M. Gessen of The New York Times

In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn’t stop talking about what they’d seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret.” One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they’ve been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

I was 11 when my mother couldn’t stop talking about “Cabaret,” and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I’d seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible.

Now, in Donald Trump’s America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the “cultural tipping point” that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump’s frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out.

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this “anticipatory obedience.” In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” lesson No. 1 was “Do not obey in advance.” Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are “teaching power what it can do.”

Snyder is right, of course, but his admonition makes obeying in advance sound irrational. It is not. In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories.

First, the responsibility-for-others argument. In 2004, I assigned and edited an article by a man who had protested Putin’s handling of a hostage crisis at a school in which more than 300 people had died. I was fiddling with the headline when one of the people in charge materialized next to my desk. If you publish that, he warned me, the entire staff of the publishing house might lose their jobs. To the best of my knowledge, the Kremlin had never threatened or even criticized the publishing house for editorial content. (The man in question now says he never tried to stop me.)

The great Russian sociologist Yuri Levada coined the term “collective hostage-taking” to describe the phenomenon when individuals cannot be free to act because of a constant, credible threat of collective punishment. Collective hostage-taking is particularly insidious because it pits different sets of values against each other: My boss, for example, was asking me to weigh the value of one article against the livelihoods of hundreds of people. The article wasn’t published.

The second argument is the higher-purpose argument, which is a close cousin of collective hostage-taking. In 2012, during the winter when more than 150,000 Russians protested against rigged elections and Putin’s intention to assume the presidency for a third term, a popular actress, Chulpan Khamatova, broke ranks with the liberal intelligentsia and came out in support of Putin. Khamatova had co-founded an organization that helped children with cancer. She faced some criticism but said, “If it meant that another hospital was built, I would do the same thing again.” Her dignity was, after all, a small price to pay for saving children’s lives.

I suspect that some American hospital administrators who are discontinuing trans care for young people are using similar logic: To serve their patients, they must protect their federal funding — even if this means that they stop serving another group of patients.

Next comes the pragmatic argument. Rational people do not stand on principle for the sake of principle. They pick their battles. Or so this argument goes. Perhaps this was the logic that led the country’s largest private funder of biomedical research to halt a $60 million diversity program, Target to scrap its D.E.I. goals or ABC News to settle Trump’s libel suit. As cynical as this argument sounds, it too is rooted in values and obligations to others — shareholders, business partners, clients.

There’s also the if-I-don’t-do-it-someone-else-will argument. A few years ago, a couple of journalists who had fled Russia in fear for their lives took an assignment to make a video that looked to me and many others like pure Russian propaganda. When I asked them why they did it, they replied that someone would have done it anyway — and they needed the money. Refusing the assignment wouldn’t have changed anything, so why not? Perhaps this is the logic of the top-tier law firms that have scrambled to hire Trump loyalists and otherwise position themselves as allies of the new administration. Perhaps this is also the logic of those Senate Democrats who have voted for Trump’s cabinet nominees: The nominees would get confirmed anyway, so these senators might as well shore up support in their contested states.

Last, we have the zeitgeist argument. “We are in a new era now,” Zuckerberg observed when he announced that Meta would end its fact-checking program. Companies should have more “masculine energy” and have “a culture that celebrates the aggression” more, he added a few days later, speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast. This kind of argument is the very definition of rational. Societies define sanity as conforming to dominant beliefs and culture. In totalitarian societies, cultural and intellectual rebels are often confined to psychiatric institutions. In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often diagnosed as insane — and by the standards of that society, they were.

There are many good reasons to accommodate budding dictators, and only one reason not to: Anticipatory obedience is a key building block of their power. The autocracies of the 20th century relied on mass terror. Those of the 21st often don’t need to; their subjects comply willingly.

But once an autocracy gains power, it will come for many of the people who quite rationally tried to safeguard themselves and their businesses. That boss from the publishing house is living in exile now, and so is that actress. Of course, many people, including wealthy entrepreneurs, are still living in Putin’s Russia. But they have discovered that to keep themselves and their businesses safe, they have had to cede ever more money and ever more power to the regime — a regime they helped build. Had they withheld obedience in advance, the autocracy that now controls almost every aspect of their lives and their businesses could not have been constructed.

