Nowhere to Run

Aged expatriate checks in on his home country

I just spent a month in England, the country of my birth, and it gave me the creeps.

I have been going to England for a summer month for as long as I can remember. I went originally to dump off my kids with my long-suffering mother for a week or two and then later I went because I like to keep in touch with England and August is the best month for weather. So off I went.

I have a British passport so I have always told myself that if things get bad enough here, I can go and live there. And generally speaking England is a much saner country than the US. I have never quite trusted the US. I grew up in northwest London amid political exiles from McCarthyism (my best friends were the sons of exiled Hollywood writers) and I’ve always had in the back of my mind the idea that America sometimes drives its critics into exile — and if I live here it could possibly happen to me. And if it does, I can go to England.

So this year I went to England in August with the idea – actually admitting this idea to myself for the first time --that I would see if I could live there, after having spent most of my adult life in California. This, of course, was a reaction to the not-so-slow-motion coup taking place in the United States.

I’m pretty much a Californian, or at least a San Franciscan, and my children and their children are mostly here. I went to both Stanford and Berkeley, all of my children went to the University of California, and then, after having signed tuition checks to the Regents of UC for about thirty years, I went to work for the University myself and the Regents started sending checks to me! I feel like a card-carrying Northern Californian.

Off I went to England, telling myself, again, that it’s a much saner country than the US. However, England is in the grip of an anti-immigrant fever that is if anything worse than what is happening here. It’s more widely spread among ordinary people. My friends, privileged home-owning members of the bourgeoisie, don’t see much of it, but two things happened while I was there that poked through the surface of my (and their) denial defences. First, there’s a vicious movement to close down the immigrant hostels, where people are waiting for their asylum hearings. This takes the form of right-wingers shouting and screaming at the people in the hostels (and threatening worse on social media). The movement was entrepreneured in Essex, the right-wing heartland east of London, by Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, and Reform are doing their best to spread it across the country. The shouting and screaming was on TV every night.

Second, I was driving around in rural Kent, south of London, and I realized, as we came into some little town, that at the entrance to the town, where they have that sign that says Little Whatsit Pop 942, there was a forest of tall flag poles bearing the red-on-white St George’s cross, the emblem of the far right. Translating into American terms, the message is something like “Liberal, don’t let the sun set on you here.”

Both these things were far from my daily life but close enough to produce little frissons of anxiety. When I got back to the US I felt I didn’t really want to go and live in England, where Farage’s party is way ahead in the polls. But then came a really bad Trump day– one of those days when I keep my copy of the New York Times because I can’t stand to read it right away. It was the September 16^th Times with the lead story about the incredibly corrupt deal between the Trump family’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial and the reciprocal (it appears) deal for the Emirates to get loads of very high-end computer chips. Two billion dollars are moving into World Liberty Financial. Further down in the front page of the Times was White House Threatens Crackdown on ‘Far Left,’ about Trump’s mini-Reichstag moment with the Charlie Kirk shooting, and then Policing Surge in D.C. Hushes Cultural Life, about the National Guard occupation of that city, and then U.S. Announces Another Attack on a Sea Vessel, about what appears to be the ramping up of a US war with Venezuela. Too much, I thought. Time to go back to England.

But then came the enormous far-right march in London, not Farage’s people but the movement led by Tommy Robinson a long time far-right campaigner, aggressively anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim. Somewhere around 150,000 people marched with him. The march was a real eye-opener: the biggest far-right demonstration since Oswald Mosley in the 1930s. It was the aggressive tone of the march that got people’s attention – a violent, angry football-thug tone. (ChatGPT’s summary of the press reaction to the march: The tone of the march was not sober or policy-driven; it was angry, tribal, and confrontational, with an undercurrent of menace. For supporters, it was empowering and defiant; for critics, it was threatening, xenophobic, and reminiscent of fascist street mobilisations.)

So now I don’t know what to do. Or rather I do know what to do, stay here and resist. But I don’t know how to do it. The Democratic Party, I fear, is not up to the job and most of the “resistance” organizations have been captured and become parts of the Democratic get-out-the-vote machinery. This is a good thing, obviously, but it isn’t a sufficient thing. It probably isn’t going to win the House even if we can get to November 2026 without Trump (a) pulling some major anti-democratic maneuver like arresting candidates or invalidating votes, or (b) declaring martial law and suspending the election anyway. Both outcomes would have seemed unthinkable a year or so ago, but not now.

But not now. In this space a while ago I asked the rhetorical question “Is he America’s Hitler,” and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that he thinks he is. Not even Orban, in Hungary, has militarized all the big cities in his country. And the attacks on the media and the universities, while following the Orban playbook, have been astoundingly quick and effective. And the attempt to diabolise “the Left” for the shooting of Charlie Kirk is straight from the Reichstag-fire playbook. As everybody knows, the effect on freedom of speech when Kirk was killed was instantly disastrous. You cannot speak your mind in this country now if you are a public person.

A serious thing is happening here in the US of A.

So, how to resist? I have no idea, but I do like the “Soft seccession” stuff, beginning with the idea of forming a joint vaccine advisory group to push back on the insane Robert Kennedy, with three western states and a bunch of Northeast states including New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. (Together forty percent of US GNP.) There are similar proposals having to do with environmental regulation, climate change etc. And eventually perhaps we can stop shovelling money to the Red States. But what I really want is a mass movement, a “bring back democracy” movement, a “get the big money out of politics” movement, a “we believe in science” movement, and all the rest of it. A self-defense movement too, given what the far right is like in this country. (I always told people that England was a better bet because there the far right isn’t armed to the teeth, whereas in this country everybody is heavily armed except you, liberal.) Anyway, it’s late, he is, indeed, America’s Hitler, or some cockamamie version of it, and the Democrats are not going to save us. We will have to save ourselves.