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Fintan O'Toole

Sunday 7th of December 2025

2024 Presidential election He [Biden] is caught in a generational paradox. He does not, in electoral terms, actually repre- sent the boomers: a majority of “old white people” voted for Trump in 2020 and will, if given the chance, surely do so again in 2024. But he can be seen nonetheless as a represen- tative boomer figure, the most prominent and powerful embodiment of the demographic  group that has dominated American wealth, poli- tics, and culture since the 1970s. He suffers on both sides of this contradiction — most of his own generation does not identify with him, but many younger Americans identify him with  the  age-related injustices that have shaped their lives. It is this incongruity that makes Biden so vulnerable. Being the old white man brings him no rewards, only resentments. And resentment is the medium in which Trump thrives. Fintan O'Toole, NY Rev. of Books, Jan. 18, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
2024 Presidential election Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, implicitly appeal to a more symbolic notion of representation: however complex and diverse American society might seem to be, its essential form is male, white, and at least culturally Christian. This has always been so in the past, and must always be so in the future. If demography, and therefore democracy, is flowing away from this eternal truth, then democracy must be frozen in time. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, September 19, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
2024 Presidential election What s truly strange is not just Trump's chronological age but the anachronistic vision in which only white men who plant their seed in fertile women are authentic citizens and legitimate rulers. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, September 19, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Aging In 2014 the US elected the oldest Congress in its history. The record did not last long: It was broken in 2016. And then again in 2018. And yet again in 2020, when — remarkably — the majority of the incumbents who lost their seats were replaced by someone even older. In the 2022 midterms, the House did become  slightly younger (the mean age of representa- tives dropped by a year, from fifty-nine to fifty-eight), but the mean age of senators continued to rise and is now over sixty-five. … The presidency is following the same trend. Fintan O'Toole, NY Rev. of Books, Jan. 18, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Aging It’s also true, of course, that younger politicians can suffer debilitating illnesses. … True, too, that older people with access to good health care can now lead productive public lives well past the ages at which their political forebears would have died or become incapable. But in other democracies where healthy  life spans are just as long as those in the US, the governing class is nonetheless much younger. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, January 18, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Authoritarianism As he [Trump] put it in his speech accepting the Republican nomination in 2016, "I alone can fix it." At the heart of authoritarianism is this notion of indispensability. The leader is unique, unparalled, irreplaceable. God has chose him to rescue and revive the nation. That is why he cannot be constrained by law or even by the ordinary calculations of rationality. Only in his infallible instincts and indominable will does salvation lie. … The valorization of the lone savior suits reactionary politics — it is not a good fit for democracy. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, August 15, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Biden administration The message that needs to be heard is not about what his administration would like to do for Americans, but about what it must achieve  because the alternative is self-destruction. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Conservatives Postwar American conservatism, like it counterparts in Europe, understood security as having five dimensions: “national security,” “law and order,” religious and cultural continuity, economic stability for most workers, and regulation for safer products and a less dangerous environment. … To put it crudely, the story of American conservatism since the 1980s is the narrowing of the idea of security by stripping away these last two dimensions and upping the ante on the other three. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus On March 8, 2020, well over two months after the first case of Covid-19 had been confirmed in the United States, Dan Scavino, assistant to the president and director of social media at the White House, tweeted a mocked-up picture of his boss Donald Trump playing a violin. The caption read: “My next piece is called Nothing Can Stop What's Coming.” Trump himself retweeted the image with the comment “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!” Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Democracy American democracy cannot be saved if it is not reimagined, deepened, expanded and brought into line with contemporary American realities. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, September 19, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Democracy Yet [Patrick] Byrne had the germ of the right idea. The best way to steal a presidential election would indeed be through a staged display of democratic process backed by elaborate precooked ‘evidence’ of foreign conspiracy and simplified by Fox News, social media, and other media. This is the upside-down shape of a successful American coup. Democracy is destroyed by the enactment of its protection. Conspirators succeed by foiling a“conspiracy.” Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, January 19, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Fear  The opposite of fear is not really hope. It is security. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, March 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Impeachment “Let the jury consider the verdict,” says the King in the trial scene in Alice in Wonderland. “‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’” With Trump's trial, there is a refinement on this order: verdict first, trial afterwards, sentence never. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, February 27, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Impeachment The reason why evidence is irrelevant to Trumps' trial is not just that the evidence is inconveniently damning. It is that this doctrine of the president's will as the source of all authority must not be undermined by the manner of the trial. At the heart of Trump's defense is the jus- tification that underlies all authoritarian rule. The leader is special. He is not like us because he has unique instincts. His gut (or divine inpiration or mystical ability to discern the true will of the people) leads him to make the right call. And the gut cannot be questioned: the job of everyone else in government is to accept what the leader does first and find the reasons for it later. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, February 27, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Israel-Hamas war It does not seem that Israel understands what its endgame is. Without a clear sense of an ending, there can be no answer to the most crucial moral and strategic question: When is enough enough? Even in the crudely mathematical logic of vengeance, the blood price for Hamas’s appalling atrocities of October 7 has long since been paid. The body count — if that is to be the measure of retribution — has mounted far beyond the level required for an equality of suffering.  Yet it appears to have no visible ceiling. What factor must Jewish deaths be multiplied by? Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, December 7, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism Populist politics exploits the double-ness of comedy — the way that  “only a joke” can easily become “no joke” —  to create a relationship of active connivance between the leader and his followers in which everything is permissible because nothing is serious. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, March 21, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Public discourse Humor … may be a way of telling us not to feel sorry for ourselves. But it is more often a way of telling us not to feel sorry for others. It creates an economy of compassion, limiting it to those who are laughing and excluding those who are being laughed at. It makes the polarization of humanity fun. … Trump is America's biggest comedian.  His badinage is hardly Wildean, but his put-  downs, honed to the sharpness of stilettos, are many people's idea of fun. For them, he makes anger, fear and resentment entertaining. Fintan O'Toole, NY Rev. of Books, Mar. 21, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Snapshot In a letter to The New York Times in 2005, Donald Trump wrote that “some people cast shadows, and other people  choose to live in those shadows.” Mike Pence went a little further and chose to be Trump’s shadow. He has ended up as a gray man of no substance, who has to insist ever more emphatically on his own godliness because he has no soul left to sell. Mike Pence portrayed by Fintan O'Toole © 2023 Kwiple.com
Socio-economic mobility There has been a relentless decline in absolute mobility from one generation to the next: from over 90 percent when Biden was born [in 1942] to around 50 percent for those who were born in the 1980s. In other words, if you were born in 1985, you are as likely to be less well off than your parents as you are to be richer. Just as the rise in mobility for Biden’s generation was virtually unique, this subsequent fall is also greater than in almost any other country. Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, January 18, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
State of the union Arguably, the real problem for the U.S. is not that it can be torn apart by political violence, but that it has learned to live with it. Fintan O'Toole, The Atlantic, January/February 2022 © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
War In the early 20th century, the ratio of deaths in wars was roughly eight soldiers to every civilian. By the end of the 20th century, this was reversed. One soldier died for every eight civilians. We must reverse the meaning of that horrible American euphemism collateral damage. It is dead and injured soldiers  who are now the collateral damage of war. Civilian casualties are the main event. Fintan O'Toole, March 17, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com