A couple of weeks into Trump’s second term, it can feel as if we are already living in an irreversibly changed country. And yet, my parents, who belonged to the second generation of people born under Soviet totalitarianism — they had never known a different society, and neither had their own parents — experienced a moment of recognition when they saw that scene in “Cabaret,” that moment when a new, dark era has taken hold. My mother died more than 30 years ago, so I can’t ask her where that recognition came from. All I know is that it was, apparently, possible to maintain a sense of facts and values — not only not to obey in advance but not to obey at all. If that was possible in the Soviet Union half a century ago, then it is certainly possible in the United States today.

I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will.

The first month of the second Trump presidency has put the lie to the widespread wisdom that Donald Trump has no ideology and no ideas, only an insatiable thirst for power and money. Trump has shown that he has ideas. So many ideas. They are just really bad ideas:

The United States can own, ethnically cleanse and redevelop Gaza as a luxury resort. The U.S. will buy Greenland and take possession of the Panama Canal. The government will become more efficient by cutting the Department of Education, U.S.A.I.D., medical and science research and many many jobs. D.E.I. caused the collision of an Army helicopter and a passenger plane in the air near Washington, D.C. Immigrants and transgender people are an existential threat to Americans. The president can and should rule by decree. These are all ideas, in the sense that they are opinions, beliefs or expressions of a possible course of action.

Some of these ideas would have seemed unthinkable just weeks ago. But now that they have been thought and uttered by the man in possession of the world’s biggest megaphone, all of us are forced to engage with them. Otherwise sane people start debating questions like: Could the U.S. really take over Gaza? Would Egypt or Jordan go along with the ethnic cleansing project? Can trillions of dollars really be cut from the federal budget with a few keystrokes? Is there evidence that D.E.I. caused the crash? Are all immigrants criminals? Do trans people exist? Did the founders intend to check the power of the executive?

Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how — it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable — radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it — they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.

Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.

Much has been said about the Democrats’ failure to sound the alarm loudly enough, fast enough or broadly enough as Trump has mounted his campaign of destruction. Some of the criticism is not entirely fair. The American system of checks and balances isn’t designed to move as fast as Trump is moving or to stop a bad-faith individual intent on breaking it. A real problem, though, is that Democrats’ objections to these ideas have been primarily procedural. Trump understands politics as the interplay of power and ideology. His opponents see politics as procedure. The contrast has never been starker — and never has the Democrats’ technocratic, legalistic approach been more detrimental to the cause of democracy. It’s not Trump who doesn’t have ideas; it’s the people who should be fighting to stop Trump’s autocratic breakthrough.

In a show that recently opened at the LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village, a group of actors led by a young, ambitious, charmingly naïve director are almost finished rehearsing Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the famed Moscow Art Theater when Russia invades Ukraine. Thanks to social media, they can hear the sirens and see the bombs falling on Kharkiv and Kyiv.

We witness the shock and disbelief, the feeling of utter impossibility of staying in one’s country, one’s city, one’s skin that so many people in Moscow experienced in the days after the full-scale invasion. They cry. They shout at one another. One of them frantically packs a suitcase.

And then the show goes on.

This isn’t a theater review, and I’m not here to tell you why you should go see the play, “Seagull: True Story.” I have too many social connections to Alexander Molochnikov, the exiled Russian director, and anyway, the current run is sold out. I’m interested in something else: that moment when the shock fades and the (figurative) show goes on.

I think we are entering that moment in the United States.

Living in and reporting on Russia when Vladimir Putin took and consolidated power, I was shocked many times. I couldn’t sleep in September 2004, after tanks shelled a school in which terrorists were holding hundreds of children hostage, and I was shocked when Putin used this terrorist attack as a pretext to eliminate elected governorships.

I was shaken when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. My world changed when three very young women were sentenced to jail time for a protest performance in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn’t breathe when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021 and almost certainly killed in prison in 2024. And when Russia again invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Along the way there were many smaller, yet also catastrophic, milestones: the state takeovers of universities and media outlets, the series of legislative steps that outlawed L.G.B.T.Q. people, the branding of many journalists and activists as “foreign agents.” The state of shock would last a day or a week or a month, but time went on and the shocking event became a fact of our lives.

