Looking Backward, Looking Forward

Abstract

This issue marks the last of our six years as the editorial team of Perspectives on Politics. It has been both a richly rewarding and exhausting journey, as well as a labor of love. As with all journeys, some of what we encountered along the way was foreseeable, but much of it was not. For example, we knew that Donald Trump’s presidency would be consequential and in many ways unprecedented when we assumed the helm in June 2017, but not that he would become the first president to be impeached twice, or the first to attempt to overturn presidential election results and violently prevent the peaceful transfer of power, thereby threatening the republic’s very foundations. We had no idea what COVID-19 was, or that it would go on to kill more than one million people in the United States alone. Nor could we foresee that the murder of George Floyd would spark the greatest wave of protest in the United States since the 1960s. Nor yet again did we know that more than seventy-five years after the end of World War II, there would be a major European land war between two former Soviet Republics. Yet we felt compelled to respond to each of these world historical moments as they unfolded in real time, while also attempting to modernize and innovate with respect to the journal’s publication procedures and to stay true to its substantive mission.