Our Political Fictions
If only Joan Didion could have written about the debate...
Judging by the news coverage, we should expect a national catastrophe to have taken place on June 27th. In the following days, The New York Times pleaded “God Help Us,” The New Yorker termed it, “A Debate Meltdown,” and even further, “The Reckoning of Joe Biden,” The Atlantic diagnosed “The End of the Biden Era.” The New York Times Editorial Board called for Biden to step down as the Democratic nominee while the Editorial Board of The Washington Post drafted a fantasy 4th of July retirement speech.
The Biden campaign leaned in on the messaging by running an ad that crowed “When you get knocked down, you get back up!” as if the President was the victim of some physical hit instead of a faltering debate performance.
Among the handwringing and hysteria of the mainstream media, as usual not to be outdone by the perpetual histrionics of the right-wing media, I turned to a writer who can always be relied on for a clear-eyed antidote: Joan Didion.
Joan Didion is most famous for her reporting on the counterculture or her grief memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking. In Joan Didion’s extensive canon, her anthologized political reporting, Political Fictions, is a niche work, for true Didion insiders.
I think it is high time that Political Fictions be reevaluated. While dour Washington cannot hold a candle to the lurid appeal of psychedelic Hollywood, Didion’s essays from the Washington period, the middle years of her career, are more controlled and condemning. The collection is scarce in the imagistic prose for which Didion is now famous, but the essays compensate with the spine of her argument.
Like many Didion mega-fans, I came to her young. I was 19 when I read her debut, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and twenty when I read The White Album:
“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
For a certain type of young woman or Brett Easton Ellis, discovering these words is as formative as falling in love. Because most readers discover Didion in this mode there is the temptation to leave her here, forever cool, but even Didion could not resist growing up.
The essays were originally commissioned by Robert Silvers, erstwhile editor of The New York Review of Books. They range from October of 1988 to October of 2000. Didion is not my usual political avatar. She was a proud Republican of the Barry Goldwater variety until her party embraced Ronald Regan as Governor and she promptly changed her registration to Democrat. In the preface to Political Fictions, she admits that had Barry Goldwater’s age and policies remained the same she would have continued to vote for him in every election for which he ran.
I imagine that Didion and I would disagree on several substantive policy issues, but, given that neither Didion nor I are members of the professional political class and, at the risk of stating the obvious, she is no longer among us, I am therefore free to appreciate the considerable wisdom I find otherwise lacking in so many pundits whose positions I nominally agree.
There is with Didion always the pleasure of tagging along with a sharp-tongued friend, knowing you are safe from the rapier of their judgment. In “The West Wing of Oz,” she writes “Since it was the given of the Regan administration that Reagan was at its helm, and since a good deal of the visible evidence suggested otherwise, the man must be a “mystery,” with skills pitched, like a dog whistle beyond our defective ability to hear them.” Refreshingly, her contempt cuts across party lines. She opens her essay on the Clinton impeachment by declaring “No one who ever passed through an American public school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton run for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent.” Persons as diverse in aim Newt Gingrich and Bob Woodward are also the target of her pen’s scalpel.
However, Didion’s true target is the arrogance of a professional political class that she sees as dangerously out of touch with the American people. Anyone who witnessed Thursday’s debate must register her subject as unfortunately timeless.
“Insider Baseball,” my least favorite essay in the collection, follows the campaign of George H.W. Bush to demonstrate how showmanship came to dominate the narratives that shaped the campaign. Her essays on Newt Gingrich and Bob Woodward lack the grand-scale ambition of the collection’s other offerings but perfect the caliber of the hit piece to fine art as she skewers each figure with their own words. Didion’s utmost contempt is reserved for anyone who rests on the laurels of lazy analysis or as she deems Woodward’s oeuvre, “political pornography.”
The most righteously angry essay of the collection is “Clinton Agnostics,” wherein Didion takes the Washington political class to task. In an essay concerned with Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the natural instinct would be to condenm the president. I think most people can agree that in an ideal world, the president of the United States would not cheat on his wife while in office especially not with a 22-year-old intern. And, as Didion notes the majority of the American public believed the President slept with Monica Lewinsky and did not wish to see him removed from office. Data from the Pew Center supports this attitude: during Clinton’s scandal his polling numbers remained steady at around 61 %, sometimes even rising, and the public largely tuned out coverage of the impeachment proceedings.
That the American public could largely separate the performance of the president from his indiscretions outraged political pundits and professional politicians who saw the president’s impunity as a grave moral threat. Didion is especially vicious in her citations here, presenting the reader with a litany of media hysterics because she understands this stuff is more serious than mere comedy. When elected officials are disinterested and dismissive of public opinion they are “disenfranchising America.” The divorce between the people and the politicians they chose to represent them results in a constituency that feels rightly alienated from the dealings in Washington.
Throughout the collection, Didion presents the rise of the “middle-class” voter. In “middle-class,” Didion correctly identifies a dog whistle: “the appeal was… to an entire complex of attitudes held in common by those Americans who sensed themselves isolated and set adrift by the demographic and economic and cultural changes of the last half century.” Sound familiar? Think about the image of the disaffected voter that was refracted by the media after Trump’s victory in 2016. There was across many mainstream media outlets a wide scale mea culpa for neglecting the types of voters both parties have always designed campaigns for.
After the cultural reactionism that propelled Regan to office Democrats and Republicans decided their best course of action was to market themselves to the voting public instead of the American public. Our country makes it uniquely difficult to vote; we persist in holding our elections on a Tuesday and are susceptible to voter suppression efforts. Young people who, theoretically have the most at stake, consistently fail to vote which is often against their larger self-interests. Why is this the case? The easy conclusion to draw is that college-aged voters are uniquely self-involved and wary of the logistics of out-of-state voting. Some of this is true, but what is missed in these caricatures is that young people are rarely given a candidate who speaks to or for them.
For a long time, I harbored the fantasy that when I graduated college I would volunteer for the campaign of some galvanizing politician, a fantasy that no doubt sprung from too many viewings of Gilmore Girls and The West Wing. How different it must have felt to canvass for Barrack Obama, the first Black President and a smart and eloquent man, than for the volunteers now at work on the Biden campaign.
One of the worst tendencies of the press is to draw false equivalencies. Trump and Biden are not the same candidate and do not present similar threats to democracy, the climate, the health of the economy, etc., however, anyone who watched the two geriatric politicians exchange jibes over golf and meander through talking points could not help feeling fatigued. Should he remain the nominee, I am planning to vote for Biden in November, but even as I urge my friends in swing states to do the same I cannot wholly blame them for failing to cast a vote for an arrogant, geriatric with a flexible relationship with the truth. No not Trump. The other one.
Biden’s reaction to the debate, his staunch denial that the polls indicate the race is a toss-up, his insistence only “the Lord Almighty” could stir him to leave to race, and his admission that “I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all, and I did as good a job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,” reveal the narcissism of a political creature for whom the presidential race is an exercise of power remote from the reality of the electorate.
Political Fictions offers a harsh lesson for him. In her final essay, “God’s Country,” Didion follows the campaigns of George Bush and Al Gore as they compete for the religious vote. Writing in October of 2000, Didion predicted Gore’s defeat because he overlooked “the distinct possibility that an entire generation of younger voters might see no point in choosing between two candidates retelling the same remote story could benefit only one campaign, the Republicans.”