The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.

Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.

And now that has become familiar. I’ve reported on many wars, and I’ve seen how they come to feel routine — to the people living through them, the people reporting on them and the people reading about them. Wars have a limited repertoire: bombings, shellings, offensives, counteroffensives, body counts. After the initial shock, few people keep track of the shifting front line.

Even Israel’s massacre in Gaza, which makes Russia’s warfare in Ukraine look restrained, can’t produce new headlines after more than 19 months of indiscriminate bombing and warfare by starvation. It is news when two Israeli Embassy employees are murdered in Washington, D.C. But when entire Palestinian families are killed, or when Palestinian children die of malnutrition, it’s just another day in Gaza. Nor is it news that the U.S. government is indifferent to war crimes committed by its allies.

In this country, too, fewer and fewer things can surprise us. Once you’ve absorbed the shock of deportations to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan aren’t that remarkable. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around the Trump administration’s revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn’t entirely unexpected.

Once you’ve realized that the administration is intent on driving thousands of trans people out of the U.S. military, a ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which could have devastating effects for hundreds of thousands, just becomes more of the same. As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.

At the end of Molochnikov’s play, the main character, Kon, loosely based on the director himself, speaks on the phone to his mother, a famous actress, who stayed in Moscow when Kon left. In the three years since the full-scale invasion, she has adjusted and, most important, she is working.

Almost matter-of-factly, she informs her son that his friend, a poet who spoke out against the war, has died in prison. Kon is inconsolable. “Mama, they killed him,” he says. The mother tells him not to worry about missing the funeral and to go to his own birthday party: “They have such good parties in America. Isn’t a birthday party better than a funeral, anyway?”

She is not heartless, just realistic. Reasonable people know the rules and live within the confines they dictate.

We humans are stability-seeking creatures. Getting accustomed to what used to seem unthinkable can feel like an accomplishment. And when the unthinkable recedes at least a bit — when someone gets released from detention (as the Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was a few weeks ago) or some particularly egregious proposal is withdrawn or blocked by the courts (as the ban on international students at Harvard has been, at least temporarily) — it’s easy to mistake it for proof that the dark times are ending.

But these comparatively small victories don’t alter the direction of our transformation — they don’t even slow it down measurably — even while they appeal to our deep need to normalize. They create the sense that there is more air to breathe and more room to act than there was yesterday.

And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.

Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that targets more than five times as many countries.

It took Alexander Molochnikov two and a half years to put on “Seagull: True Story.” The process was arduous and often frustrating, he told me, but the long journey was ultimately good for the play. It allowed him to observe the normalization of the war in Russia and include these observations in the text. It also enabled him to get to know the United States.

The second act takes place in New York. One character, a sleazy producer, observes: “Just think. When he first came to this country, he was afraid even to say he is Russian. And now we are all friends and making peace everywhere in the world. Such a good peace.”

At one point, another character makes a comment about censorship and adds: “Something like that could never happen in America. Right?” On the night I saw the play, the audience laughed a kind of laugh I’d heard before, but not in this country: It was bitter, and it was resigned.

Interpol had been looking for a disgraced finance executive for weeks when Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, found him, hiding in Belarus. Grozev had become expert at following all but invisible digital trails — black-market cellphone data, passenger manifests, immigration records — in order to unmask Russian spies. These were the sleeper cells living in Western countries and passing as natives, or the people dispatched to hunt down dissidents around the world.

He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. That revelation put Grozev in President Vladimir Putin’s cross hairs. He wanted Grozev killed, and to make it happen the Kremlin turned to none other than the fugitive financier, who had been recruited by Russian intelligence. Now the man that Grozev had been tracking began tracking him. The fugitive enlisted a team to begin the surveillance.

The members of that team are behind bars now. The financier lives in Moscow, where several times a week he makes visits to the headquarters of the Russian secret police. Grozev — still very much alive — imagines the man trying to explain to his supervisors why he failed in his mission. This gives Grozev a small measure of satisfaction.

