The short answer is, "we're not at that point yet."

Right now it is still fairly safe to be an "American dissident". There are a lot of things wrong with the US, it has its share of inequality, injustice, corruption and human rights violations, and it seems like we're going more one step forward/two steps back at the moment, but progressive change is still something you can fight for.

There is still a chance of winning, and more importantly, it's still safe to lose. Not in the "things can't get worse" sense, but in the "if you come at the king" sense. In the US, you can challenge the reigning kleptocrats, expose their crimes, embarrass them, and then fail to remove them from power, and while it is frustrating and depressing, you can still live a long and happy life.

It's when that last part stops being true[*] that I would start asking myself if it is time to get out.

Trump aside, the US has steadily become more authoritarian and insane since 2001, and the main argument for staying is you might not find anything better outside of the imperial center. Both political parties are basically "banks, looting and eternal war" parties who don't care about ordinary people, and who use political wedge issues, sexual politics and paranoid propaganda to divide the people. Outside of the upper middle class "money spigot" cities most of American HN readers lives in, you see widespread social and physical decay. Nobody is doing anything about it. Most people don't even notice, because they're drugged to the gills and obsessed with what the propaganda tells them about the dangers posed by their fellow countrymen and various invaders and imaginary bugaboos, such as the whole "Muh Russia" conspiracy theory touted in most of the mass media, or the "AI apocalypse" nonsense the Davos types are presently selling us to excuse not fixing bridges and the opioid epidemic.

Arguments for staying: high rate of pay I guess. Also, maybe some people enjoy living this way. I don't!

That's kind of a convincing argument.

Ugh, the both sides are bad trope combined with a ton of “my feels” argument.

There’s just a tremendous amount to unpack here.

The United States is a vast, nonhomogenous, capitalistic culture with it’s fair share of issues.

The war in Iraq was a travesty and reconstruction efforts were unmitigated money grabs by a certain subset of well connected contractors.

The war in Afghanistan has gone on for almost two decades and appears unlikely to ever be “won” in any traditional sense of the word.

Despite that, our continuing presence there is actually a rather mature decision to not let millions of Afghani peoples fall back under the oppressive and horrid Taliban rule they were under before.

We have issues with undue corporate influence, and the issue of voting weight disproportionality among our citizens when the Senate, gerrymandering, and Electoral College are taken into account are indeed insane.

However. There is a very clear difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans, excluding this horror story of a Presidency, have something like 38 times the number of indictments as compared to Democrats when taken on an equal number of years in power.

Republicans consistently expand the deficit while cutting social programs.

They investigate Benghazi for six years then moan about a two year investigation.

Enough about that distinction, but it goes on. The Republicans are a drastically different party than the Democrats. And no, the Democrats aren’t perfect.

But you know who had plans for fixing infrastructure and the opiod crisis? Democrats. And they still do. Go look at their policy positions. Staggeringly enough there actually well thought out and decent, progressive policy initiatives laid on Sanders’, Warren’s, and Clinton’s websites.

Finally. The young people of America are fantastic. Gay rights have moved forward dramatically in the last two decades. The MeToo movement is helping to stamp out a culture of sexualization and rape throughout our industries.

We produce culture, and planes, and tremendous advancements in science, and research.

And our framework has held up pretty damn well against a clearly authoratative demagogue.

The post WWII period which has been centrally defined by the rise of American Hegemony features plenty of mistakes, but it’s also been the singular most peaceful era of global history and seen the greatest decrease in world poverty.

So please don’t reduce us to “drugged to muh gills” and “endless war”.

I'm sorry: I do not share your optimistic views that there is one side better than the other. I look, in fact, at people who have such views as dupes who are making the country worse. "You" and the US as a whole do not produce "culture, and planes, and tremendous advancements in science, and research" -these are achievements of the US in the cold war era. They stopped post cold war; the country is now a sheep shearing operation fueled by eternal war. The bipartisan consensus is: drug the population, eternal war and keep the peons fighting each other while we pick their pockets and slowly enslave them. Were you not sentient during the Obama administration? That's as left wing as we're gonna get. It was basically the Goldman-Bush administration ... with a shitty republican health care plan.

