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Political Fictions
In these coolly observant essays, the iconic bestselling writer looks at the American political process and at that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.
Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.
Through the deconstruction of the sound bites and photo ops of three presidential campaigns, one presidential impeachment, and an unforgettable sex scandal, Didion reveals the mechanics of American politics. She tells us the uncomfortable truth about the way we vote, the candidates we vote for, and the people who tell us to vote for them. These pieces build, one on the other, into a disturbing portrait of the American political landscape, providing essential reading on our democracy.
338 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
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4127 people want to read
About the author
Joan Didion
101 books17.1k followersJoan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
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November 26, 2023
PORNOGRAFIA POLITICA
Era il prodotto di un’infanzia trascorsa per lo più in mezzo a repubblicani conservatori in California (prima che il significato di “conservatore” cambiasse) durante il boom economico del dopoguerra. Alle persone con cui sono cresciuta interessavano imposte basse, bilancio in pareggio e governo limitato. Soprattutto credevano che quest’ultimo non dovesse interferire nella vita privata o culturale dei cittadini. Nel 1964, assecondando simili interessi e opinioni, votai convinta per Barry Goldwater. Se Barry Goldwater non fosse invecchiato, e si fosse ricandidato, avrei continuato a votarlo. Invece, scioccata, personalmente offesa, per quanto possa sembrare strano, dall’entusiasmo con il quale i repubblicani californiani avevano scaricato un vero conservatore (Goldwater ) ed erano passati da un giorno all’altro dalla parte di Ronald Reagan, mi iscrissi al Partito democratico, la prima della mia famiglia a farlo (e forse ancora l’unica della mia generazione). Il fatto che un simile gesto non implicasse un cambio di posizione su una serie di questioni fu una vera scoperta, che mi portò a dubitare del “bipartitismo americano”: questa fu la mia vera introduzione alla politica americana.
Dove Barry Goldwater è il candidato repubblicano alla presidenza che nel 1964 fu sconfitto da Lyndon B. Johnson, che era il presidente in carica in quanto da vice nominato numero uno dopo l’assassinio di John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Dove Ronald Reagan, dopo una dignitosa carriera da attore mediocrino, era governatore della California dal 3 gennaio del 1967. E qui è possibile sottolineare l’unica cosa buona che abbia mai realizzato: spingere Joan Didion dal Partito repubblicano a quello democratico.
Dove invece non è così chiaro desumere che il celebrato bipartitismo americano contempla in realtà un terzo partito che è quello più numeroso: il partito della gente che sceglie di non votare, o che non vota senza neppure sceglierlo.
Nel 1988 fu chiesto a Joan Didion se voleva seguire la campagna per le elezioni presidenziali (quelle che opponevano il vicepresidente uscente George W. Bush, repubblicano, al candidato democratico Michael Dukakis, di fierissime origine greche). Joan traccheggiò. Era indecisa. E lo rimase a lungo.
Alla fine seguì la campagna presidenziale, quella e le seguenti. Ma fece uscire i suoi ‘pezzi’ qui raccolti solo nel 2001: Finzioni politiche fu pubblicato una settimana dopo gli attentati dell’11 settembre.
Ci parla di un’America che risale alla fine del secolo scorso: tuttavia, è quanto mai attuale. E non sembra parlare solo del suo paese, ma anticipare quello che va da tempo succedendo anche nel resto del mondo: il crescente disinteresse dei potenziali elettori, il progressivo scollamento e allontanamento del sistema politico dall’elettorato che avrebbe dovuto rappresentare, la distanza sempre in aumento tra cittadini e politici.
Sempre geniale e acuta, sempre divertente e tagliente, sempre attenta a ogni singola parola - qui anche molto attenta e brava nell’analizzare quelle altrui – Joan è meno “presente” in queste pagine di quanto non lo sia in altre sue celebri raccolte “giornalistiche”: penso a The White Album, penso per esempio a Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Quella sua splendida abilità di sapere ‘personalizzare’ qualsiasi argomento, dalla crisi di Cuba a una session dei Doors, qui è pressoché assente: e per un lettore italiano può risultare ostico il notevole numero di nomi, tra politici e giornalisti e opinionisti e testate e programmi tv, che allontanano un po’ dal racconto.