On May 12, after a lengthy trial, Justice Nicholas Hilliard of the Central Criminal Court in London sentenced six people, all of them Bulgarian nationals, to prison terms between five and almost 11 years for their involvement in the plot to kill Grozev, among other operations. The group had spent more than two years working out of England, where the ringleader maintained rooms full of false identity documents and what the prosecution called law-enforcement-grade surveillance equipment. In addition to spying on Grozev and his writing partner, the Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov, the Bulgarians spied on a U.S. military base in Germany where Ukrainian soldiers were being trained; they trailed a former Russian law enforcement officer who had fled to Europe; and most embarrassingly for Moscow, they planned a false flag operation against Kazakhstan, a Russian ally.

When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you? In my experience, it is strikingly easy to shrug off one’s responsibility for the country where one pays taxes, contributes to the public conversation and, at least nominally, has the right to vote, if that country is the United States. It seems one can just say “Not in my name” and continue to enjoy the wealth and the freedom of movement one’s citizenship confers. But as this country builds more cages for immigrants, deploys military force against civilians in city after city, regularly commits murder on the high seas and systematically destroys its own democratic institutions, that may change. It should change. What does one do then? How can one be a good citizen of a bad state?

On a recent trip to Israel, I talked to a number of Jewish citizens who have grappled with this question. In the last two years, as Israel has carried out a genocide against Palestinians and has all but dropped any pretense of democracy, many Israelis have come to dread telling people what country they are from. Some see this as unfair, having never personally supported their country’s far-right politicians or its prime minister, and having done what they could to change the course of Israeli politics. Others — a tiny minority — are grateful for the scorn of other nations, in hopes that it can bring change to their own.

The people I sought out don’t agree on everything. But all of them have reckoned with questions of belonging and complicity, have wondered whether they should stay in their country, and have asked themselves what they are morally obligated to do to stop or slow the actions of their government. (About 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinian, but for this article I spoke only to Jews, for it is in the name of Jewish safety and Jewish nationhood that the Israeli government claims to act.)

We were having breakfast at one of Tel Aviv’s myriad lovely cafes where one could have good coffee and fresh food while some 40 miles away people were starving. One could reasonably assume that many people at the cafe were at least somewhat uneasy about that starvation, but the discomfort wasn’t visible; what was, Sfard pointed out, were three different displays devoted to Israeli hostages in Gaza, who were still captive when we spoke. He had no objection to these displays, he hastened to add; it was the lack of any acknowledgment of the genocide that concerned him. Both the genocide and the obliviousness were policies of a state to which, Sfard stressed, he continued to contribute, “not just by paying taxes, but even now, as I’m talking to you, I contribute to an understanding of Israel, which Israel benefits from.”

Over the summer, Sfard told me, “I had to get away.” He and his family went to Italy. While they were there, some of the most dire reports of mass starvation started coming out. The distance helped put things in perspective. When Sfard returned, he wrote an essay that Haaretz, a left-wing newspaper, published with the headline “We Israelis Are Part of a Mafia Crime Family. It’s Our Job to Fight Against It From Within.” Many people look at the far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, “these two petty fascists, who — unlike their Italian or German counterparts — have neither class nor aesthetics, only raw racism and sadistic cruelty,” Sfard wrote, and think, with relief, “This doesn’t represent us.” But, he continued, “the criminal, felonious, unforgivable project of Gaza’s destruction is an all-Israeli project. It could not have happened without the cooperation — whether through active contribution or silence — of all parts of Jewish Israeli society.” Admitting one’s complicity means being called to action, including action that many Israelis perceive as disloyal. Sfard called on his readers to get behind people who refuse to serve in Gaza, and to support sanctions, political isolation and international investigations into Israel’s actions.

The question that haunts all Israeli Jewish parents is what will happen when their kids turn 18, the age of compulsory military service. A family’s biggest contribution to the state is a child who joins the army. Universal military service (with some exemptions, including for the ultra-Orthodox and for Palestinian citizens of Israel) has been a pillar of security and national cohesion since the founding of the state of Israel. It is also the state’s most effective instrument for implicating the maximum number of people in its policies and its crimes. At one of the weekly protests in Tel Aviv, where, for many months, thousands of people gathered every Saturday night to demand a cease-fire and the return of the hostages, I met a left-wing journalist, two of whose children were serving in Gaza. So were the children of two friends who usually joined her at these protests.

