Opinion | Don’t Let Donald Trump Drive You Into Internal Exile

Since Donald Trump’s victory, I have not been able to stop thinking about Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in 2012 — another time in which an exhausted populace found itself unclear on what to do next.

For months leading up to that moment, tens of thousands of Russians protested as Mr. Putin prepared to return to the Kremlin following four years in a shadow role as prime minister. They were energized and often joyful, young and plugged into pop culture — it was the first time I had seen memes hop from the internet into real life, by way of protest signs.

The day before Mr. Putin was inaugurated in May, the police violently cracked down on a mass protest. When Mr. Putin drove through a Moscow cleared of any signs of life, and through the Kremlin gates, the protest movement was effectively dead. As this fact settled in, opposition-minded Russians flooded social media, recalling just how young they were when Mr. Putin first headed the state more than 12 years prior — some remembered their college days, others elementary school. I was reminded of that when some American first-time voters, some as young as 10 when Mr. Trump first ran for president, revealed they had never heard of the “Access Hollywood” tape, a key moment in the president-elect’s political and misogynistic lore.

The United States is not Russia, and Mr. Trump is not Mr. Putin. This country has checks and balances that Russia can only dream of (if we can keep them), and a tradition of free speech and freedom of association that, though often tested, are central to how America works. But something binds these men who seek power with no controls — the creation of internal enemies, the constant shock moves to keep people on their toes, their viselike grip on the information environment, as well as the anger and exhaustion they provoke in their critics. Here we go again.

In the months that followed Mr. Putin’s return to the Kremlin, a term that had been popular in the Soviet era seeped back into the culture: internal emigration, or as it’s better known in the West, internal exile. The fight against Mr. Putin had been lost, the thinking went, and you had but one life to live. Why not spend it making a cozy home, tending a little garden, shutting out the leaden horrors outside? You didn’t have to move anywhere to internally emigrate. There was no financial cost or material upheaval. You simply had — to bastardize a phrase popularized by Timothy Leary — to turn in, tune out and drop out.

There are hints this is happening in the United States. Democrats are not nearly as united as they were in the wake of Mr. Trump’s first win. Donations to nonprofits, which soared in 2016, are down, and tactics such as another Women’s March have been met with a decided lack of enthusiasm. This may be a result of exhaustion or a frustration with the old methods.