There is a point in a bad marriage when the fighting stops, and that is usually the point when the spouse who regarded the fighting as evidence of commitment should become worried. For years, every argument could be interpreted as participation in the relationship. However ugly the evening became, both people were still negotiating because both still believed there was something worth negotiating over. Then one of them quietly rents an apartment. The other is astonished. Why leave now, when we were still working things out? The answer is that the fighting was the working-it-out part. Silence arrived when the decision had already been made.
American institutions have spent decades making a similar mistake. Schools became accustomed to angry parents, universities to angry alumni, newspapers to angry readers, corporations to angry customers, cities to angry taxpayers, television networks to angry viewers, and political parties to angry voters. The anger could be managed precisely because the angry people remained customers of the institution. A parent screaming at a school-board meeting still had children enrolled in the schools. A conservative furious with network television still watched network television. A businessman complaining about state government still operated his business in the state. A homeowner furious about property taxes still owned property inside the jurisdiction collecting them. The complaints sounded like rebellion while functioning as evidence of attachment.
Increasingly, Americans are discovering a different response. They can go their own way.
The phrase already belongs to men who concluded that contemporary relationships offered them an unacceptable bargain. Whatever became of the sprawling MGTOW subculture, its central mechanism was simple and powerful: withdrawal. A man dissatisfied with marriage or dating could spend his life trying to change women, society, divorce law, sexual politics and expectations surrounding masculinity, or he could decide that he no longer wanted the product badly enough to accept its terms. Participation had been mistaken for an obligation when it was actually a choice. Once he understood that, the negotiation changed completely.
That is the useful principle here, stripped of the sexual politics surrounding the original acronym. Going Their Own Way is what happens when people stop asking an institution to change and begin arranging their lives so that they need less from it. Parents homeschool or choose another school. Workers relocate. Audiences abandon networks. Writers publish themselves. Businesses change states. Families cross school-district lines. People move from cities to suburbs, from suburbs to exurbs, from incorporated towns to unincorporated land, or from one state to another. Each decision can be tiny when viewed from the household making it. The importance lies in what happens when thousands of tiny decisions begin pointing in the same direction.
Fuck This Hill. There Are Other Hills.
Much of the world contains peoples whose relationship with land is nearly impossible for a highly mobile American to understand. Land can contain ancestry, religion, graves, language, memory and obligations stretching through generations. The particular ground matters. A replacement parcel fifty miles away cannot replace it because the attachment concerns the place itself rather than its acreage, price or amenities.
The stereotypical white American relationship with geography is almost comically different. When taxes become intolerable, schools deteriorate, crime increases, regulations multiply, neighborhoods change, employment disappears or the general aggravation level exceeds the owner’s tolerance, the moving truck appears. There is another suburb, another county, another state, another subdivision, another five acres. Americans have been doing this since before there was an America. Cross the ocean. Cross the mountains. Leave the farm. Leave the city. Leave the old industrial town. Leave the inner suburb. Leave the expensive coastal state. Home becomes partly a place and partly a kit that can be reassembled wherever the truck stops.
That habit matters because mobility creates a peculiar form of political power. Institutions normally assume that dissatisfied people will remain inside their boundaries. The school district assumes parents will keep sending children. The municipality assumes homeowners will continue owning houses. The state assumes earners and businesses will remain taxable. The newspaper assumes readers still want the newspaper. The political argument therefore concerns what the institution will do for you, permit you to do, charge you for doing, or require you to tolerate.
Going Their Own Way changes the pronouns.
The school district can tell you what your schools will teach until you decide they are no longer your schools. The city council can tell you what your city has decided until you no longer live in the city. The newspaper can explain what our community believes until you stop reading it. The state can describe what we have chosen until you become a resident of another state. None of those institutions disappears when you leave. What disappears is the institution’s ability to define itself as yours merely because it once was.
That distinction becomes particularly important at the local level because local government is where belonging and payment are most tightly connected. Leaving a school district can mean removing both a child and a family from its future enrollment. Leaving a municipality can mean taking a household’s property, consumption and economic activity beyond the municipal tax base. Leaving a state can move income, investment and future taxable activity with the person. Moving into a different jurisdiction can redirect property taxes toward a different school system and local government. The person making the move usually experiences none of this as a grand political act. He has found a house, a school, a tax bill and a community he prefers. From his perspective, the sentence is simply: I live here now.
That is where the cascade begins.
White Flight and the Politics of Exit
White flight is the enormous American demonstration of how consequential millions of individually comprehensible departures can become. Families leaving cities took purchasing power, tax revenue, businesses, children, professional skills, political energy and future investment with them. The racial discrimination, housing policy, redlining, exclusionary development and segregation surrounding that history mattered enormously and cannot be separated from its consequences. But white flight also demonstrates something broader about exit itself: a person does not need to seize control of an institution to profoundly alter it. He can leave it.
