Late in the summer of 1984, I met my dying father for what I thought would be our last lunch together. We’d chosen one of his favorite restaurants in downtown Brno, the capital of Moravia in what was then Communist Czechoslovakia. The ceiling fans spun sluggishly in the air; the clatter of plates echoed off the marble walls and high ceilings; cigarette smoke curled above tables where men spoke in whispers.
My father looked thinner than I’d remembered him. Cancer had hollowed his cheeks and deepened the furrows at his eyes. But it wasn’t only illness that appeared to weigh on him. He seemed lost in his thoughts—haunted, perhaps, by more than his failing body.
I had invited him because I carried a secret. As the waiter set down our favorite dish—broiled trout with herb butter and country potatoes—I looked around to make sure that no one was sitting close enough to overhear us. Then, my hands trembling slightly, I leaned in and told him that I was planning to defect.
For years I had lived in fear. A close friend of mine from architecture school had been found dead under suspicious circumstances. Many of those close to him believed that thugs from the StB—the regime’s secret police—had murdered him after he’d refused to spy on a relative in Rome who’d been labeled an “enemy of the state.” It was clear that to protect the authoritarian regime, the government would kill even innocent people who refused to collaborate. I could not breathe inside that system any longer. I was ready to risk everything to escape.
[Read: Authoritarians are great at propaganda—until they’re not]
I braced for my father’s reaction. I expected anger, or for him to enumerate a litany of horrors that might await me if I were caught. I could end up in jail for years, and then would be blacklisted by the regime from jobs, housing, educational opportunities, and more. Our entire family, including my father, despite a spotless political career, could also be punished. He studied me for what felt like an eternity. When he finally spoke, his voice was calm, almost tender. “I understand,” he said. “And I support you.”
After another long silence, he leaned forward, lowering his voice so that the waiter could not hear. As it turned out, he had his own secret. For decades, he said, he had lived a double life—outwardly a loyal Communist, but in actuality a spy for the West. The man I knew as a gentle gardener, an enthusiastic party member, and a dutiful bureaucrat had been risking his life to undermine the regime that he’d pretended to serve.
He spoke of clandestine meetings in parks and hotel bars in faraway countries, of documents copied and smuggled, of narrow escapes when he suspected that his cover was blown. He had never told anyone before me—not even my mother. She had despised the Communists and had eventually divorced him because she believed that he had become one of them. He let her go without explanation. He knew that to reveal the truth would have endangered her, my sister, and me.
For my father, unburdening himself of his secret was an act of release; for me, the moment was a revelation. Until then, I had regarded my father as an inscrutable man shaped by the compromises of totalitarian life. Now I was finally seeing the moral steel beneath the surface. His calm was not complacency; it was discipline. His loyalty was camouflage. My father was an idealist who had risked everything for the hope of restoring freedom that had been lost—and that I, too, was seeking.
Sitting motionless in that dining room, the restaurant seeming to fade around me, I realized that my father’s confession was also a farewell. He knew that, once I fled, we might never meet again. Soon I would begin my journey to a new homeland, one where, I was convinced, I would be able to leave the authoritarianism of my past behind me.
My father had been born in free Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, into a country that was proud of its democracy and culture. But in February 1948, everything had changed. The Communist Party, riding the wave of Soviet triumph over the Nazi occupation, engineered a coup. The new regime followed the dictator’s playbook to the letter, replacing competent officials with loyal sycophants; censoring the independent media and flooding the public with propaganda; seizing control of the courts, military, and police; and quickly dividing the nation into “us” and “them.”
By the time I was born, about a decade later, totalitarianism had saturated the very air we breathed. At school, we memorized slogans about the wisdom of the party and the danger of “imperialist enemies within and abroad.” Neighbors whispered carefully in stairwells, or spoke in code; even family members sometimes informed on one another. The price of a careless remark could be a job, a degree, or one’s freedom.
Most people survived by performing obedience. If you wanted your child to study at a university, you joined the party. If you wanted a promotion at work, you kept your opinions to yourself and publicly embraced party doctrine. You’d play along, while watching memorials being built to honor the supposed successes of the Communist Party and its leaders. Morality was privatized and discreet; in the public forum, cruelty replaced compassion.