Quello che infastidisce molti lettori, il suo talento nel far ruotare qualsiasi narrazione intorno a se stessa – oppure, il sapere infilare se stessa in qualsiasi argomento di discussione e ricerca – è per me invece un prezioso bene che qui ho trovato in misura nettamente minore.
E mi è mancata, ho sentito assenza viva.
Tanto più viva ora che Joan è morta (23 dicembre 2021).
Era il prodotto di un’infanzia trascorsa per lo più in mezzo a repubblicani conservatori in California (prima che il significato di “conservatore” cambiasse) durante il boom economico del dopoguerra. Alle persone con cui sono cresciuta interessavano imposte basse, bilancio in pareggio e governo limitato. Soprattutto credevano che quest’ultimo non dovesse interferire nella vita privata o culturale dei cittadini. Nel 1964, assecondando simili interessi e opinioni, votai convinta per Barry Goldwater. Se Barry Goldwater non fosse invecchiato, e si fosse ricandidato, avrei continuato a votarlo. Invece, scioccata, personalmente offesa, per quanto possa sembrare strano, dall’entusiasmo con il quale i repubblicani californiani avevano scaricato un vero conservatore (Goldwater ) ed erano passati da un giorno all’altro dalla parte di Ronald Reagan, mi iscrissi al Partito democratico, la prima della mia famiglia a farlo (e forse ancora l’unica della mia generazione). Il fatto che un simile gesto non implicasse un cambio di posizione su una serie di questioni fu una vera scoperta, che mi portò a dubitare del “bipartitismo americano”: questa fu la mia vera introduzione alla politica americana.
Dove Barry Goldwater è il candidato repubblicano alla presidenza che nel 1964 fu sconfitto da Lyndon B. Johnson, che era il presidente in carica in quanto da vice nominato numero uno dopo l’assassinio di John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Dove Ronald Reagan, dopo una dignitosa carriera da attore mediocrino, era governatore della California dal 3 gennaio del 1967. E qui è possibile sottolineare l’unica cosa buona che abbia mai realizzato: spingere Joan Didion dal Partito repubblicano a quello democratico.
Dove invece non è così chiaro desumere che il celebrato bipartitismo americano contempla in realtà un terzo partito che è quello più numeroso: il partito della gente che sceglie di non votare, o che non vota senza neppure sceglierlo.
Nel 1988 fu chiesto a Joan Didion se voleva seguire la campagna per le elezioni presidenziali (quelle che opponevano il vicepresidente uscente George W. Bush, repubblicano, al candidato democratico Michael Dukakis, di fierissime origine greche). Joan traccheggiò. Era indecisa. E lo rimase a lungo.
Alla fine seguì la campagna presidenziale, quella e le seguenti. Ma fece uscire i suoi ‘pezzi’ qui raccolti solo nel 2001: Finzioni politiche fu pubblicato una settimana dopo gli attentati dell’11 settembre.
Ci parla di un’America che risale alla fine del secolo scorso: tuttavia, è quanto mai attuale. E non sembra parlare solo del suo paese, ma anticipare quello che va da tempo succedendo anche nel resto del mondo: il crescente disinteresse dei potenziali elettori, il progressivo scollamento e allontanamento del sistema politico dall’elettorato che avrebbe dovuto rappresentare, la distanza sempre in aumento tra cittadini e politici.
Sempre geniale e acuta, sempre divertente e tagliente, sempre attenta a ogni singola parola - qui anche molto attenta e brava nell’analizzare quelle altrui – Joan è meno “presente” in queste pagine di quanto non lo sia in altre sue celebri raccolte “giornalistiche”: penso a The White Album, penso per esempio a Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Quella sua splendida abilità di sapere ‘personalizzare’ qualsiasi argomento, dalla crisi di Cuba a una session dei Doors, qui è pressoché assente: e per un lettore italiano può risultare ostico il notevole numero di nomi, tra politici e giornalisti e opinionisti e testate e programmi tv, che allontanano un po’ dal racconto.
Quello che infastidisce molti lettori, il suo talento nel far ruotare qualsiasi narrazione intorno a se stessa – oppure, il sapere infilare se stessa in qualsiasi argomento di discussione e ricerca – è per me invece un prezioso bene che qui ho trovato in misura nettamente minore.
E mi è mancata, ho sentito assenza viva.
Tanto più viva ora che Joan è morta (23 dicembre 2021).
January 13, 2016
"This is something one should talk about in another time, in another country."
