strike33 Is It OK to Leave the U.S. if the Wrong Candidate Becomes President?

A few years ago, American friends of mine bought a home in a European country in order to obtain an E.U. passport. (The country has an immigration program supporting this.) They state that they are doing so in case the United States presidential election goes as they fear.

They, and I, have no doubt that the U.S. would fall to some form of authoritarianism if the wrong candidate were elected. They, and I, are white, well educated, nonimmigrants and upper middle class, with a wide range of well-connected and financially stable friends. Our demographic backgrounds are relevant to my question, which is on the ethics of leaving a country because its democratic institutions are failing.

As members of some of the groups who most likely will retain many tangible privileges and are least likely to be negatively affected, do we have an ethical obligation to stay and help those who will be impacted more harshly than us, or is it ethically acceptable to leave the country? — Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

To say ‘‘my country, right or wrong,’’ G.K. Chesterton complained, was like saying ‘‘my mother, drunk or sober.’’ If your mother took to drink (or, in another example of his, if your son committed murder), a loving relationship meant that you couldn’t be blithely indifferent. I take his point about alcoholic parents and murderous offspring. By my lights, though, when genuine patriots say ‘‘my country, right or wrong,’’ they mean that it’s their country whether or not they agree with what is done in its name. That’s the opposite of giving the country a free pass. It expresses a commitment to trying to help your country do what it should — which is how we should normally feel about our families too.

A sign of your identification with a country, your sense that it’s yours, is the pride — and the shame — that you feel about things done by your country and your compatriots. It’s a concern for national honor. Another sign is a sense of shared responsibility for the country’s fate. Leaving your country because you think it has gone off the rails isn’t really consistent with this sense of shared responsibility or with a commitment to trying to make things better. Unless you think that staying will put you in jeopardy, or that leaving will contribute to restoring your country (the way the Free French departed France when it was occupied in World War II, in order to regroup elsewhere), skedaddling does strike me as unpatriotic.

Now, patriotism is a fine thing, in my view, but that doesn’t mean patriotic self-sacrifice is a duty. If you’re convinced that life here will be unbearable for you, you are morally free to go. Morally free doesn’t mean morally admirable, though. You make it clear that this country has treated you well; let me note that people can have patriotic hopes for a country that has treated them badly. Frederick Douglass was an American patriot despite having been enslaved under his country’s laws.

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