Running Away From Trump’s America Is Complicated. I Should Know.

The front row likes to say that the US is a country of migrants, where people have long moved for jobs. This has been done before—the dust bowl, the northern migration of African Americans. Yet those were a reaction to failure, not a sign of success.

At the heart of our divisions is almost half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility. Americans tolerate more economic inequality than citizens of other modern democracies: if anyone can become anything, today’s unequal results are fair and might well change tomorrow. That was never completely true, but now it’s plainly false.

A work visa seemed out of reach, particularly given the sudden bursting of the Internet economy's bubble; the trend now was toward outsourcing and "reverse migration," with H-1B holders going home and Indo-American entrepreneurs heading back to the subcontinent to make their money. The United States was no longer rolling out the welcome m

There’s another way to understand Just America, like the other three narratives, and that’s in terms of class. Why does so much of its work take place in human resources departments, reading lists, and awards ceremonies? In the summer of 2020 the protesters in the streets of New York were disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees m

The narrative of Free America remained as inflexible as any ideology: tax cuts and deregulation = freedom and prosperity. Decade after decade you encountered its mantra, like the rituals of a cargo cult, on the website of the Cato Institute, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, broadcasts of The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the platform of the