― Major Jocoaitique to Todd Greentree and Major McKay in Joan Didion's "The West Wing of Oz", Political Fictions.
"History is context"
― Joan Didion
"Joan Didion—and I mean this in the most adoring and complimentary way possible—is a well-known stone cold bitch."
― Madeleine Davies in "Joan Didion's Crème Caramel Must Be Very Hostile", Jezebel, 2/12/15
How could I not forever love Joan Didion? She is a prose goddess who is prepared to burn down every single America's sacred political temples. She takes no prisoners. Reagan is an empty shirt who can hit a mark. George Bush, Sr. Boring. The Clinton campaign? Bottom-feeding, focus-grouped idiots. George W. Bush? A pandering fool for Christ. And I think she actually liked most those politicians as people.
Joan saves her hottest anger for when she is writing about the opinion makers, the political journalist, etc. (I honestly think whenever she switches gears from politicos to the hacks, she puts away the ink and starts to write with blood); and those back-room attorneys plotting Clinton's demise or Clinton's campaign, and the absolute buffoons who try to keep us up-to-date on the horse race of the campaign. That special class of idiots who type the narrative we are supposed to ingest about the moral failings, the moral resurrection, the need for morality in our politicians. She hates them all. It is a delicious thing to watch. The closest emotion I can point to is that feeling I get when I watch Dexter or Hannibal cut up and eat one of their righteous kills. It both disgusts and thrills me.
And yes. Certainly. Didion is part of the game. She is part of the narrative makers she bitches about. However, she is a wiser Buddha, a cooler Jesus, a Moses who can really kick political ass. If I could with ease, hand out to a handful of my favorite writers the secret of eternal life, I would save an early vial for Queen Didion. I can't imagine a written world without her wit, her sideways shivs, her beautiful prose. A political year with out Didion is a political theatre I don't want to watch.
Anyway, this book is made up of eight articles and a forward:
1. Insider Baseball, New York Review of Books, Oct 27, 1988
2. The West Wing of Oz
3. Eyes on the Prize, New York Review of Books, Sep 24, 1992
4. New Gingrich, Superstar
5. Political Pornography
6. Clinton Agonistes, New York Review of Books, Oct 22, 1998
7. Vichy Washington
8. God's Country, New York Review of Books, Nov 2, 2000
Read them. Read them all. We have started a brand new election year and among all the bullshit and political noise, it helps to have a lighthouse, a golden goddess to guide one through the darkness of spin, Luntzcraft and massaged messages to light, truth, and damn good prose.
― Major Jocoaitique to Todd Greentree and Major McKay in Joan Didion's "The West Wing of Oz", Political Fictions.
"History is context"
― Joan Didion
"Joan Didion—and I mean this in the most adoring and complimentary way possible—is a well-known stone cold bitch."
― Madeleine Davies in "Joan Didion's Crème Caramel Must Be Very Hostile", Jezebel, 2/12/15
How could I not forever love Joan Didion? She is a prose goddess who is prepared to burn down every single America's sacred political temples. She takes no prisoners. Reagan is an empty shirt who can hit a mark. George Bush, Sr. Boring. The Clinton campaign? Bottom-feeding, focus-grouped idiots. George W. Bush? A pandering fool for Christ. And I think she actually liked most those politicians as people.
Joan saves her hottest anger for when she is writing about the opinion makers, the political journalist, etc. (I honestly think whenever she switches gears from politicos to the hacks, she puts away the ink and starts to write with blood); and those back-room attorneys plotting Clinton's demise or Clinton's campaign, and the absolute buffoons who try to keep us up-to-date on the horse race of the campaign. That special class of idiots who type the narrative we are supposed to ingest about the moral failings, the moral resurrection, the need for morality in our politicians. She hates them all. It is a delicious thing to watch. The closest emotion I can point to is that feeling I get when I watch Dexter or Hannibal cut up and eat one of their righteous kills. It both disgusts and thrills me.
And yes. Certainly. Didion is part of the game. She is part of the narrative makers she bitches about. However, she is a wiser Buddha, a cooler Jesus, a Moses who can really kick political ass. If I could with ease, hand out to a handful of my favorite writers the secret of eternal life, I would save an early vial for Queen Didion. I can't imagine a written world without her wit, her sideways shivs, her beautiful prose. A political year with out Didion is a political theatre I don't want to watch.