Almost 35 years ago, when Sfard reached conscription age, he joined the military. But when he was ordered to serve in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, he refused — and went to military prison. Now, he told me, he wouldn’t serve at all — both because the military has changed and because his understanding has evolved: He has come to see that the entire military structure reinforces an apartheid system.

These days Greenberg spends much of her time in Masafer Yatta, an area in the South Hebron Hills featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land.” Masafer Yatta comprises more than a dozen small villages, each of which is fighting for survival in the face of constant attacks by Israeli Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers. In July, a contributor to “No Other Land,” a teacher and activist named Awdah Hathaleen, was killed by a settler. In other incidents, Greenberg told me, settlers have commandeered sheep and used rubble from their own construction sites to block entrances to the caves where some villagers are living. Soldiers and settlers routinely detain Palestinian residents for hours or days, subjecting them to physical abuse and humiliation. Greenberg is one of dozens of activists — all of them Israeli Jews or foreign nationals — engaged in what’s called protective presence. They often insert their bodies between the villagers and their attackers. Most of the time, attackers seem to recognize these Jewish or Western bodies as more valuable than those of the Palestinians. Still, Greenberg has taken her share of beatings. A few weeks before we met, Greenberg told me, there had been a “pogrom,” in which settlers had fractured at least one activist’s skull.

What is it like to be protecting Palestinians from your countrymen? “I’ve had shame and guilt, but these are not the things that bring me to action,” Greenberg said. “Responsibility brings me to action. And rage.” She sees no way to disavow being an Israeli. “No matter what I do, I am Israeli. It’s a choice that I have no choice but to choose.” She can decide what to do about being Israeli, though — and doing nothing is not an option. “Being an idle bystander is doing something, too. I’m either maintaining the system or dismantling it.”

For a few months, Greenberg was living in the West Bank, only returning to Tel Aviv, where her mother, grandmother and older sister live, every other weekend. The hourlong journey from Jerusalem was the hardest part of her life. “I am on the train with those soldiers, and they see me as one of them — and at that point I am actually one of them,” she said. After what she has experienced in the occupied West Bank, being among people who are wearing Israeli uniforms feels unbearable. “It’s too much to hold at once, to remind yourself, ‘These are kids my age, they were brought up this way.’ No. I have to think, ‘They are fucking monsters.’” A couple of years ago, her older sister was doing her mandatory service. One time, Greenberg went home straight from an anti-occupation protest that the Israel Defense Forces broke up with stun grenades, rubber bullets and beatings — and there at the dinner table sat her own sister, wearing the uniform.

When your country strips you of rights and protections, it tells you that it no longer recognizes you. Other times, you realize that you no longer recognize your country. People leave; families rupture along political lines; friendships shatter; people and institutions that used to be widely admired are vilified, and yesterday’s villains are sainted; familiar faces disappear from the public sphere; an aggressive conformity takes hold; the material conditions of life change.

The indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show signaled just such a shift in landscape. The news tells us that we are moving from one country to a different, autocratic one. The television shows us: This country looks different, sounds different and feels different. A familiar face and a familiar voice vanish. Some people turned on their televisions on Friday night to see a memorial to Charlie Kirk when they expected to see a comedian welcoming his next guest.

What unites the many actions of the Trump administration, from the sledgehammer it has taken to government programs to the demonstrative cruelty it has built into immigration raids, is that they transform the daily physical, economic and psychic experience of life. President Trump is remaking the country in his image: crude, harsh, gratuitously mean. The ongoing attack on civil society, which his administration plans to intensify in the name of Charlie Kirk, is a part of this program. Civil society makes life more livable. The administration’s message is that the work of civil society no longer belongs in this country.

