Although the fear of U.S. fascism under Donald Trump isn’t new, for years the alarm bells were just scattered tinkles, coming from people who Trump called “the enemies from within.” These “radical left” enemies included politicians, journalists, professors, and everyday people who were simply paying attention to his authoritarian words and actions.
But seemingly overnight — with DOGE’s war on institutions, the escalation of ICE raids, the illegal deportation of innocent people to El Salvador, the refusal to obey court orders, lawsuits that target news organizations and threaten to pull broadcast licenses, and the extortion of law firms — an awareness has smashed into the U.S. mainstream, triggering alarm bells that crescendoed into a full-blast siren on June 14, No King’s Day, the largest protest in U.S. history.
And perhaps one of the catalysts for this anti-authoritarian protest came in the shape of a terrifying New York Times print and video essay on May 14, called “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S,” which immediately went viral. (See video below.)
In the piece, three Yale history professors — Marci Shore, her husband Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley, who are all widely known for their books on authoritarianism — talk about how they fled the United States for Canada, and are all now teaching at the University of Toronto.
One of the most chilling lines in the Times video, one that stuck to my gut, came from Prof. Shore, who said, “The lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later.” As a paranoid person myself who is always wondering what this aforementioned “sooner” looks like, I had the urge to contact her and ask what she meant by that.
Shore was raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania before receiving an M.A. from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D from Stanford University. As a historian of Eastern Europe, she’s the Munk School for Global Affairs’ new Chair in European Intellectual History, as well as the author of several books on life under authoritarian rule, including Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968, and The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.
After reaching out to Shore, I asked her if the urgency to flee the United States as portrayed by the New York Times was accurate, and she told me that the piece had “dramatized” her and Snyder’s decision to leave Yale. She said the University of Toronto had actually reached out to her and Snyder around three years ago, and the couple had already been in Toronto with their children since August 2024 for a year-long sabbatical from Yale. “We most likely would have stayed in Toronto and accepted the Munk offers even if Kamala Harris had won,” she told me.
In fact, “For Tim [who wrote the New York Times’ number one bestseller, On Tyranny], Trump’s return to power made it much harder for him to stay in Canada — if he had been alone, he would have gone back to the States to fight, not despite but because of the 2024 elections. He agreed to stay in Toronto for me and our kids,” she told me, adding half-jokingly, “I’m very different. Unlike Tim, I’m a neurotic Jew.”
In other words, unlike her husband, Shore’s “own impulse had been to leave immediately after the November 2016 elections.”
“We vacillated then, in 2016 and 2017, and at that time ended up deciding to stay. But after the 2024 elections, it was clear to me that I didn’t want to bring my children back to the States,” she said. “I could feel it would still be much worse than it had been the first time around. I sensed there would be much more violence to come.”
“Let me make one further observation, now that I’ve spent so much time talking to foreign journalists about leaving Yale,” Shore told me. “Europeans in particular keep asking me, disbelievingly, variations of the question: ‘Can this really be happening in America?’ What baffles me is that this ridiculously banal story of a few academics moving from one good university to another — which is the most ordinary, not-at-all-radical thing — seems to be the story that is waking up Europeans into finally seeing what's going on in the United States.
“On the one hand, Europeans often think of America as a barbarian country with a ‘culture industry’ instead of Kultur — on the other hand, they can't let go of the myth of ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ But Trump has obliterated that naive myth. “Liberalism is fragile,” Shore told me. “Liberal democracy can collapse anywhere. Americans have no magical immunity against fascism. As my Serbian colleague Vladimir Petrović recently wrote, ‘We could not believe it could happen here is not just the title of a recent book on the Yugoslav wars, but also an important warning: it can happen wherever you may be, dear reader.”