Anyway, this book is made up of eight articles and a forward:
1. Insider Baseball, New York Review of Books, Oct 27, 1988
2. The West Wing of Oz
3. Eyes on the Prize, New York Review of Books, Sep 24, 1992
4. New Gingrich, Superstar
5. Political Pornography
6. Clinton Agonistes, New York Review of Books, Oct 22, 1998
7. Vichy Washington
8. God's Country, New York Review of Books, Nov 2, 2000
Read them. Read them all. We have started a brand new election year and among all the bullshit and political noise, it helps to have a lighthouse, a golden goddess to guide one through the darkness of spin, Luntzcraft and massaged messages to light, truth, and damn good prose.
November 11, 2024
Joan Didion did not suffer fools gladly. These eight essays that cover the American political landscape stretching from the Iran/Contra affair to the Bush/Gore contest of 2000 are suffused with a sophisticated, cold contempt for the artifice, fake pieties, pretensions, and propaganda that define American politics. Her elegantly efficient prose deftly dismantles the veneer created by politicians and their enablers in the press, revealing the venality, self interest, incompetence, and sheer ruthlessness that lays behind that veil.
No one is safe from Didion’s withering contempt. She eviscerates Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives with equal aplomb. For it is the artificiality, the dishonesty of the political system itself that is her target in these pieces. This is perhaps why the political press, that necessary tool for selling the deceptions to the public, receives her harshest treatment. (And though she is herself here writing of politics, she manages to deftly demonstrate the admonishment of Christ when he instructed to be “in the world but not of it.”)
Though these essays are composed of concentrated contempt, they are delivered devoid of anything as crass as a sneer. Ms Didion’s style was far too sophisticated and well bred for anything so plebeian. Instead, she devastated with the literary equivalent of an arched eyebrow or a side eyed look. In most cases she simply allowed her target’s own words to do the work, placing them within a context where their actual intent is clear. It is a thing of beauty to behold; she dismantles an entire system of political pretensions with the ease of a long drag on her cigarette and a cold-eyed stare.
No one is safe from Didion’s withering contempt. She eviscerates Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives with equal aplomb. For it is the artificiality, the dishonesty of the political system itself that is her target in these pieces. This is perhaps why the political press, that necessary tool for selling the deceptions to the public, receives her harshest treatment. (And though she is herself here writing of politics, she manages to deftly demonstrate the admonishment of Christ when he instructed to be “in the world but not of it.”)
Though these essays are composed of concentrated contempt, they are delivered devoid of anything as crass as a sneer. Ms Didion’s style was far too sophisticated and well bred for anything so plebeian. Instead, she devastated with the literary equivalent of an arched eyebrow or a side eyed look. In most cases she simply allowed her target’s own words to do the work, placing them within a context where their actual intent is clear. It is a thing of beauty to behold; she dismantles an entire system of political pretensions with the ease of a long drag on her cigarette and a cold-eyed stare.
April 19, 2025
“Early in 1988, Robert Silvers of ‘The New York Review of Books’ asked me if I would do some pieces or a piece about the presidential campaign just then getting underway in New Hampshire. He would arrange credentials. All I had to do was show up, see what there was to see, and write something. I was flattered (a presidential election was a ‘serious’ story, and no one before had solicited my opinions on one), and yet I kept putting off the only essential moment, which was showing up, giving the thing the required focus.”
And so begins the Forward by Joan Didion for Political Fictions, a collection of essays discussing the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the 1988, 1992 and 2000 presidential elections, the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections, the impeachment of Bill Clinton as well as an analysis of the worlds of Bob Woodward and Michael Isikoff. Political Fictions discusses the evolution of American politics and that of political journalism in the wake of the Reagan presidency and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Although all of the essays were written between 1988 and 2000 and initially published in The New York Review of Books, it is just as cogent today with the sharp eye of Joan Didion shining a light of the political process in America.
“In the understandably general yearning for ‘change’ in the governing of our country, we might pause to reflect on just what is being changed, and by whom, and for whom.”