Yet beneath the gray conformity were pockets of resistance—underground artists, writers, comedians, and other brave humanitarians who dared to reveal the truth. It turned out that my father had been part of that hidden resistance. His rebellion took a quieter form, but one that could have cost him his life. Each secret mission, meeting with operatives, or report that he passed on was a courageous act of faith that someday the truth would prevail and democracy would return.
[Jonathan Chait: The ‘resistance’ won]
I followed his example in my own way. A few days after my lunch with my father, I packed a small rucksack, concealed $60 and a copy of my new architecture-school diploma in a hollowed-out book, and took a train to a popular beach resort on the Adriatic coast, in what was then Yugoslavia; my official story was that I was going on vacation with a couple of friends. My plan was simple, and desperate: to slip through the Julian Alps into Italy, crossing at a high pass known only to some local climbers I’d befriended years ago.
The climb was brutal. Loose shale crunched under my boots. Morning mist veiled the peaks. A breeze carried the scent of pine and the sound of distant cowbells from the valleys below. When I finally reached the ridge, more than 8,000 feet high, I looked back toward Czechoslovakia—toward the only life I had known. With tears running down my cheeks, I said a quiet goodbye to my family, my girlfriend, my language, and my country. I believed that I would never see any of it again.
Hours later, in the darkness of the summer night, exhausted, I stumbled into a local police station on the Italian side of the border and asked for political asylum. The next day, I was welcomed into a refugee camp an hour south of Rome. An official asked me which country I wished to emigrate to. Without hesitation I answered: “America.” It was more than a destination for me. It was a symbol—the beacon of democracy, the far shore of moral clarity.
I have now lived in the United States for more than four decades. I became a citizen in 1990. I have built a successful career as an architect, raised a son, paid taxes, voted, argued, believed. For much of that time, the rule of law felt solid beneath my feet; facts were facts; the idea of freedom was unshakable. I loved this country not because it was perfect but because it aspired to be governed with integrity and accountability.
I’ll never forget the pride I felt in 1987, still a new émigré to America, listening to President Ronald Reagan as he stood at the Brandenburg Gate and challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Two years later, when the wall crumbled, the moment felt like not just Europe’s liberation but the fulfillment of a promise that America had made to the world, and to people like me: We are committed to supporting and defending democratic movements and values around the globe. After decades in the private sector, I joined the State Department in 2010, to serve my adopted country. What I write next reflects only my own opinions, and not those of my employer.
I now feel the chill of the authoritarianism that I fled long ago. Over the past 10 years, the rise of Donald Trump, and the movement that coalesced around him, have brought back a vocabulary that I never wanted to use again: propaganda, purge, cult of personality. Early on in this transformation, I told myself that any comparison to Communist Czechoslovakia was hyperbole. America had strong institutions, a free press, an independent judiciary and Congress, and checks and balances embedded in the Constitution.
But slowly, almost imperceptibly, the ground began to shift. To anyone who has lived under dictatorship, the pattern is instantly recognizable. Dictators start by instilling fear. They exploit uncertainty to manufacture loyalty. They promise safety in exchange for obedience. And when facts threaten their authority, they destroy the very idea of truth. With this comes ideological cleansing, show trials, the silencing of independent media. Lenin did this in 1918. Mussolini and Hitler refined it in the 1930s. Stalin’s puppet president in Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald, followed the script in 1948. The packaging—the slogans, uniforms, actors—change depending on the setting, but the choreography is always the same.
In the United States, we have now heard the language of fear—fear of immigrants, of “globalists,” of red or blue neighbors, of friends or coworkers who think differently. The old trick of inventing an “enemy from within” has resurfaced. Loyalty is valued over competence and expertise. In Trump’s second term, national institutions of justice and law enforcement have become tools of injustice, violence, and oppression. Lies have been normalized, and truth has become negotiable or, at times, transactional.
