Saudade for America

Leaving America guest essay by Alexander Hurst

Giving the enormity of this moment in U.S. history and the grave consequences to the world order, it feels vital to also incorporate bigger discussions to the Leaving America series. Let’s begin with this essay from fellow American journalist in Paris, Alexander Hurst. He’s a contributing op-ed columnist for The Guardian, a previous guest of The New Paris podcast, and the author of the forthcoming memoir Generation Desperation (2026). The Questionnaires will return next week.

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Alex Falcó Chang

When I was fourteen, I burned an American flag. A little polyester one, with its feel somewhere between rough paper and cotton fabric, glued to a skewer-like wooden stick and handed out at carnivals and parades and on the Fourth of July. I don’t remember where I got the flag, but I distinctly remember the act of burning it—alone after high school, in the bathroom of our family apartment. Lighting the match and then touching flame to flag, watching the flames curl through first the red, then the white, and then finally the blue, the comforting smell of the extinguished match mixing with the harsher notes of the burning fabric, letting the burnt pieces fall into the toilet, flushing the toilet. The pledge of allegiance welling up in my mind as I watched the ashes of the flag swirl away.

It was 2004, one year into the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that our desperate protesting had failed to stop. Not the two large demonstrations that I had attended in Washington D.C. Not the 100 “Attack Iraq? No!” bumper stickers I had purchased with my weekly allowance and handed out to my eighth grade classmates the year before. And certainly not the “alternative Christmas caroling” that the Cleveland Nonviolence Network and the Catholic Worker Community had added to our weekly protests every December:

God rest ye merry Congressmen

Let nothing you dismay

Remember that Afghanistan is very far away

You need not count the casualties as starving children say

No tidings of comfort and joy, we sang.

“America, love it or leave it!” passersby replied. Or sometimes, just, “Fuck you.”

Perhaps I burned the flag alone and in secret because I knew that there was a violence in the act, a violence that ran antithetical to the philosophy of nonviolence that the radical, Catholic leftists who lived in our neighborhood community held so deeply. If America was a nation fundamentally convinced in the justness of its own violence, then in this respect, I was a red-blooded American. A world away, something in a different neighborhood was surely burning, and so I lit what little match I could. And then, eventually, I left.

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When I first moved to Europe—specifically, to France—I experienced little of the sense of “woundedness” that Alexis de Tocqueville observed about Americans who had left their country “inflated with pride,” only to discover that the rest of the world cared far less about the United States than they did. Perhaps it was because American culture has become pervasive in a way that it was not in the 1830s, or perhaps it was because I trailed the smoke of that burned flag and simply lacked the “disagreeable and talkative patriotism” that, as Tocqueville also wrote, “fatigues even those who honor it.”

Of those who grow up with a certain idea of an exceptional America, some eventually peek behind the curtain and have to confront the shattering of the myth. For many, Donald Trump’s eruption into U.S. politics served as the hammer to their looking glass, leaving them grieving the loss of the country they thought they knew, the idea they loved.

I had skipped over the myth, though. In its place, I had always had X-rays of America, like those taken by Langston Hughes and Howard Zinn: of the country born in slavery and the dispossession of its native people of their land; the bitter racism that followed; its rampant inequality and wild condescension towards the poor; its scorn for international law; its history of violent interventions abroad, from overthrowing Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran to supporting the Contras in Nicaragua.

Instead of pride, what I felt across the ocean was the weight of a different history. The mass and gravity of centuries piled on each other, and the endless plaques commemorating the Continent’s twentieth century history most of all. Each one a thunderclap reverberating in my ears like the ghost echo of exploded shells.

The poet Rumi wrote about light, “It goes, and when it does, the open plain becomes passionately desolate, wanting it back.” In early 2015, when America’s very own, spark-throwing, infinite jest unto itself descended an escalator into a gaggle of cameras and asked, “what have you got to lose?” I found that my answer was, almost everything. There was, for the first time, a palpable realization—emphasized, perhaps, by looking back from Europe, with its tragic history and then brief, but continuing peace—that things could most certainly get worse.

Donald Trump’s emergence did not surprise me; neither did his re-election. From a founding revolution sparked less by England’s taxes than by England’s constraints on seizing more Native land to the west, to its outrageously low petrol prices, the United States is a country that has never wanted to pay the costs associated with its lifestyle. And Donald Trump offered it the chance to be an exquisite cognitive contradiction—an exceedingly powerful and aggrieved victim.

But this undeniable worse that he represented sent me on an inverse path into acknowledging the complexity of what preceded him. After everything I knew about the origins and foundation of the American order, an alternative was finally there, staring at all of us. Would a post-American world really be a better one? Or just a more unstable one? As the light receded from the plain, I realized that what I felt for my country was saudade—a Portuguese word that describes a longing for a thing bordering on lost, but which might not have ever been at all. I felt saudade for the America that might yet still be.