July 20, 2019
There are eight essays here, excluding Didion's foreword (although that's worth reading as well), spanning the late 80s to the year 2000. A couple- like "Newt Gingrich, Superstar", and "Political Pornography", about the books of Bob Woodward- narrow the focus to a single person or body of work, and a couple- like "Insider Baseball" and "The West Wing of Oz"- draw unexpected but intuitive connections among seemingly disparate subjects, but each one is excellent and worth reading. One of the strengths of the book is that Didion is not a Washington insider, not habituated to political reporting, and furthermore that her general skepticism (or what the NYRB called, slightly less charitably, her "patrician accent") allows her to hear the cliches and "the pieties" that "were repeated to the point where they could be referred to in shorthand"; to identify a system of language, and therefore thought, that refers to nothing outside of itself.
One of the standouts here is "Eyes on the Prize", which offers a perfect illustration, through its outline of the gradual re-shaping of the aims of the Democratic party via Bill Clinton and other members of the Democratic Leadership Council, of one of Simone Weil's points in On the Abolition of All Political Parties, about how the ultimate goal of any party eventually becomes its own growth- the imperative to win at all costs- and that of the two factors, it's really ideology that always proves malleable. Then again, it's hard to make a case for continued futility, either. A Democratic candidate in 1972 campaigned on ending the war in Vietnam. 49 out of 50 states sent back the answer that that's not what this country was.
Another highlight is "Clinton Agonistes", perhaps the clearest of all the essays on a theme that runs throughout the book, which is the hermeticism of the political class in Washington. As Didion puts it, in the world of 24/7 news, a very small group of people decide what the zeitgeist is, and run with it- the rest of us just try to keep up. The rest of us tune in to get informed about what 'people' are thinking and feeling, even though those people are...well, us; or to find out which candidate is the most 'electable', which one I should throw my efforts behind so he/she can beat the other side, except for the fact that the people who should determine which candidate is the most 'electable' are...again, us. By, you know, electing him or her. Didion showcases the absurdity of the outrage generated among the political class by Bill Clinton's behavior- that is to say, an outrage that was made to seem as though it was sweeping the nation, when in fact it wasn't- no matter how obvious it became that the majority of the country just didn't care:
Mr. Clinton's own polls...showed pretty much what everyone else's polls showed: that a majority of the public had believed all along that the president had some kind of involvement with Monica Lewinsky...continued to see it as a private rather than a political matter, believed Kenneth Starr to be the kind of sanctimonious hall monitor with sex on the brain they had avoided in their formative years...and, even as they acknowledged the gravity of lying under oath, did not wish to see the president removed from office.My only warning is that Didion's book will make the news even more difficult to stomach. I happened to finish her book a couple of days ago; that evening, on-air commentators were talking about the latest Trump rally, where the crowd had chanted, about Ilhan Omar, "send her back." "People", the commentators seemed to agree, "even some Republicans", were upset about this. Trump had finally gone "too far", and, setting morality aside, he'd made a costly political error. Well, my memory is not great, but I'm fairly certain that these same people (or those of the same hermetic political-commentator class) told us that Trump had gone "too far" when he said that Mexicans were rapists, when he suggested that McCain was a loser for getting captured in the war that Trump had managed to avoid fighting in, when the "grab-'em-by-the-pussy" audio was released, after Charlottesville- the point is that a person who comments on politics for a living and interacts primarily with people who do the same thing (maybe relying on polling data to try to understand what people are thinking "out there", beyond the Beltway) is probably not going to be able to reconcile the heinousness of a Trump rally with his or her vision of what the country is- but that doesn't mean it's something that ~45% of the country isn't on board with. Personally, I'll bet that Trump didn't lose a single vote this week.
December 5, 2020
I picked this book up because I was told that Joan Didion was part of wave of writers called Literary Journalists, in that they wove a storyline from among the myriad of source quotes and factual event recordings that went on in a typical journalistic piece. What I read was a series of long essays still mired in disparate source quotes, woven into complex, run-on, and fragmented sentences, some that spanned whole paragraphs – certainly not your everyday journalistic writing.
Many of these pieces were written on the eve of a presidential election – so the focus is on the buildup and not the outcome – i.e. Bush Sr. vs. Dukakis, Clinton vs. Dole, Bush Jr. vs Gore et al. There is also an implied belief that the reader understands the issues of the day, which at this point is historical and faded from memory. As these essays were also published in the New York Review of Books, and refer to several books within them – Newt Gingrich’s To Renew America, Bob Woodward’s The Choice and Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion among others – one needs to have read these books to get a deeper appreciation of Didion’s essays – unfortunately, I haven’t read these books.
