HOBOKEN, FEBRUARY 25, 2025. My friend “Joshua” and his family are moving to France. The chance of the U.S. descending too deeply into darkness is too high, he says, and he’d rather get out early than get out late.

Democracies rely on norms of behavior, Joshua points out. One norm is that if a court rules against the President, the President accepts that ruling. But what if the President defies the court? Courts lack enforcement power, Joshua notes, whereas the President heads the armed forces.

I tell Joshua I’m too lazy and fond of America to leave, plus my kids are here. Worst-case scenario: My university fires me for being too woke, and I live off my savings and Social Security.

Smiling grimly, Joshua replies:

John, your worst-case scenario is practically the best-case scenario. History gives us many possible worse-case scenarios. Suspended elections. Economic collapse. Social collapse. Widespread violence. Mass arrests. Disappeared people. Internment camps. Civil war. Massacres. But even without extremes, the trends that already plainly exist are pretty dystopic: calcified oligarchies, daily injustices and a steady diet of official lies that get repeated with almost no pushback by an almost totally-captured national press. There are literal neo-Nazis in power, and they are already following through on their campaign promise to purge non-whites and non-supporters from the government. They refer to professors as the enemy and talk about breaking universities. If this were a book of science fiction, you’d think it was a little much as it is — and you’d be more surprised if things didn’t get worse before they could possibly get better.

Joshua is smart and well-informed, he knows a lot more than I do about how governments work and how they can fail. I take what he says seriously. Before this chat, I’d been clinging to the illusion that Trump is a bump on our path to a more just, peaceful, prosperous world. Now, I’m brooding over what to do. Run? Resist? Hunker down and pretend everything’s gonna be okay?

Resist! the social-justice warriors in my family, all female, insist. Before the election my sisters flew to swing states and knocked on doors for Kamala Harris. Now they send me links to anti-Trumpers like Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Hubbell, and they urge me to call my Representatives to register my outrage. AOC says calls make a difference!

I can’t muster the will to make those calls. In the fall of 2016, at my sisters’ urging, I called hundreds of voters in Pennsylvania to urge them to vote for Hillary Clinton. Folks who answered usually hung up as soon as I mentioned Clinton; others said they hated Trump but hated Clinton more. That experience depressed me, it made me fear Trump would win.

In January 2017, my buddy Robert Hutchinson convinced me to protest Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C. I’m committed to nonviolence, so I freaked out when black-hooded protesters around me started smashing windows and throwing cherry bombs at cops.

I’m really a watch-from-the-sidelines rather than march-in-the-street kind of guy. And I’m a writer, so I should resist by writing, right? Maybe I can sway a mind or two by speaking out for truth, justice, peace, yada yada.

Seeking inspiration, I read Noam Chomsky’s 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” The linguist and political critic says American intellectuals have a duty to “speak the truth and to expose lies.” Intellectuals must condemn crimes committed by their government, such as “the savage American assault on a largely helpless rural population in Vietnam.”

Chomsky’s implicit assumption is that what intellectuals say matters, it makes a difference. But does it? That is, do tightly reasoned, evidence-backed polemics like Chomsky’s influence government policies?

The U.S. waged war against Vietnam for eight more bloody years after Chomsky published his essay. He ended up being blackballed for decades by major media such as The NY Times, which just a decade ago Chomsky was still accusing of propagating pro-U.S. “propaganda,” such as the lie that we Americans are always the good guys.

Intellectuals have even less influence now, in part because The NY Times and other media seem cowed by this new regime. Nobel-prize-winning economist and mega-columnist Paul Krugman recently quit The Times because, he told Columbia Journalism Review, his editors kept telling him to tone down his attacks on Trump and Republicans. Paul Krugman!

I’m a pipsqueak compared to Krugman. Anyone who notices my political rants usually reacts negatively. In my 2023 column “You’re Not Free If You’re Dead,” I questioned U.S. military aid to Ukraine and suggested that Ukrainians resist Russia nonviolently. Readers, including my sister, accused me of being an appeaser of the evil dictator Putin.

In another column, “Is Killing Children Ever Justified,” I compared both the Israeli government and Hamas to serial killers. That pissed off people on both sides of the conflict.

These episodes exacerbate my chronic moral self-doubt. Here’s another problem, and I hesitate to mention it, because my sisters might get mad: When I oppose Trump’s government, what kind of government am I advocating? The kind we had under recent Democratic Presidents?

I wasn’t thrilled with the failure of Obama and Biden to curb our country’s warmongering ways. “Humanitarian” war is still war. In our topsy-turvy era, Republicans seem more war-averse than Democrats.

My sisters will exclaim, Whaaaa??!! Are you saying Trump is better than Obama and Biden? No, I’m not saying that. I’ve seen bad Presidents in my lifetime—Nixon, Reagan and Bush/Cheney come to mind--but Trump is by far the worst. If he’s antiwar, it’s not because he gives a shit about war’s victims. His proposal to cleanse Palestinians from Gaza and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” makes that clear.

Noam Chomsky told me in 2018 that Trump—simply because he opposes efforts to curb climate change—poses a greater threat to civilization than any previous President. I agree. Trump also undermines democracy and human rights worldwide. He’s an asshole making the world safe for assholes.

But if I write a column denouncing Trump, and anyone notices, it’s likely to be a pro-Trump flunky seeking to purge academia of woke professors like me. I might lose a job I love and have nothing to show for it.

So instead of resisting Trump, I write about quantum mechanics, the marvels of a Costa Rican rain forest, the improbability of existence. I sit beside the Hudson River and draw pictures of portable toilets. I make excuses, confessing to my tendency to self-gaslight and retreat into a solipsistic bubble when things get bad.

I don’t run, I don’t resist. I hunker down and pretend everything’s gonna be okay.

Further Reading:

I Am One of Those Evil Woke Professors

How I Cope

Self-Gaslighting

The Election and the Problem of Evil

Drawing Pretty Pictures in Troubled Times

Confessions of a Woke, Antiwar, Hockey-Playing Demonic Male

Can Beauty Redeem the World?

Advice to Aspiring Science Writers: Remember Marx

Dear Student Protesters, Please Oppose All War