Always American

We may leave the country, but the country never leaves us.

So, as the journey down the road to “someplace else” becomes real (for me), so too does the friction of leaving.

That friction is why most people never do it. Who in their right mind voluntarily abandons everything they know—culture, family, the language on their tongue, the food that shaped their childhood—for a foreign land where they will always be outsiders?

Crazy people. That’s who.

Or maybe the sanest people alive. Because leaving a system that’s collapsing into authoritarianism isn’t irrational—it’s survival. Risky, yes. Insane, no.

Scuttling the Ships

I think of Hernán Cortés in 1519. He landed in Mexico, his men looked at the vast forces of the Aztecs arrayed against them, and they muttered of mutiny. Some even tried to slip back to Cuba. Cortés solved the problem: he scuttled the ships. Perfectly seaworthy vessels, drilled full of holes. No return, no retreat. Victory—or death.

That’s what this feels like. Our ships are going down, whether we sink them ourselves or they simply rot at anchor. I don’t expect to return to the United States for any meaningful time. Once you cross this threshold, you don’t go back.

Why We Leave

And why should I? Does it matter if Trump lives or dies, wins a Nobel or chokes on a cookie? No.

Does it matter if Democrats stagger into power again? No. They’ve proven worse than useless. The Republicans openly aim for proto-fascism, and the supposed saviors can barely scrape 55% in polling against it.

Meanwhile, AI is about to tear the floor out from under the economy. It won’t be Hillbilly Elegy this time. It’ll be Wingtip Elegy—an entire class of white-collar professionals thrown out of work. Stockbrokers, coders, consultants, lawyers, accountants, people who thought six-figure salaries bought them safety—gone. Replaced. Millions at a time. While this will occur everywhere, it will be particularly pronounced here in the United States. Two reasons: one, we have utter buffoons at the helm of our federal government, finance, and commerce apparatchiks; two, our cultural obsession with the labor theory of value, “free markets,” and capitalist accumulation guarantees it.¹

No party, red or blue, has the courage or imagination to handle that cataclysm.

Even if AI doesn’t literally kill us all, the American system has already been hollowed. Productivity gave way to rent-seeking. Creation gave way to extraction. That’s The Great Extraction—my term for a system that strips value instead of building it.

And if even my children—educated, resourced, privileged—struggle to build a life free from crippling debt, what hope is there for anyone else? If the “jackpot generation” can’t cash in, the game is rigged beyond repair.

We’re fucked. America is fucked.

I realized something important: the “American Dream” is not to stay in America. It now lives abroad in the idea of a sovereign lifestyle. The “Sovereign Architect” is the one who shall prosper. The “future” belongs to the free.

The Next Place

So yes, we scuttle our ships. For now, it’s Canada. Later, maybe Portugal, Spain, or Italy. My kids may gravitate to France or Ireland. We’ll adjust as the terrain requires.

Five years ago, unthinkable. A year ago, unformed. Now, inevitable.

But here’s the paradox: we will never fully belong anywhere else. I’ll live in Canada but never be Canadian. I could live in Italy, but never be Italian. We are orphans—stateless in spirit if not in passport.

We are Americans of a country that no longer exists, relics of a fallen empire.

And yet that makes us custodians of something precious. We carry the ember. Because even if America itself dies, the idea of America doesn’t have to. Leaving ensures that ember survives, scattered in the diaspora.

Orphans with Fire

Yes, I’ll still walk like an American, Thanksgiving turkey in November (maybe twice, if Canada insists). I’ll still doomscroll U.S. news, half in horror, half in morbid fascination.

But staying behind to throw yourself against the wreckage isn’t noble—it’s suicidal. “It’s people like you who should stay,” they say. No. It’s people like me who must go.

Because America isn’t dying once. It dies twice. Once the body of the Republic collapses. And again, when its ideas are spoken for the last time.

By leaving, we prevent that second death. We carry its better self into the future. We preserve the idea—innovation, Enlightenment, exceptionalism—while the husk of the state decomposes into patrimonial rot.

We will never assimilate fully. We will integrate, yes, but never belong. Our children will become chameleons—half-American, half-European, cosmopolitan in ways we can’t yet imagine.

But we? We will remain orphans.

Orphans with fire, whether we like it or not. We can’t help ourselves. We’re always going to be American.

The Rallying Call

So let us be clear. We are not refugees in spirit. We are not exiles in shame. We are the ones who scuttle our ships. We are the ones who carry the ember.

We will not die in America’s collapse. We will not throw ourselves into the gears to slow the inevitable. We will go on. We will build.

And there is no going back. Time moves ever forward.

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If you’re one of us—one of the sane “crazy people” who sees what’s coming—then don’t just lurk. Subscribe. Join the tribe. Bring your ember.

1. Some of you may think, “Marxist!” Well, yes—but Marx didn’t invent the labor theory of value. He weaponized it to critique how capitalism allocates wealth. His point was that those who spend their time being productive are entitled to the wealth they generate.

In communism, that meant the capitalist deserves nothing (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”). In capitalism, it meant those who create value for others earn more than those who don’t. And for a while, as productivity continued to expand, that bargain held.

But once rent-seeking overtook productivity, the balance collapsed. Marx was wrong about capitalism’s inevitability. The real weakness isn’t the capitalist; it’s when the distribution mechanism gets so distorted that it devours itself. That’s why communism imploded: the state claimed to allocate value but couldn’t produce bread. And that’s why America is imploding: the market claims to reward productivity while siphoning everything into extraction.

Different systems. Same fatal contradiction.