Members of the Trump administration have branded judges who rule against the president as partisan and, in some cases, called for their impeachment. The government has justified unlawful deportations and even the killings of defenseless citizens in Minneapolis. The presence of armed National Guardsmen and ICE agents in American cities and towns sends a clear message of political intimidation. Even the military, once seen as apolitical, has been drawn into the partisan theater. Minority and immigrant communities bear the heaviest weight, their very existence recast as a threat to national identity.
At the same time, the administration has gone after dissenters. Journalists who question the administration’s blatant lies have been personally attacked as “stupid” and vilified as “fake news.” Independent outlets have been banned from the Pentagon and the White House. Comedians and artists who have dared to satirize the powerful have found their work censored or quietly defunded. Universities have been smeared as indoctrination camps, and billions of dollars in federal grants have been canceled or paused to pressure these institutions to align with the administration’s political agenda. Scientists have been ordered to stop their research or have opted to leave the country. Meanwhile, the Trump administration allows blatant corruption that benefits the loyal few. Each of these acts, taken alone, might seem like an overreach; together they form a deliberate strategy by the current administration to diminish democratic checks and wield absolute power.
In Communist Czechoslovakia, the party controlled not only information but also imagination. It decided what words could mean. Obedience was redefined as patriotism; questioning the party was considered treason. These days, I hear that same semantic drift in phrases including real Americans, enemies of the people, and even vermin, a term with a dark history.
What worries me the most is not Trump himself or those who do his bidding, but rather the willingness of so many ordinary citizens to look away. I remember how my neighbors in Brno, decent but weary, learned to ignore the lies, the quiet knocks on the door at night, the disappearances. Their lives were comfortable enough not to take any risks. Over time, their silence became complicity. I see the same fear-driven behavior creeping into Americans’ daily lives, which allows for the jaws of totalitarianism to close tighter.
I am not naive. The United States today is not Czechoslovakia in 1948. Its democratic institutions are older, its civil society more resilient. In a couple of days, Americans will have the chance to exercise their right to vote, and many will head to the polls. But this is why the warning signs matter so much now. Once complacency and fear take hold in a population, democracy’s defenses erode from within.
Each generation must decide what freedom is worth. For my father, it was a life of secrecy and great personal risk. For me, it was exile. But courage in our current situation doesn’t need to be this dramatic. Courage is the quiet refusal to surrender one’s conscience. It is the scientist who keeps publishing data after being told to stop, the teacher who still assigns banned books, the neighbor who protects the vulnerable instead of denouncing them. It is not staying silent when facing injustice or witnessing corruption. It is participating in organized and peaceful public protests. It is protecting and exercising all of our constitutional rights—including the right to speak (and write) freely under the First Amendment. It is voting.
[Steven Levitsky: The new authoritarianism]
When I think of my father in that smoky restaurant, I remember his composure—the steadiness of a man who knew that he had chosen correctly even if history might never vindicate him. He never sought recognition. His satisfaction was simple: The truth, he hoped, would eventually come out. And it did. He bravely battled his illness long enough to watch democracy restored in Czechoslovakia. I was able to return and see him again after the Velvet Revolution, when he was in the final stages of his struggle with cancer.
I sometimes imagine what he would say if he could see America now, in the year of its 250th birthday. I think he would remind me that democracy is not inherited but practiced every day. In America, we still have a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. And we must each make a firm decision about the role we will play as citizens.
The window for that choice, however, is narrowing. The Trump administration could be emboldened by the midterm results, especially if the elections don’t go its way, and its attacks on democratic institutions could become more difficult to roll back. January 6, 2021, was a sloppy, desperate attempt at election interference by an uncoordinated mob without military support. Imagine how a similar scenario would play out now, when the Trump administration is stocked with loyalists, and the military and justice system are so thoroughly politicized.
And yet, I still believe in the renewal of American ideals. History records how democracies fall, but also how they rise again. From Prague’s Wenceslas Square to Berlin’s wall to Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, progress has always begun with those who have joined together to say, simply, Enough. When I crossed the Julian Alps four decades ago, I thought I was running toward freedom. In truth, I was carrying it within me.
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