Welcome to The New York Times’s international election newsletter, where Sarah Lyall tries to explain the U.S. midterm elections to readers outside the United States (and perhaps to herself). Only a week to go.

It’s been an awful few days, with the slaughter of 11 worshipers by an anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant gunman at a Pennsylvania synagogue, and the efforts, apparently by a deranged Floridian supporter of President Trump, to send pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and Trump critics.

I have been thinking, wistfully, of the time more than half a century ago when, faced with what feels to me to be a similar kind of moral turbulence, Americans finally woke up and said “enough.”

The year was 1954. The longtime anti-Communist obsessions of the Republican senator Joe McCarthy had succeeded in infusing the country with a toxic brew of fear, mistrust and paranoia. But then, in the midst of a televised hearing about whether Communists secretly lurked in Army, as Mr. McCarthy claimed, an Army lawyer named Joseph Welch could not take it any longer.