The election results have been traumatic to many people, and have occasioned the revival of two structural proposals usually unpopular among left-leaning liberals–decentralization through federalism, and secession. Both strike me as pointless and unrealistic gimmicks. The first won’t solve the problem; the second won’t work, and might not solve the problem if it did.

The real options, it seems to me–at least for those of us traumatized by the prospect of a Trump presidency, as opposed to those welcoming it or viewing it with equanimity–are endurance or emigration. Since I count myself among the traumatized, those are what I regard as my own options. Endurance is the less pleasant but more realistic option, emigration the more attractive but harder to pull off.

As for emigration, I have friends and family in Canada who, for a long time, have been suggesting Vancouver as a healthy alternative to (living in and bitching about) New Jersey.

My Vancouverite cousins: “I don’t get why you won’t just move here and get a job at the University of British Columbia. I’m sure they have a Philosophy Department or whatever. It’d be so much fun!”

My British Columbian friend: “Staying in America just seems really self-punitive on your part. Is that why you’re still there?”

The irony is that my cousins, nominally Muslim but adherents of the Shopohaulic faith, now fear that a Trump presidency might put an end to their weekly shopping forays into Seattle. Scary stuff. In other words, moving to Canada might really mean moving to Canada.

I’d always kept the Vancouver Option “under consideration” in a loose and gauzy sense of that phrase, but now have reason to take it more seriously, if only as a retirement option. To put the matter bluntly, there may be reasons to stay in the U.S.–most obviously reasons connected to having a full-time academic position here–but those reasons will become irrelevant after retirement. I may have been born in the USA, but at this point, I intend to die elsewhere.

Anyway, here’s a long comment, slightly edited, that I wrote in response to a post by Kevin Vallier at BHL, “Healing Through Decentralization.” It hasn’t been commented on in the four days it’s been up at BHL, so I figured I’d cut and paste it here.

Maybe you deal with this in your book, but this post is so lacking in specificity that I have no real idea how the proposal is supposed to work.

Example: New Jersey went to Hillary Clinton, but only because the urbanized counties went to her. The rural counties went to Trump. So decentralization to the state level won’t help. Further, some of the urban counties that went to Clinton overlap with congressional districts that went red for down ballot options (as well as rural counties that went to Trump that overlap with congressional districts that went blue). So again, decentralizing to the state level is of little help. Here’s what a blue state like Jersey really ends up looking like.

In other words, it’s only a blue state along the Northeast Corridor rail line. The rest of it is red. But “places along the Northeast Corridor rail line” is not a political district, and therefore not a candidate for “decentralization through federalism.” I’m not sure this sort of thing is idiosyncratic to New Jersey.

Further, even if you look at counties or municipalities, it’s not as though you find pure Clinton or pure Trump anywhere, or pure red or or pure blue anywhere. Yes, there are majority-red and majority-blue places, but there is appreciable red mixed with the blue and vice versa just about everywhere, down to the level of municipalities, municipal wards, school districts, neighborhoods (in the sociological sense), zones (in the “master plan” sense), streets, and even families. Even the reddest places in New Jersey were tinged with blue, and the bluest places were tinged with red. A friend of mine in a firmly blue town (59:36) walked me through his suburban neighborhood and (quietly) pointed out the Trump vs. Clinton houses on his street.

As for freedom of movement, I don’t quite understand your point.* We already have freedom of movement, and it doesn’t solve the problem at hand. Setting aside the rhetoric about moving to Canada, no one is leaving any time soon. And why would they? People go where the best school districts are, and where they find the most favorable commuting time to their job. No Trump voter is going to say, “Well, I better give up my plum school district, and move to a redder town because the Democrats outnumber me 59:36 here.” If what you mean is that freedom of movement is vitiated by regulations like residential zoning, that may be true, but the remedies for e.g. exclusionary zoning are a matter of state-level policy, and I’ve already suggested that state-level policy is likely to be a red-blue food fight. That’s been the history of inclusionary zoning remedies in New Jersey for the past 40 years.

The one bright spot I can see for decentralization is the idea of sanctuary cities for undocumented aliens. But it’s not that bright: some of these sanctuary cities are also under federal consent decree by the Justice Dept for civil rights violations by their police departments (e.g., Newark). So decentralization will likely come with a cost or a trade-off, with the Trump Administration saying: “You want to be a sanctuary city? Well, then your federal consent decree will be a decree in name only. Don’t expect help on that bullshit from us. Expect us to flip you the bird. And as for the 75% constitutional violation rate you were managing during your stops and frisks? That don’t impress us much. We kinda think a bit of stop and frisk is a good idea, not just for black people, but for people who might look Syrianish or Mexicanish or whatever. Anyway, we’ll get back to you on that. First we gotta check with Steve. Steve Bannon, that is.” And you don’t need a consent decree to get a trade-off; all you need is federal funding. The post doesn’t deal with the degree of federal involvement in local politics. Maybe your point is that the federal involvement should be scaled back, but that’s easier said than done.

Speaking of Bannon, can you say something about why we’re supposed to “heal” as opposed to doing something else? The ACLU is gearing up for litigation. That doesn’t sound very much like healing, but it sounds like the best idea I’ve heard since last Tuesday.

I suppose Vallier could respond that he only intends the decentralization proposal to be applied where it might antecedently be thought to work. If it doesn’t work in New Jersey, it needn’t be applied there, but it might work elsewhere. What this overlooks, however, is that we can’t coherently decentralize the process of decentralization. Either we decentralize across the board, or we don’t. If we do, the proposal runs into problems of the sort that come up in New Jersey and places like it. If not, we’re back to endurance or emigration.

Which is where I think we are. In other words, the lesson here is: America–hate it or leave it. I’m up for a bit of both.

*To be more precise, Vallier had invoked “freedom of association,” but in the context of a defense of decentralization, what that ends up meaning is “freedom-to-move-to-a-place-of-demographic-like-mindedness-and-then-freely-associate,” which I referred to without elaboration as “freedom of movement.”

Thanks to Ron Rice for the tip on Newark as a sanctuary city.