This is where a seemingly small event becomes interesting. One family leaves a school district and essentially nothing happens. One affluent household moves outside the city limits and the city continues operating. One business relocates and another may take its place. Even a hundred departures may disappear inside the normal churn of a metropolitan area. Institutions are large enough to absorb individual exits, which makes each departure easy to dismiss.
The secondary effects arrive through accumulation. Fewer children can eventually mean lower enrollment. Lower enrollment can change staffing, programming, school utilization and political constituencies. A changing residential population changes the property-tax base, retail demand, housing market and electorate. Businesses follow customers and workers. Families compare schools partly by the families already attending them. Employers compare jurisdictions partly by the workers already living there. Homebuyers compare neighborhoods partly by the tax burden and services created by everyone who arrived before them. The departure that looked like an isolated household decision becomes one input into the next household’s decision.
Then the direction of causality becomes difficult to untangle. Did families leave because the schools declined, or did the schools struggle because families with money, children, political influence and alternatives left? Did the tax base weaken because businesses departed, or did businesses depart because the tax base was weakening and government was asking more from those who remained? Did a suburb become desirable because affluent families moved there, or did affluent families move there because it was desirable? At sufficient scale the answer can become all of the above. Cascades feed themselves.
That is the part of Going Their Own Way that gets lost when every departure is interpreted as an ideological statement. Most people do not move with a manifesto taped to the windshield. They make decisions at human scale. This house is cheaper. That school seems better. The commute works because I am remote three days a week. My parents live nearby. Property taxes are lower. I can have a yard. I am tired of dealing with this city. None of those sentences sounds revolutionary. Add enough of them together and they can redraw a metropolitan region.
COVID Made the School Optional
Public education provides one of the clearest contemporary examples because COVID accidentally conducted an enormous audit of American classrooms. Parents who previously experienced school through homework, report cards, parent-teacher conferences and stories told over dinner suddenly sat within earshot of the school day. They heard teachers speak, watched lessons unfold, encountered the vocabulary of the classroom, observed disciplinary norms and discovered which subjects received confidence, attention and moral emphasis. Some came away impressed. Others became convinced that academic priorities, cultural priorities or both had drifted far from what they expected from public education.
The lasting change was larger than any argument over curriculum. Millions of parents learned that the school itself was optional in ways they had never seriously considered. Homeschooling had infrastructure. Online curricula existed. Microschools could be organized. Religious and private schools were alternatives. Charter schools, tutors, co-ops and learning pods expanded the menu. Even families remaining entirely committed to public education discovered another form of exit: move six miles and acquire a different public school system.
That last form may be more consequential than the spectacular political battles because it connects education directly to geography and taxation. A family that removes a child for homeschooling can still own the same house and pay the same property taxes. A family that leaves the school district changes considerably more. The children leave. The parents leave. Their house changes hands. Their spending patterns change. Their votes disappear from one jurisdiction and appear in another. Depending on the move, their property taxes may begin supporting another school system, another county, another municipality. What began as dissatisfaction with something happening in a classroom can end with a moving truck crossing a jurisdictional boundary.
The institution sees the enrollment number. The municipality sees the tax roll. The realtor sees demand moving between neighborhoods. The receiving school sees another student. The receiving county sees another household. The family sees Tuesday.
That mismatch of scale is why cascades are so easy to miss while they are happening.
Going Their Own Way Is Bigger Than Geography
Media went through the same transition without moving trucks. Conservatives spent decades complaining about newspapers, network television, Hollywood, publishing and eventually social-media companies. Complaining implicitly acknowledged the authority of those institutions. Someone furious that a newspaper would never publish his argument still wanted publication in that newspaper. Someone angry about television coverage still regarded television coverage as important. Technology gradually reduced the value of permission. Talk radio, cable television, blogs, YouTube, podcasts, streaming and independent publishing allowed audiences and creators to construct alternatives.
The important event was not that everyone suddenly agreed. They stopped needing to occupy the same room. The old institution could retain its values, standards and audience while the people who disliked the bargain assembled somewhere else. The political battle over who controlled the gate weakened because there were suddenly many gates.
Money behaves similarly because money possesses even less sentimental attachment to institutions than people do. Companies relocate. Investors reallocate. Retirees change states. Entrepreneurs incorporate elsewhere. Remote work allows some earners to separate employment from geography altogether. A government still possesses enormous authority within its jurisdiction, but jurisdiction itself becomes part of the bargain whenever the governed possess a practical exit.
