In the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale, refugees from Gilead, America’s post-democratic theocracy, find safe haven in “Little America”—a fictional neighborhood of Toronto.
In the real world, Toronto is also becoming a popular sanctuary. Just as during the Vietnam War, when many American families, including that of the urbanist Jane Jacobs, flocked north, today the continent’s fourth-largest city is welcoming disaffected U.S. academics and scientists.
Once known as the leader of the free world, these days America feels more “like 1933 in Germany,” says Marci Shore, a professor of Eastern European intellectual history, who is leaving Yale University for the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.
I interviewed Shore shortly before the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion was firebombed after Josh Shapiro and his family’s Seder on the first night of Passover, which celebrates freedom and the Jews’ escape from slavery.
Shore’s husband, Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, is also leaving Yale to teach at Munk.
They will be joined by their friend and Yale colleague, the philosopher and Fascism expert Jason Stanley. As he told The Guardian, his grandmother and mother left Berlin in 1939; his move is thus part of a “family tradition.” Stanley’s ex-wife, a cardiologist, is also moving.
U. of T.’s Munk School, founded by international-relations expert Janice Stein, was particularly appealing because of its inter-disciplinary approach.
“The Munk school has outstanding scholars who have worked on authoritarianism and the different ways it presents itself. They understand it, how it grows, takes root, and the critical strategies for resistance,” Stein says. Noting that U. of T. is “close to the U.S.” but not in the U.S., she adds, “We have just a little bit of distance, and it allows us to look at things differently.”
This week, the Canadian Association of University Teachers advised Canadian academics to halt all non-essential travel to the U.S. (As for regular Canadian travelers to the U.S., Canada is warning them that U.S. border agents can search and seize their electronic devices; tourism seems to have already taken a hit.)
Meanwhile, Toronto’s University Health Network is investing $15 million to recruit 50 researchers immediately—and like U. of T., they are courting Americans.
After San Francisco and New York, Toronto is North America’s third-largest tech hub, a sector that is also welcoming disaffected U.S. citizens.
“Lots of people say, ‘Can you get us out? Can you help us leave?,’” Shore says. “People are trying to get a second passport if they can. I think the leadership at [U. of T.] is thinking that this could be a good moment to do some targeted hires.”
While Stanley and Snyder could not be reached for comment at press time, Shore says, “Tim was reluctant, but I grew up in a community with Holocaust survivors. The lesson of 1933” was strong.
According to Shore, the similarities have been evident for a long time. “They haven’t been especially subtle,” she says, adding that she has been “in a state of extreme panic since late 2015,” when Trump announced his first presidential campaign.
The reason, Shore says, was Trump’s break from empirical reality. Unlike 20th-century political ideologies, the new, postmodern form of totalitarianism no longer provides a coherent (however false) narrative, undermining the notion that there is any such thing as truth. Instead, Shore says, “you’re going to demobilize people as opposed to mobilizing them.”
Journalists were accustomed to checking particular facts—not every word. “They weren’t used to a total unhinging from empirical reality,” Shore says. “People thought it was a joke. But I had been watching what was happening in Russia and Ukraine, and so I panicked really early.”
When children are wrenched from their parents at the border and locked up in cages, “the thing that you thought could never happen is the new normal three months later,” Shore says.
There’s a Russian word for this, she explains: proizvol, which means the arbitrary abuse of power, the effect of which is a feeling that anything can happen to anyone at any time and that there is no accountability.
“The problem is that what’s terrifying is not what is hidden. Instead, it is what we’ve normalized,” Shore says. In America, assaults on journalists, lawyers, academics, elected officials, and others at the forefront of democracy’s defense are happening in plain sight.
Others are choosing to stay—to fight.
Suzanne Nossel, the former longtime C.E.O. of PEN America, for one, has no plans to leave the U.S.
“I feel there are important causes and principles to stand up for here,” Nossel says. “I was born, raised, and educated in America. I care deeply about our democracy, and there’s a huge segment of this country that I think feels similarly. We have a stake in the future of the United States, and the principles that have governed this country and that have made it an amazing place to live and thrive.”
Whatever side of the border they choose, these pro-democracy voices refuse to be silenced.
Once known as “Toronto the Good,” the city has its problems, not least its own shameful history of anti-Semitism. But for its newest residents, the city’s greatest virtue is that it’s beyond the reach of Donald Trump.
Jennifer Gould is a columnist at the New York Post. She covers real estate, money-laundering, and global corruption
