The Great American Checkout

What happens when your best minds, brightest students, and most curious spirits stop believing in the project?

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

China’s Gathering Infinity Stones

The American brain drain unfolding today, as many observers have noted, is yet another sign that the country’s refusal to confront its own idiosyncrasies, and its staggering, willful historical ignorance, is poetically reversing the gears of progress it once relied on. The re-election of the current president, even after an insurrection and a laundry list of disqualifying offenses, confirms what many feared: the American public is too drunk on its own mythos, too unserious to sustain the burdens of global leadership, especially when the people involved aren’t the color a comfortable plurality prefers.

Despite Reaganism’s fever dream convincing a spectacle-addled nation that “government is the problem,” it was federal investment that powered research and development, the quiet engine behind the American century and the country’s historic superpower status. That engine has been sputtering for years. Now, it’s being gutted.

At a national science and technology conference in June 2024, Xi Jinping declared that technology was the “frontline” of international competition and innovation. China’s rapid expansion across electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, biotech, quantum communications, and fusion energy reflects the muscle of its centralized investment in university-led research and development. The unsettling truth beneath all this isn’t just that China might catch up to American innovation, it may leapfrog it entirely.

In the final quarter of 2024, Chinese EV giant BYD, short for Build Your Dreams, outsold Tesla. By March, Beijing had transmitted quantum-encrypted images to South Africa via a cheap, compact satellite. And to add insult to injury, as Foreign Affairs notes:

“As the energy demands of artificial intelligence make fusion power—a potentially massive source of carbon-free electricity—even more desirable, China has more new public fusion projects, fusion patents, and fusion Ph.D.s than any other country.”

China isn’t just building products—it’s building paradigms.

The Myth of Self-Made Supremacy

There was a time when many Americans believed they could have it both ways, technological innovation and cultural insulation. But in the face of China’s rising technological power, America’s response has largely been retreat: protectionism, nostalgia, and performative export controls, particularly targeting GPUs (graphics processing units—the same chips that power AI and make your gaming rig sing). Meanwhile, the spaces that have historically fostered innovation, universities, are being vilified for embracing racial inclusion, and climate science is now branded “woke.” These attacks aren’t random. They’re the product of political winds governed by a revanchist design: punish complexity, reward grievance.

That same Foreign Affairs piece delivers a quiet rebuke of the Reagan-era addiction to short-term profitability:

“That’s why it is so important that the United States not let up on its own innovation. When the government in Beijing decides that China must lead in a certain technology, resources are not an issue, and neither is short-term profitability. Washington, on the other hand, traditionally respects market forces and opposes government-led industrial policy. On the battlefield of technology, Americans must both continue to do what they do best and find new ways to improve competitiveness.”

Translation: China invests in the long game. America respects the market, until the market crashes the future.

Johns Hopkins University, one of the world’s foremost research institutions and right here in my hometown of Baltimore, was founded on the Humboldt model. That early 19th-century German vision fused teaching with research, and it transformed higher education, making Germany a magnet for serious academic inquiry. But as nationalism and war destabilized the European continent, that intellectual energy migrated to the United States.

Institutions like MIT partnered with industrial giants like AT&T and General Electric to fuel applied research that served both society and the economy. By the time World War II began, federal dollars were supercharging America’s scientific apparatus, leading to breakthroughs in microwave radar, nuclear fusion, and proximity fuses, all of which helped birth modern GPS. This momentum continued into the postwar era and turned the U.S. into a global lighthouse for scientific talent.

But what happens when a nation gets used to its own supremacy, so used to it, in fact, that it starts mistaking it for nature?

What happens when voting starts to feel like a reality show, with citizens phoning in to crown the contestant they hate the least?

The Brain Drain in Motion

There’s already a growing stir among academics, many of whom fear their foreign background will be weaponized against them, or who simply no longer have the funding to continue their work in this country. A recent Politico EU article captures this brain drain through a story told by Margaret McFall-Ngai, a biochemist at Caltech. One of her brightest students saw their program defunded and their future stall out. McFall-Ngai forwarded the student’s CV to Europe. That student is now headed to the Max Planck Society in Germany.

The article goes on to note that European and Canadian institutions are now openly scouting American academia as a “new talent pool.” And the data backs it up:

Of the 690 postgraduate researchers who responded to a poll in the publication Nature, 548 said they were considering leaving the U.S. One even responded: “This is my home, I really love my country, but a lot of my mentors have been telling me to get out, right now.”

That’s not just professional calculus, it’s emotional exile.