FWIIW I was born in the US and lived here almost my entire life; I don't plan on dying here. Good on you for sticking it out: I'll vote with my feet while I still can.

Yes because it’s always been the Democrats who’ve opposed making healthcare better.

And the Democrats who started those wars.

And the Democrats who give tax cuts to the wealthy.

And the Democrats who get indicted for corruption constantly.

The idea that the Obama administration is as left as we can get is some seriously revisionist history which disregards which party was continually blocking any attempt at progress the other party made.

The Democrats never blocked Supreme court nominees for a year, or stone walled any attempt at legislation put forth by the other party.

No Democratic Senate Majority Leader ever said “our only goal is to make this guy a one term President”. And during the Bush years there were many examples of bipartisan initiatives which went forward.

That all ended after Obama’s second year as President when Republican’s won the House and Senate and decided the only thing they would be for was being against Obama.

You’re placing the blame on both parties for the Obama administration and yet only one party is to blame for the abject lack of forward progress during that administration.

And despite that, under Obama millions and millions of American’s gained healthcare, gays got the right to marry, the United States came out of an absolutely tremendous recession, the US scaled back it’s wars in the Middle East, and the US regained some of the respect it lost under the Bush administration.

And yes, I, and the US as a whole absolutely produce tremendous amounts of culture, technology, science, and research.

No idea where you think Hollywood movies come from, or many of the advances in healthcare, or silicon valley came from.

Look at you, litigating this as if it's a party thing. It's not a party thing. It's a false oppos thing. Nobody in this country except the "fringe" candidates, who are purposefully kept fringe, are talking about real issues. You aren't either; you're talking about meaningless emotional bullet points. You've drunk so much kool aide, blaming the dumb rednecks for all your problems, you might as well be writing the stuff.

Many advances in healthcare? Name one! The US population's average lifespan is declining; something that has never happened before. Yay muh "health care" and alleged medical advancements. Hollywood is garbage, and I don't watch it, basically, at all. Your civilization is declining, physically, culturally, even technologically. The last interesting technological thing the US did was search engines, and that happened in the 20th century.

Anyway, you can console yourself with the fact that I'm leaving! And every time I interact with people like you, or your ideological opposite, I'm more determined to GTFO the sinking ship while I still can.

I've often thought this as well as we basically are just making marginal advancements at this point in things like computing power (hey, let's shrink this some more or add more cores). The nuclear power industry is a sinking ship (wind, solar, and storage won't be enough), and we lose more freedoms every year.

However...where else would you go? A Nordic country? Switzerland? I think you would want some place high on the freedom list that has a good economy and also a strong enough military to not have to worry about getting steamrolled. I don't think there are too many that meet that list.

If you're serious about leaving, you have to war game it out in your head for what your personal future looks like in the US versus somewhere else; depends on what you do for money, what your net worth is, what kind of freedoms are important to you, whether or not you have a family to worry about and so on. What's the worst thing that could happen in country X,Y,Z; what is the median outcome, etc. It's a simple calculation for me and lots of places work.

Switzerland is hard to beat as far as long term stability goes, but one of the reasons it is hard to beat is they don't just let anybody in.

Yea, I've thought about living in another country before for various reasons including adventure, but once you start a family a lot of stuff gets complicated fast.

Yea...a little weird as an American citizen, I have trouble comprehending places which basically don't ever let you become a citizen.

Trump is very bad, but the more worrying thing is that which he is a symptom of. That does make my family consider leaving often. Put it this way, if trump had acted like a reasonable person during the election, then gotten elected, and acted like he does now, and americans were apalled by it and his approval rating were 20%, and congress rebuked him, I wouldn't worry at all.

That his approval rating holds steady at 42% no matter how awful he gets, and that congress supports him is what is super disturbing.

Well... unlike with Russia, Americans could actually vote Trump out if they wanted to.

Trump is a symptom, not the disease.

Just like Putin.

Funny you should ask, but as someone who's left Russia 8 years ago to come to the US, I'm now considering other options. There's a lot of reasons, but Trump is definitely one of the big ones.