Is there a road home?

After 15 years in Europe, a reflection on emigration, shared values, and the trajectory of the American nation-state

Photo credit: Annie Spratt, For Unsplash+

In several posts I’ve referred to my family’s departure from the U.S., which was motivated by an eminently practical concern: healthcare. Family health and well-being had not only become unaffordable, it had also become inaccessible due to the the industrial policy of not insuring individuals with “pre-existing conditions.” Subsequently the Affordable Care Act addressed the latter issue, largely by not challenging the myriad issues of healthcare costs.

At the time, in 2009, I saw our departure as a difficult but necessary practical response to an existential issue. As we settled into a European culture where healthcare was adequately addressed, I came to realise that the base issue was not a single practical problem. It was, rather, a broader issue of shared societal values and of national culture. Shared societal values insofar as we believe in equitable access to healthcare for all citizens, not simply those born without chronic disease and with financial privilege (in Ireland, where we settled, access to healthcare is universally accepted as a right of the population). National culture insofar as we came to understand that American society’s expectation of the role of government is fundamentally different from that in most other Western democracies. The healthcare issue in America—indeed, issues of safety and security in general—are really symptoms of U.S. society’s historically meagre expectations of the role of government in actually supporting “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Did these latter words, from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, imply that achieving such noble goals was the responsibility of the individual, or did it declare it a responsibility shared between the citizenry and the governing nation-state? The culture appears to have embraced the former interpretation, whereas we favour the latter.

In the course of time, then, it became clear to us that the deeper reason for our departure from the United States had been, in effect, a lack of alignment between our values and convictions, and those of the society we were living in.

Living outside of the United States one sees the country from a different perspective. The shape of the lens through which we view things changes in many ways. The press and the media are always, as I once read while living in Germany, “ein krummer Spiegel der Realität” (a curved or distorted mirror of reality)—in Europe the press offers different perspectives while also, in general, viewing the world as a much larger place than the American media generally acknowledges. And there are other more commonplace, more quotidian and even mundane phenomena in our new place of residence that change one’s perspective: the nature of the workplace and of the workday; everyday civility; the absence of the vitriolic anger we often witness among Americans; the ability to non-contentiously discuss contrary points of view with fellow citizens; the more comprehensive safety net of the welfare state; the greater accessibility of quality education, of healthcare; the lack of disagreement among even those of very different political views on the reality of climate change; and on and on.

While living in Ireland I was often asked if or when I’d return to the United States. Indeed it was an inevitable part of first conversations with people. It’s not a question I hear anymore, and I don’t believe it is because we now live in France. I think it is because the evolution of American society and government over the past while has caused many European citizens to no longer regard America as the reliable and irresistible land of promise and endless possibilities it once was, and in many ways they perceive the consequences of its evolution as something threatening, dangerous and potentially contagious.

If I were now called upon to answer that question about returning to the U.S. I would have to say that the trajectory of social policy from 2000 to the present only intensifies the worries that led to our difficult decision to move to a new jurisdiction. Yes, the Obama and Biden years mitigated some concerns, but I was profoundly disappointed by the modesty—indeed the tentativeness—of reforms effected by those administrations in the domain of healthcare in particular, our key personal issue.

Moreover, from 2025 the country seems like the land of broken promises. Promises with regard to the welfare of society made through programmes like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, or the reforms implemented by the Affordable Care Act, all now under tangible threat. Promises with regard to security and the rule of law, now cast aside, while a policy of personal revenge unfolds from the highest seat in government. Promises made in treaties with its two closest neighbours and allies, now endangered and potentially meaningless as a result of vicious and ignorant political whim. And promises made to immigrants, like my forbears, enshrined in the poetic words given to Lady Liberty by Emma Lazarus, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

What country now sees the U.S. government as a reliable partner in commerce or defence? Who, internationally, will continue to regard the U.S. dollar as an infallible reserve currency or preferred medium for commerce amongst nations? And who in the U.S. citizenry truly views its government as a serious agent in addressing society’s most tangible problems—the health of the population and the health of the planet?

Is there a road home for us, who will always be American citizens no matter where we reside? That path now seems impassible, overgrown with greed, corruption and lies. Someday perhaps its trail will even have become indiscernible, no more than a memory in a poisoned wilderness. Still, I ask with increasing desperation, does it really need to be this way?