Skiluros
Bread and circuses. Or Big Macs and iPhones if you want the modern equivalent.
If you’re serious about this. You don’t need a degree. You would need some sort of financial buffer for the transition.
You can teach english or maybe even find a mid-level job (by local standards) leveraging your english skills in globalized areas like outsourcing (experience with sales or some sort of client facing would help).
I would not go through with this unless you’re actually committed (perhaps even beyond Trump; looking for something novel in life). You’ll need to learn the local language if you are serious about this.
Not an American, so maybe I don’t know what I am talking about (although I have lived/worked/studied in US + Canada for a decade).
I won’t speculate on who will win or not. But as a foreigner who has lived in the US, the impression I get is that American society is arguably not prepared to fight for it’s freedoms. There also don’t seem to be any institutions (political, social, cultural) that can create a situation where the current elite’s de facto hold on power becomes unsustainable and they start feeling a personal risk (even on an implicit level - which is arguably more important than explicit actions).
Paradoxically that can be seen as a good thing; there is enough money to go around where people don’t need to care. That’s actually a decent place to be in (in an abstract sense). But there are also externalities to such a setup; your country’s liberal (not in the American sense) institutions can slowly circle the drain and no one does anything until it’s too late.
In a hypothetical country a sizeable ethnic minority might be so opposed to a given leader, that a lot of the centrists or people who just don’t care that much start having second thoughts about that leader. Or say the local oligarchs or the judicial elite start wondering if they could get themselves in trouble (real trouble; loss of assets, even personal danger - doesn’t have to be explicit but even a somewhat real possibility) due to the continued support of said leader.
From my experience, these sort of dynamics simply do not exist in the US. The oligarchs will always have their money protected and their “get out of jail free” cards respected. The judicial system as a whole would never be in a situation where they would largely be considered illegitimate (and seen as treasonous, criminal collaborators).
And can you honestly imagine any kind of real protest movement in the US. Shutting down of airports and critical transport and communication networks. Direct rejection of central authority in specific regions. Local arrests of oligarch property. Orders for arrests of specific oligarchs in protest regions (with full support of rank and file police officers).
I am not saying this is good thing, just pointing out that I can’t imagine this happening in the US (I could be wrong).
So let’s say Harris does win and Trump does a low-key coup with backing from oligarch and judicial elites (the US supreme court is corrupt by global standards). I don’t see anyone fighting back.
Am I being too pessimistic and jaded in my worldview?
I think your confidence in this is exactly why it can happen.
This is not some sort of secret knowledge, the topic of democracies sliding into de facto authoritarianism is a well researched topic.
And the mode by which this happens is often slow and steady, largely driven by complacency and corruption.
Ukrainian here, most the of the country and the government thought Trump would win. Some of this could be attributed to just more brand recognition (no one knows much about Harris), but I think people generally felt that Trump was more in line with US society.
FWIW, we’ve been fighting russian domination for centuries, so in a sense this is just another chapter. No other option than to do what we can.
Historically that’s not necessarily the case. Authoritarians who come to power via somewhat democratic means in their first terms to be much more mild relative to subsequent terms where they solidify their hold on institutions.
One notable example would be Putin’s first term (which is largely seen to be a fair win) or even when Medvedev was ordered to warm the seat. It always only gets worse, at least from historical examples.
The bigger question is whether the US opposition has any willingness to fight, which I don’t believe to be the case.