And neither do trans people. The government’s official policy is that we do not exist — and yet, somehow, we constitute a danger to the country. The fact that Kirk was killed while he was answering a question about the purported prevalence of trans mass shooters (a fiction he had helped promulgate) and the news that the suspect in Kirk’s killing apparently has a romantic partner who is trans have hypercharged this process of disowning.

On Monday morning, before returning from a weekend away, I entered the following words into the search bar on my phone: “famous trans people.” Then I tried “transgender journalists,” “transgender professors” and a few similar queries. My name did not come up. This was my inexact way of measuring the risk that someone would target me. It appeared to be low, even after a weekend of Donald Trump and his prominent allies blaming the left in general and trans people in particular for Kirk’s assassination. OK, I thought, I could go home, for now.

The feeling that I am on borrowed time in my own home is a familiar one. Twelve years ago, I was forced to leave Russia to protect my family from a campaign to take children away from L.G.B.T. parents. In the years since, Russia has been adding L.G.B.T. people to a list of “terrorists and extremists.” Other lists — of “foreign agents,” “undesirable organizations” — are for journalists, academics, media outlets and universities. For a while after Russia issued the arrest warrant that resulted in my being sentenced in absentia to prison, I had a recurrent nightmare: I am on a plane to Moscow, which is exciting, until I remember that I will be arrested as soon as I land.

Ece Temelkuran, the prominent Turkish political columnist, who now lives in exile, described a moment of realization: “I was standing at a gate in Tunis airport after talking to my lawyer, who had said: ‘They’re arresting journalists by the dozen today. Take a vacation or something. I don’t know, go away somewhere.’ I looked at the passengers boarding the plane to Istanbul, then down at my boarding pass. While trying to change my ticket from home to somewhere else, it was the first time I felt that Turkey was hardly my country.” This quote is from a book called “How to Lose a Country.”

The price of admission to Trump’s America is aggressive compliance, the sort demonstrated by more and more universities. Columbia and Williams College, for example, have been voluntarily flying flags at half-staff in honor of Kirk. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley, has notified about 160 students, faculty members and staff that it has given their names to the federal government in connection with “alleged antisemitic incidents.” The philosopher Judith Butler and the Middle East historian Ussama Makdisi are perhaps the only two notified people who have spoken publicly about the email they received. Butler sees the silence of the others as a sign of fear.

A friend of mine is in the cross hairs of the administration. I asked her if her world had gotten smaller. Not exactly, she said. “It’s like what happens when somebody dies. There will always be people who will disappoint you. And other people show themselves, having been through what you’ve been through.”

Something is dying: the sense that we know our country. Butler told me that when they got the email notification from U.C. Berkeley, they had trouble believing the university would so badly violate its own procedure and fail in its obligation to protect academic freedom. They had trouble believing it even though they have studied autocracies. Even though they are currently writing a book on Franz Kafka and the law. In Kafka’s novel “The Trial,” the protagonist is arrested but never learns what his crime was. The letter Butler received from the university counsel did not specify for what offense, if any, they might be investigated.

I have been thinking of historical, rather than fictional, antecedents, in particular the assassination in 1938 of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by a Polish-German Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan. I’ve been thinking about it because it’s an assassination; because, like most public violence, it was committed by a young man; and because it was an act of despair. Grynszpan’s family, rejected by both Germany and Poland, was stuck in borderland hell between those two countries, along with some 12,000 other people. Staying with an uncle in Paris, Grynszpan was unable to help them. He decided to kill someone he saw as a representative of the force that was immiserating his loved ones. If the information released by the Utah investigators so far proves accurate, Tyler Robinson might have felt a similar desperate fury.

Grynszpan’s action served as a pretext for Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass,” a two-day state-sponsored pogrom in Nazi Germany. During the course of it, authorities rounded up nearly 30,000 Jews, marking the first time the regime conducted mass arrests and put people in concentration camps because of who they were and not what they had ostensibly done.

But what makes this parallel feel most apt is how nervous I am about drawing it. The comparison seems straightforward: The person who was murdered was a representative of a hateful ideology, the person thought to have killed him was a deluded young man who may have tried to oppose that hatred in the most destructive manner imaginable. And yet something in the transformed landscape of this country tells me I’m not supposed to say so.