say “Fuck you, you’re all on your own” when ICE rolled into town… Idk, buddy. Maybe Harris didn’t deserve to win, if these are the kinds of people who claimed to support her policies.
TBH Cali should be a its own country. That said, assuming the same ~63% participation, that’s more like 40% who could have voted did vote for Harris. If we’re strictly talking about the character of the voters in a district, of course they’d be among the least shit. And in their case, its at least slightly more excusable given they’re in a locked in blue state anyways. Still bad though, there are still down ticket and local elections that would matter.
Depending on your perspective on democracy, the “type of people” who vote doesn’t matter. You “deserve” to win when you get the most votes, she did not. And at least in first past the post, the victorious side’s voters and non-voters at least deserve the differential between the top two candidates. Do you not at least agree with that?
That said, your particular example is not particularly relatable. Unfortunately, I live in a wretched red state and have most of my life and extremely unfortunately I’ve spent time around the backwater ruroids that I’ve been desperate to escape. I’ve only just recently escaped to a small city. In fact, at bare minimum if I can’t afford at all to leave the country by 2032, I hope to move to a nearby blue state urban area. We’ll see.
That said, while I might be sad about my struggle to escape, I absolutely cannot begrudge anyone with the means to do so doing it regardless of where they live in the US.
Listen, I’m also a big fan of balkanizing the US in order to limit its global power. But lets go further. I want nothing less than Six Independent Californias.
I mean, more power to you. But the “I don’t owe anyone anything” mentality gets you right back to the MAGA Libertarianism that’s destroying the country.
That’s probably because you just like a different super power, no? Do you think balkanizing the US would be good for the average person in America? I earnestly ask neutrally. Like I said after that election I’m pretty ambivalent about the well being of most Americans now, but I’m interested if you think squeezing the average person with such an action is justified? Or do you actually think it’d be beneficial?
“MAGA Libertarianism” Lumping all of your enemies together over simplifies things for a propaganda metanarrative. That said, I want to point out that the MAGA and Libertarians are generally people I’m getting away from primarily by moving out of the rural hellscape.
Further, I don’t care about the country (and I mean beyond the government) because it doesn’t care about me and it never will, its made that clear.