The interesting question is therefore rarely whether one particular tax, school policy, zoning decision, cultural argument, crime statistic or regulation will cause some dramatic exodus. Usually it will not. People tolerate enormous amounts of friction because moving is expensive and disruptive. The cascade begins when several ordinary incentives align. A household dislikes the schools a little, taxes a little, housing costs a little, regulations a little, crime a little and the general direction of the place a little. Meanwhile another jurisdiction offers a somewhat better school, somewhat cheaper house, somewhat lower taxes and people the family already knows. Eventually the arithmetic crosses an invisible line. Nobody needs to become furious. The alternative merely needs to become easier than staying.
The Receiving Side of the Cascade
Departure changes the destination too. A family carries consumption, labor, children, taxes and social networks. A business carries payroll, suppliers, investment and future expansion. Enough arrivals create demand for houses, schools, restaurants, churches, stores, professional services and political representation. The place people escaped to begins acquiring institutions capable of supporting more people like them. That makes it more attractive to the next wave.
This is how sorting becomes self-reinforcing. People select different packages of order, autonomy, surveillance, community, privacy, services, taxes and inconvenience. Some willingly pay high taxes for excellent schools and extensive public services. Some choose a tightly regulated municipality because they value predictability. Others accept fewer services in exchange for lower taxes or greater autonomy. Some want an HOA. Others would rather look at their neighbor’s rusting washing machine than receive a letter about the height of their own grass. America’s abundance of overlapping jurisdictions allows remarkably different preferences to exist within a short drive of one another.
The important word is their. Going Their Own Way does not require everyone to agree about which package is best. It depends upon people being able to select among packages. My preferred bargain can be intolerable to you. Your preferred bargain can seem absurd to me. Political temperature falls considerably when neither of us requires the other to live under precisely the same arrangement.
This also explains why the cascade can become dangerous to institutions without being threatening in any ordinary sense of the word. Nobody has to menace a school board, city council, university, newspaper or employer. Nobody needs to announce retaliation. People can simply stop showing up. The school can keep its curriculum. The newspaper can keep its editorial position. The city can keep its policies. The state can keep its tax structure. The employer can keep its rules. The individual retains the equally mundane decision to determine whether the resulting bargain is worth buying.
Exit Produces Sorting, and Sorting Produces Institutions
Going Their Own Way becomes more consequential as repeated exits produce durable alternatives. A few homeschooling families constitute a departure. A large homeschooling ecosystem becomes an educational institution. A podcaster with a microphone represents independent media. Thousands of creators with millions of listeners constitute a media system. Families leaving one state represent migration. Enough families carrying businesses, wealth and political preferences reshape the state receiving them.
Exit therefore has stages. Dissatisfied people complain while they remain invested in an institution. Some eventually leave. Departures sort people into alternatives that better match their preferences. Successful alternatives develop infrastructure. Infrastructure attracts investment and talent. That infrastructure makes departure easier for the next person. What required courage or eccentricity for the first generation becomes a menu option for the second. Children grow up inside the alternatives and regard them as ordinary.
That final step may be the most important. The first generation remembers the old newspaper, university, city, neighborhood or school system. It may retain nostalgia and periodically wonder whether returning is possible. Its children may have no such attachment. The homeschooled child does not necessarily experience homeschooling as an escape from public education. It was simply school. The family raised in the new county does not necessarily think of itself as having fled the old city. That was where Mom and Dad used to live.
The cascade has then crossed from behavior into inheritance.
This is why institutions should pay attention to quiet departures long before they become dramatic demographic trends. Anger represents engagement. Complaint represents attachment. A furious parent still believes the school can be recovered. A furious reader still cares about the newspaper. A furious resident still believes the city is his city. The argument itself contains evidence that the relationship remains valuable enough to fight over.
Silence arrives later.
By then the family has another school. The reader has another publication. The business has another state. The homeowner has another county. The taxpayer has another jurisdiction. The person who once argued about what we should do has quietly changed the meaning of we.
That is Going Their Own Way. It is not necessarily a movement, and it does not require coordination. It can emerge from millions of people making decisions that seem almost boring when considered separately. One enrollment withdrawn. One house sold. One subscription cancelled. One business incorporated elsewhere. One family crossing a county line. One taxpayer deciding that the combination of services, schools, regulations, costs and culture available somewhere else suits him better.
The cascade appears only afterward, when somebody looks at the enrollment, the tax base, the audience, the population or the map and asks where everybody went.
The answer may be that they stopped fighting.
The fighting meant they hadn’t left yet.
A very smart and insightful piece of work. Thanks.