New York Review of Books

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Dear readers,

Donald Trump’s reelection comes as a shock, if not in every way a surprise. We are confronted by the reality that most Americans not only rejected Kamala Harris’s calls for unity, sanity, and a stronger social safety net, they also found in Donald Trump’s darkness and rancor something to vote for, something to believe in. On Tuesday, the president-elect expanded his map and his mandate.

In response, we Americans who abhor Trump’s zero-sum vision of the world must figure out what we got wrong and adapt our understanding of the country we live in. We can never accept his bigotry, his dangerously petty and callous perspective.

The New York Review has always brought depth, style, and a commitment to justice to our accounts of the world. Yesterday our small staff gathered over bagels and coffee to talk about what questions this election has raised and who might best answer them. Over the next few days, we will be publishing a series of reflections by some of our sharpest contributors on what is at stake.

Today we publish an urgent early essay from our next issue by Fintan O’Toole, our Advising Editor. He explains how the United States got to this point, and warns that a brutal “disinhibition” will characterize the second Trump administration. “With allies on the Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably at the time of writing) the House of Representatives,” he writes, “Trump will have no one to regulate his urges.”

This is an uncertain time: prominent figures in Trump’s circle are already speaking of mass deportations, rolling back vaccine mandates, continuing to take away women’s basic rights. There will be much work to do to expose the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of these ideas, and to clarify other, better approaches.

Thank you for reading and for being a part of the conversation that we must keep pushing forward.

Emily Greenhouse
Editor, The New York Review

Fintan O’Toole
Letting It All Hang Out

Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America.

Rozina Ali
God’s Directive

After the September 11 attacks, evangelical American missionaries followed military tanks into Afghanistan and Iraq to convert Muslims as part of a holy war.

Jenny Uglow
The Legacy of Red Vienna

From 1919 to 1934, socialist Vienna was guided by the “critical rationalism” and the pluralist, collaborative ethos of its thinkers and planners, whose influence endured long after they lost power.

Carl Elliott
The Horrors of Hepatitis Research

Sydney Halpern’s Dangerous Medicine shows that the abusive experiments on mentally disabled children at Willowbrook State School were only one part of a much larger unethical research program.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s October 25, 2018, issue, Christopher R. Browning grappled with the historical question that has haunted American politics since 2016:

As a historian specializing in the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and Europe in the era of the world wars, I have been repeatedly asked about the degree to which the current situation in the United States resembles the interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe. I would note several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference.

Christopher R. Browning
The Suffocation of Democracy

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics.

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