Political Fictions

Political Fictions by Joan Didion is a series of extended essays ranging chronologically from the Dukakis campaign in 1988 to the 2000 Election. As it was released a week after September 11th, 2001, it was immediately forgotten. I rarely see this book in bookstores, and even though Didion is my favorite writer, hadn't read it until now. The central thesis of the book is that during that time the American "political process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American experience." Didion's own politics are mentioned in the foreword, a disillusioned, laissez-faire Goldwater conservatism that switched to the Democratic Party in the wake of Reaganism. If she ran for office and had a constituency, it would be the enormous percentage of Americans that prefer not to vote in elections. 

Political Fictions is great, of course, but it's a product of the times. A lot has changed since 2000. I wonder how she'd write about the Trump Administration. On one hand, President Trump appeals to a hazy sense of spiritual nostalgia, exactly as she describes political language in her essay "God's Country." On the other hand, the nonsensical campaign discourse that she spends a good portion of the book deconstructing is absent in his unorthodox rhetoric. Political Fictions was a good document of its era, and I wish that we still had Didion's laser focus on our own.