The Trail of Tears was America; so are the Lakota, who stood at Standing Rock and stopped Keystone XL. Bull Connor, who unleashed his dogs at the Edmund Pettus bridge, was America; so was John Lewis, who crossed that bridge one last time leading four former presidents in the wake of his moral clarity. Ronald Reagan was America; so were the four Cleveland nuns who gave their lives in El Salvador to bear witness to what his administration wrought in Central America. America is the flawed belief in the power of a “good guy” with a gun; it is the March for Our Lives.

The United States overthrew dozens of democratic governments; it also built the United Nations and its institutions, which gave rise to some semblance of international law, human rights, and the expectation that power would practice self-restraint. It created death, destroyer of worlds, and placed it atop rockets; the same rockets took us to the moon, and then beyond, and showed us our watery blue earth, minuscule and round and indivisible in the void.

Could you love a thing with such a tormented past? And in the space between what was and what might be, I asked myself, was there such a thing as progress? Donald Trump is America. But so was my grandmother, relegated by segregation to a 5th grade education, who nevertheless watched her daughter go to law school, her grandson move to Paris, and who, at 85 years old, walked into a voting booth and cast a ballot for a Black president for the first time.

I wondered whether the U.S. had to be something in particular, why it had to incarnate some grand struggle between good and evil. Whether it was enough for it to simply exist—with all of its history, and also all of its dissidents. A discordant but inventive jazz solo. A flicker in the dusk. An African American spiritual mixing lament with hope. A fragment of identities, desires, and beliefs, somehow still held together by something thinning.

William Brown

This, it turned out, was an interlude, an entracte. What’s worse: losing your country for the first time, in a way that made you appreciate, more than previously, what there was to love about it? Or losing it a second time, in a one-two punch that makes you think your 14-year old self had it right, was perhaps less naive than the older self that was succoured, so briefly, into the narrative and myth?

The world is a complex jumble of our internal contradictions—of mutual oppression, and of the things we sometimes do right. The postwar world—the one of institutions and laws, of a grasp at international society, at the creation of some semblance of transatlantic identity—was also one that at least attempted to close the drawer on a far bloodier history of great power rivalry. At least, in this, there was a reaching. With Trump, the reaching isn’t just gone, it’s been flipped on its head and replaced with purposeful, wanton cruelty.

Non-Western states may shed few tears for the domestic breakdown of the rule of law and the rise of fascism in the U.S., or the dissolution of a world they often saw, and rightly so, as hypocritical. But at the very least, international law and norms against aggression and for human rights exerted enough power for there to be hypocrites. This generation of American techno-nihilist oligarchs will not content themselves with the United States alone. Having seized its apparatus, they are using its power to prey upon the world as a whole.

And a world of unconstrained power and predation is certainly not a better one. It is one of fewer lectures and more disease, death, repression, and war. It is a world made hotter as the United States drills and extracts from the world’s environmental future—a choice for which developing countries will pay the highest price. It is a world made colder in empathy and human caring.

To leave a country for good is to ‘splinch’ oneself—for a while—in a way only immigrants understand. Looking back from this side of the Atlantic, the United States seems caught between cartoon villainy and a great uncaring, and in that liminal space, so much capitulation. How much, I wonder, should I care? Not about the world, but about the country I left, and then tried to love, and which then left me a second time.

So, why do you want French nationality? The agent from the préfecture left the question for the very end of the citizenship interview. France has become a part of me, and I, a part of her, I answered. The preceding hour had, I hoped, evidenced just how true that was.

What responsibility do I still bear to America? It is a passport, memories, people I love. And yet, now it exists alongside another passport, different memories, other people I love.

What responsibility do I bear now to Europe, with its millennia of history etched into its landscapes, its fallen empires, its lingering ghosts, its cathedrals and squares smack dab in the middle of its cities and towns, its cacophonous regionality, its eighty-year long symphony of internal peace. To France, with its stubbornness and strikes, its conviction in a proper way of things, its obsession with symmetry, its belief in the power of art, its bonne soirées and bises and insistence that, yes, really, l’on peut et l’on doit rire de tout.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light, wrote Dylan Thomas. Once upon a time, I burned a flag in rage, wanting my country to be better than it was. I’m not sure anymore. It’s not that I don’t want to save the United States. It’s that I’m not sure that the United States is saveable. America needs no more X-rays to be properly understood. It has flipped sides—turned against liberal democracy and the rule of law, and towards corruption, oligarchy, autocracy, and predation. Under Trump, it has turned against its allies and made camp with the regimes we always associated with these words.

There’s a strange feeling of almost guilt watching my other country go fascist from Paris. And yet, I do not feel guilty. I made my choice long before America made its own. Instead, I feel my saudade turn somewhere else. A dozen years ago, in a French class, the teacher taught the future tense by turning to Victor Hugo. “Un jour viendra,” foretold Hugo, when "we will have a great United States of Europe…a country without borders, commerce without customs, movement without barriers.”

I still feel saudade, but it’s not saudade for America. It’s saudade for Europe. A Europe more united than it ever was before. A Europe that believes in the values it gave birth to, and which America once stood for. A Europe that might yet be.