Riding the pendulum's descent

On the wish to leave America

Jul 17, 2025

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Have people always wanted to leave?

One day my teen writers were discussing the Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder.” You might be aware of the concept of “the butterfly effect” in history. He came up with it. Smart guy, great writer. Read it.

Almost out of nowhere, but at the some time completely apropos to the discussion, one of my students asked, “Have people always wanted to leave the US?”

The student didn’t offer any more context, but who needed it? It’s in our media and in our conversations: many people, and not just liberals, are questioning the future of the United States and whether it will serve their needs.1

I stammered, I stuttered. Not sure of how to answer that wouldn’t be baldly political, I started to walk them through my experience of the political pendulum. In every administration since I became an adult (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama) a good chunk of the population of this country was unhappy with the result. In the Reagan/Bush I years, Democrats still had a lot of power, with a liberal-friendly Supreme Court and a heavily Democratic Congress. In the Clinton years, Republicans wrenched back power of Congress for much of the time. Then flip-flop again with Bush II and Obama.

During all those years, although individuals were of course more or less unhappy with our politics, there was no palpable sense in the culture that perhaps there was no future worth fighting for in America.

Looked at another way, each presidential administration in this country has disappointed large numbers of people. But in no modern case that I know of did a good chunk of the populace entertain finding a new country to live in or even have the sense that America was “lost” to them. The future they envisioned was always possible, however remote.

Make American Great “Again”

Grammatically speaking, the “again” in that slogan means that America is no longer great, and the embrace of this slogan, I think, indicates a change in how Americans now feel about their country. I would hazard a guess that most of the surge of searches about moving abroad were Democrats (“By 8 p.m. ET on election night, searches for "how to move to Canada" had a 400 percent day-to-day increase,” Newsweek reported.2)

But I’d also say that the way that MAGA adherents talk about the US is strikingly different from the way their parents did. Sure, lots of conservatives consider FDR somewhat akin to the devil, but when I was young, conservatives still focused on how “great” America was. Even after Bush II inherited a historic surplus and then nearly destroyed our financial system, conservatives weren’t saying that it wasn’t worth fixing. And in fact, Obama’s fixes were largely very favorable to conservatives.3 (I wasn’t a fan.)

It was only when MAGA started taking hold as a rallying cry that cohesive segments of average people in this country seemed to shift their thinking from the classic “despite our struggles, the future is worth fighting for” to America as “shithole country.”

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In a true democracy, our relationship should be conflicted

This cultural change was fed, perhaps by more radical factions like the Tea Party, but definitely the day that Trump trolled from atop an escalator. At that point, a significant number of Americans started to believe something truly antithetical to living in a democracy: They started to believe that unless their side “won” all the time, the country was “lost” to the “enemy.”

This is antithetical because dissent and conflict were built into the foundation of the United States. If you read our founding documents, they sound like sedition—because they are. The founders’ struggle was not to get the other side to agree with them; their struggle was against an all-powerful monarchy that didn’t allow for any dissent. Unless you had the King’s crazy ear, you had no hope of influencing policy.

American democracy is referred to as “an experiment” because it is a process of constantly balancing competing needs and desires. There is no intent in our founding documents to define the country that will be because in a democracy, the country will continually redefine itself based on the will of the populace. In that way, dissent defines our political culture.

Before MAGA, no matter who was in power, no matter how some individuals felt about their personal relationship with their country of birth, American culture, broadly stated, was proud of itself. Even as a snarky young person who moved to France hoping to escape the parts of American culture I despised, I could recognize a lot to be proud of. Even the conservatives I knew who loathed Clinton were still proud to be Americans. Even when people around the country were appalled that we were sending our young people to die in Afghanistan and Iraq with no clear exit plan, we were careful to delineate that from our feelings about The American Experiment.

Illustration based on an Edgar Allan Poe story, "The Pit and the Pendulum." (1842) by Legros, Alphonse, 1837-1911.

We used to understand the pendulum

Of course there have always been radicals and fanatics, in the US perhaps even more than other countries because our culture encourages rebellion at its very foundation. But most Americans on all sides of the political spectrum used to understand that in a democracy, especially one with a seemingly unbreakable two-party system, the pendulum is natural. We might not have enjoyed the ride when it swung away from our side, but we could always see our side, beckoning to us, asking us to work hard to keep democracy moving in the right direction.

But many of us can no longer see across the divide. From my perspective, I’d say that there is a more significant core on the right—hardcore MAGA—who firmly believe that if they don’t get their way 100%, the country is doomed. On the left, I see fewer who have adopted that mindset. Perhaps that all-or-nothing mindset is most typified by the wave of anti-free-speech, must-impose-our-mores-on-everyone wing that really, let’s face it, has very little power in the Democratic Party, loud as their voices may be.

But in any case, it is clear that American culture itself has shifted. This isn’t just politics as usual. This is a new worldview, and our young people are growing up seeing it as the norm.

Searching deep for that place of joy

Suki Wessling

Jul 5

On the 4th of July I went to our local parade and interviewed participants and bystanders, asking them "Why are you proud to be American?" On the 5th of July, the day after I asked my neighbors to speak from a place of joy and saw so many of them struggle, I shared my thoughts.

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Hope for teenagers

I don’t like to leave teenagers on a negative note on any subject. I remember my own teenage brain and I know how teenage brains can spin. They need adults to help them believe that the fight is a worthy one. So after all my stammering and stuttering, I tried to spin it back around: No, I admitted, I couldn’t remember a time when people felt so negatively about our country’s prospects that many were talking about bailing on it. But, I said, American culture has always been a pendulum, moving back and forth, but also moving forward toward a goal, our More Perfect Union.

What I didn’t say, what I hope is not the case, is that it’s like the pendulum from another famous story, Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” In that story, the advance of the pendulum is ever downward, slowly and achingly regular, arcing toward the belly of our antagonist. The pendulum in that story, thankfully for the narrator, doesn’t go downward forever, splitting the belly of our hapless victim. He is pulled, “seared and writhing,” from the pit, and informed, “The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”

But would casting our modern Inquisition into the pit really be a happy ending for our Less-than-perfect Union? I don’t think so. My personal hope is that our current Inquisition, which seeks destruction of all that liberals hold dear simply for the joy of destroying “the enemy,” learns a less violent lesson than being cast into a pit. If history is our guide, the pendulum will shift, our culture will take a deep breath, and somehow find a reset button. Americans will, I hope, go back to respectful disagreements amidst shared hopefulness and pride in the imperfection we continue to cultivate.