Fintan O’Toole

Democracy’s Afterlife

Trump, the GOP, and the rise of zombie politics.

William Barr: Enabler in Chief

The attorney general exemplifies the growing influence of right-wing Catholicism under Trump.

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

Night and Day

Democrats are gambling that abhorrence of Trump is sufficiently strong to motivate voters, and Biden and Harris can offer comfort and empathy instead.

Unpresidented

Toxic residues from the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the so-called war on terror continue to flow into American politics.

Vector in Chief

To understand Trump’s incoherence, we have to take into account two contradictory impulses within the right-wing mindset: paranoia and risk.

The Outsider

In his presidential campaigns Bernie Sanders has radically altered the meaning of inside and outside.

Trump’s Show Trial

Republican senators are now quite openly behaving as courtiers. It is impertinent for courtiers even to go through the motions of putting the monarch on trial.

The Designated Mourner

Joe Biden is the most gothic figure in American politics. He is haunted by death, not just by the private tragedies his family has endured, but by a larger and more public sense of loss.

The Union Without Qualities

The Ham of Fate

Boris Johnson has always understood that a vivid lie is much more memorable than a dull truth.

Vile Bodies

The King and I

Celtic Myths

Saboteur in Chief

When you want to discredit government itself, obliviousness and ineptitude are their own rewards.

How Brexit Broke Up Britain

There is stark and overwhelming evidence that the English people who voted for Brexit do not, on the whole, care about the United Kingdom and in particular do not care about that part of it called Northern Ireland.

Powder His Face

How Ulster Unionists Block Brexit

If, as the Democratic Unionist Party insists, Northern Ireland can be treated no differently from the rest of the UK, then all of the UK must stay largely within the existing European Union rules. In which case, Brexit itself is pointless. The DUP’s backward-looking Britishness thus stands in the way of Brexit’s English revolution.

Where Lost Bodies Roam

The literature of witness is an attempt to fix the immediate past, but in Beckett the horror is not past.

Mad As Hell About What?