Shore described the absurdity of how the New York Times piece was a wake up call like this: “Often when I’ve spoken to journalists in the past couple weeks, I’ve felt as if the kids wrenched away from parents on the Mexican border and locked in cages, and the president inciting a violent insurrection on the Capitol and encouraging a mob to hang his vice-president, and the Venezuelans baselessly accused of terrorism and deported into an El Salvadorian prison, and the students disappeared off the streets by guys in balaclavas, and the threats of invading Canada and Greenland, and the obscene fawning over the mass murderer in the Kremlin — all failed to make a real impression until three professors gave up tenured positions at Yale.”
Although Shore couldn’t tell me exactly what sooner looks like (as in the window of time when people in Nazi Germany still had time to escape), she told me that for her, making the decision to leave the United States was determined by her “own intuitions — and these are based on my being a historian who has spent a lot of time researching and writing and thinking about the 1930s.” She did pinpoint a few moments along the GOP’s path towards MAGAhood in which she realized we were in, as I put it in my question to her, “deep trouble.”
“Extreme wealth inequality (here I’m thinking of Hegel’s point that changes in scale can become changes in kind) combined with the absence of universal health care, insufficient funding for education and a non-livable minimum wage contribute to making liberal democracy very, very fragile,” she explained.
Shore says she saw the GOP make a dangerous shift nearly 20 years ago, when the GOP picked a proto-MAGA candidate for Vice President of the United States. “When Sarah Palin appeared on the scene as McCain’s running mate in 2008, I definitely panicked — I felt like I was watching a 1930s-Romania-style alliance between the Old Right, the conservatives, and the New Right, the fascists. In the 1930s, as in the 2000s, it took the conservatives some time to realize that the young fascists were not just more invigorated versions of themselves. I could see that McCain himself got scared at a certain point, unnerved by what he had unleashed.”
“When Obama won,” Shore added, “I thought that Tina Fey should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to ensuring that Sarah Palin didn’t get close to the presidency.”
When I asked Shore if she had any advice on how to best survive fascism from within, she said she wished she had “some magical prescription,” but instead reminded me of John Oliver’s advice: “It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal — especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions. So keep reminding yourself: This is not normal. Write it on a Post-It note and stick it on your refrigerator.”
“It’s also essential to keep speaking out on one another’s behalf — solidarity as an antidote to the atomization that tyrannical regimes feed on,” Shore added. “You know the famous quote by Martin Niemöller, the German right-wing sympathizer-turned-political prisoner of the Nazis: ‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.’”
I ended our conversation by asking her what she thought the chances were that Trumpism would end up a failed effort, and that the U.S. would go back to its pre-MAGA days, when democracy was still taken for granted. “Alas, I really don’t know,” she said. “I’m skeptical that there’s any possibility of ‘going back,’ but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a better ‘going forward.’
“History shows us that all tyrannical regimes eventually fall, but we don’t know when. It often seems impossible until the moment it happens — after which it seems retrospectively inevitable,” she said. In the meantime, however, Shore worries things could get worse before they get better. “I fear we’re heading towards civil war — but desperately hope I’m wrong.”
Shore’s latest book is Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, published by Yale University Press. She is also part of the Small Acts of Democratic Resistance, “a collective New School-based Democracy Seminar project,” which you can visit here.
Sadly, I believe we may already be in the early stages of a civil war—though not one that resembles the 19th century. A 21st-century civil conflict won’t be defined by two armies wearing distinct uniforms, which makes it harder to recognize, especially if we’re expecting history to repeat itself in exactly the same way.
What we’re seeing now—escalating political violence in rhetoric, actions, and policy—is likely to intensify before it subsides. We are living through an evolutionary moment for the United States. And like all periods of transformation, it will involve deep pain, disorientation, and likely, a prolonged struggle.
Yet pain can have a purpose. It signals that something is wrong. It forces us to protect what matters and to reevaluate our beliefs and priorities. In that way, suffering can be a catalyst for growth, healing, and ultimately, positive change.
There will be a tipping point and eventually, we will emerge stronger and more conscious as a nation—but that can be difficult to believe while we’re living through the upheaval.
In these moments, I remind myself of Gandhi’s timeless words:
“Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
This is not normal.