A theme emerges of the evolution, or a straying away from the core, of American politics between the ‘80’s and the year 2000, the time span during which these essays were written. Beginning with Reagonomics that reduced regulatory barriers and unleashed the “Me, Myself and I” culture, to the fall from grace that this hedonism attained with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, to the resurgence of the religious right under George W. Bush where a return to binding the state to religion (termed Reconstructionism) was advocated, Didion portrays the see-saw swings of political ideology and the manipulation of the electorate by a few college-educated, establishment types (and the partisan press). The photo-op, the undecided voter, the negative attack ad – these election-winning devices reared their heads during this 30-year span to become the monsters they are today.
What I liked best, if I were to confer the title of Literary Journalist upon Didion, was her character portraits of the personalities within this book. Ronald Reagan was the quintessential movie actor, even in his role of president: organized, superficial in relationships, managing his daily schedule like a film script, always looking for the drama in his interactions, even making up stories to deepen character. Bill Clinton always talked about the pain of his childhood, and seized upon hate speeches made by others to show what a clean guy he was. Newt Gingrich was the self-reliant man with outlandish ideas on the how much the individual could achieve – including space travel and a modern Jurassic Park. And Bob Woodward had a problem describing what his books were about. Being often in the coterie of journalists invited to accompany presidential candidates on their campaign trails, Didion had an incredible closeness to the personalities and issues of the time while writing these essays.
I am pretty sure these pieces would have been lapped up during the time they were written, for the author adopts an objective stance, dissecting liberals and conservatives alike. And yet, given the complex writing style, the overreliance on injecting source quotes that break up the narrative flow, and the assumption that the reader is fully versed on the issues being covered, I wondered whether Didion too was writing for the college-educated, establishment types and not for the masses who could have effected real change with their vote.
Many of these pieces were written on the eve of a presidential election – so the focus is on the buildup and not the outcome – i.e. Bush Sr. vs. Dukakis, Clinton vs. Dole, Bush Jr. vs Gore et al. There is also an implied belief that the reader understands the issues of the day, which at this point is historical and faded from memory. As these essays were also published in the New York Review of Books, and refer to several books within them – Newt Gingrich’s To Renew America, Bob Woodward’s The Choice and Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion among others – one needs to have read these books to get a deeper appreciation of Didion’s essays – unfortunately, I haven’t read these books.
A theme emerges of the evolution, or a straying away from the core, of American politics between the ‘80’s and the year 2000, the time span during which these essays were written. Beginning with Reagonomics that reduced regulatory barriers and unleashed the “Me, Myself and I” culture, to the fall from grace that this hedonism attained with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, to the resurgence of the religious right under George W. Bush where a return to binding the state to religion (termed Reconstructionism) was advocated, Didion portrays the see-saw swings of political ideology and the manipulation of the electorate by a few college-educated, establishment types (and the partisan press). The photo-op, the undecided voter, the negative attack ad – these election-winning devices reared their heads during this 30-year span to become the monsters they are today.
What I liked best, if I were to confer the title of Literary Journalist upon Didion, was her character portraits of the personalities within this book. Ronald Reagan was the quintessential movie actor, even in his role of president: organized, superficial in relationships, managing his daily schedule like a film script, always looking for the drama in his interactions, even making up stories to deepen character. Bill Clinton always talked about the pain of his childhood, and seized upon hate speeches made by others to show what a clean guy he was. Newt Gingrich was the self-reliant man with outlandish ideas on the how much the individual could achieve – including space travel and a modern Jurassic Park. And Bob Woodward had a problem describing what his books were about. Being often in the coterie of journalists invited to accompany presidential candidates on their campaign trails, Didion had an incredible closeness to the personalities and issues of the time while writing these essays.
I am pretty sure these pieces would have been lapped up during the time they were written, for the author adopts an objective stance, dissecting liberals and conservatives alike. And yet, given the complex writing style, the overreliance on injecting source quotes that break up the narrative flow, and the assumption that the reader is fully versed on the issues being covered, I wondered whether Didion too was writing for the college-educated, establishment types and not for the masses who could have effected real change with their vote.
June 27, 2025
I agree with another reviewer who said that t his would have been even better with better candidates. I read t his way long ago so my review maybe a bit vague. But I enjoyed i t. I like to read anything and everything political.
I would like to see her come out wit h another book about what is going in right now in America. I just got done watching Trump's impeachment trial. It makes me sad that people..adults..OUR POLITICIANS who serve at our pleasure..act like they are three years old, slinging insult s and making up stories.
