Earlier this week, Yale professors Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley announced that they were leaving the United States to take up academic positions in Canada.

Ordinarily, this would not be considered news. Academics move all the time. Sometimes from the United States to other countries.

But since both Snyder and Stanley have been, since 2017, the two leading proponents of the thesis that the United States is sliding precipitously toward fascism or authoritarianism, if we’re not already there, their announcement has attracted a considerable amount of attention.

Snyder’s reason, and the timing of his decision, has been somewhat murky. But Stanley has been forthright: He’s moving his family out of the country because the political climate has grown intolerable, and after Columbia announced its decision to capitulate to the Trump administration, he no longer thinks he can count on universities to oppose Trump.

What has interested me is the reaction of people online to Snyder’s and Stanley’s decision. I’m going solely by Facebook, but over the last 72 hours or so, I’ve seen a steady stream of criticism from people saying that many academics in the United States, many people in the United States, don’t have the privilege that Snyder and Stanley do. Many people have gone so far as to say that if Snyder and Stanley truly believe we’re living in fascist state, they should stay and fight.

As someone who has been on the completely opposite side of this argument since 2017, as someone who has repeatedly and publicly tussled with Stanley, both in person and on line, in formal debates and informal emails, in arguments and conversations that have frequently gotten unpleasant and nasty, I don’t understand this particular criticism of him or Snyder.

Most of their critics, as far as I can tell, are people who believe that Snyder and Stanley are correct about America: fascism has indeed come. If you do believe that fascism is here, not just rhetorically or hypothetically but in actuality, how, by your own lights, not my lights, but your own, how do you criticize two people who’ve been not only extremely outspoken in their denunciations of Trump for almost a decade; people, in Stanley’s case, who’ve been repeatedly targeted with death threats (and maybe Snyder’s, too, I just don’t know); people who, if you believe we’re living under a fascist regime, could quite easily have a target on their backs; people who have decided that for the safety and well being of themselves and their families, they must flee to a place of greater safety?

I want to make it clear that I am not arguing that either Snyder or Stanley are in danger. I am arguing that if you believe we are living under a fascist regime, and that fascist regimes tend to do certain things, one of which is to persecute their most prominent critics, I don’t really understand your criticism of Snyder’s and Stanley’s actions.

That other people don’t have their privilege, I of course concede. And…so what? Would we say to the filmmakers and authors and politicians who fled Germany in 1933, there are other filmmakers and authors and politicians and journalists and auto-workers and civil servants and Jews and trade unionists, who aren’t as privileged or lionized as you, who don’t have your resources or knowledge of foreign languages, who don’t have your contacts in France or Britain or the United States or Denmark, who can’t just up and go?

I think most people would say that anyone making such a claim was not really in touch with the reality and the danger that people are facing under such a regime.

Then I start wondering, despite some of my rethinking about the nature of the Trump threat, whether I wasn’t right all along about the people who have been saying it’s fascism—namely, that they say those words, but they don’t believe them or don’t understand them.

Again, if you really believe we’re living under a fascist regime, like the other fascist regimes of history, everything from Nazi Germany to Pinochet’s Chile, do you really condemn someone for fleeing the scene?

To me, this is one of those moments where the rubber hits the road for the left. Either you take your analysis of fascism come to America seriously—and I say “your” because it hasn’t been mine—or you revert back to the left’s insipid privilege talk, where even the right to flee the country, and go into exile, to protect yourself and your family, becomes some kind of privilege that must be shared equally before it gets used at all. Which I just see as a secular version of Christianity, where sacrifice of self is the highest good, and if we can’t improve the lot of everyone, we can’t improve the lot of anyone, and if we can’t save everyone, we can’t save anyone.

There are many criticisms one can make of Stanley’s decision. To my mind, he’s never been entirely coherent or consistent in his arguments, and this is no exception. He says that universities should band together to fight fascism in the very same sentence that he says that he’s leaving. He says he can’t raise his family in a fascist United States, but that he’s not really fleeing fascism in the United States so much as joining the fight against fascism in Canada, which he says is being targeted by the United States in the same way Yale is being targeted by Trump, which sounds about as coherent as saying, in 1938, that you’re leaving Nazi Germany to fight fascism in…Austria. So, as is often the case when he talks about politics and fascism, I’m not clear what Stanley thinks. That’s all fair game for criticism.

I can even imagine a lot of more cynical assessments of Stanley’s decision. But what I can’t understand, and what I keep coming back to, is that if you yourself believe the United States is being ruled by fascists, how can you engage in the kind of parsing and nitpicking of the decision of an outspoken critic of that fascism to leave the country.

All I can say is that, if we we really are living under a fascist regime, or even heading toward one, I’m not going to count on the people online to strategically fight it or save us. They seem to have far too great a talent for getting distracted by other priorities.