So many of our elected leaders are nothing more then sociopaths. She does an excellent job in explaining the political process which has worsened with time and I would like to read her thoughts on the mess that is our political process in 2020.
I would like to see her come out wit h another book about what is going in right now in America. I just got done watching Trump's impeachment trial. It makes me sad that people..adults..OUR POLITICIANS who serve at our pleasure..act like they are three years old, slinging insult s and making up stories.
So many of our elected leaders are nothing more then sociopaths. She does an excellent job in explaining the political process which has worsened with time and I would like to read her thoughts on the mess that is our political process in 2020.
February 25, 2021
Joan Didion's, "Political Fictions," Is a collection of about ten essays that primarily deal with how presidential campaigns are so staged that almost everything you see a candidate say or do, right down to how many steps it takes a candidate to walk from the Oval Office to greet a group of reporters is choreographed. It more or less covers the period from 1981 to 2000, with a heavy emphasis on 1988 to 2000. There are roughly ten essays, the reason I can't give a correct figure is because so many of the essays have what you would call separate chapters.
Out of the ten essays, there are five that are nothing short of outstanding, insightful, and riveting... So much so that the other five are somewhat of a disappointment.
The one about President Ronald Reagan and his years in the White House is fascinating and funny. Mr. Reagan, in a sense, went from a motion picture actor and TV star, to literally playing the part of the President of the United States. In the evening he would receive a schedule of the things he had to do the next day, and as he went down the list he crossed out each one he had just finished, and when everything on the list was completed that was more or less the end of his work day. He performed the duties of the President no different than if he was following a script for a movie and what was expected of him that day... What shots he would be in, exchange of dialogue, following the directions of the camera person and director.
In contrast to the one on Reagan, the one on the Central American debacle was nothing short of a moral and humanitarian disgrace. The Reagan administration at the time was trying to get more money from the Congress to support the army and government in El Salvador which was under attack from leftist communists. What would become known as "The Massacre of El Mazote," where the Salvadoran army went into a Peasant village and killed between 750 and 900 innocent civilians, more than half women and children and babies, many burned to death and buried beneath a church. The optics and coverage of such a massacre would have killed any aid to the Salvadoran government. The administration, along with advisors from the American embassy, never verified
The massacre, and reporters could not get close to the scene, so it wasn't until six years later the true story came out, not the one put out at the time, that if it did happen it was the communists dressed in army outfits that committed the murders.
It was essays like the two above, and three others that make this book of essays so worth the read. The other five are good, but not nearly as compelling and somewhat convoluted.
Out of the ten essays, there are five that are nothing short of outstanding, insightful, and riveting... So much so that the other five are somewhat of a disappointment.
The one about President Ronald Reagan and his years in the White House is fascinating and funny. Mr. Reagan, in a sense, went from a motion picture actor and TV star, to literally playing the part of the President of the United States. In the evening he would receive a schedule of the things he had to do the next day, and as he went down the list he crossed out each one he had just finished, and when everything on the list was completed that was more or less the end of his work day. He performed the duties of the President no different than if he was following a script for a movie and what was expected of him that day... What shots he would be in, exchange of dialogue, following the directions of the camera person and director.
In contrast to the one on Reagan, the one on the Central American debacle was nothing short of a moral and humanitarian disgrace. The Reagan administration at the time was trying to get more money from the Congress to support the army and government in El Salvador which was under attack from leftist communists. What would become known as "The Massacre of El Mazote," where the Salvadoran army went into a Peasant village and killed between 750 and 900 innocent civilians, more than half women and children and babies, many burned to death and buried beneath a church. The optics and coverage of such a massacre would have killed any aid to the Salvadoran government. The administration, along with advisors from the American embassy, never verified
The massacre, and reporters could not get close to the scene, so it wasn't until six years later the true story came out, not the one put out at the time, that if it did happen it was the communists dressed in army outfits that committed the murders.
It was essays like the two above, and three others that make this book of essays so worth the read. The other five are good, but not nearly as compelling and somewhat convoluted.
August 3, 2018
Another gem in the crown of Joan Didion’s collection of non-fiction writing. In “Political Fictions” she explores the nature of our political system in the United States and the manner in which we all buy into the story. It is my understanding that the book was released in 2000 and what struck me was just how prophetic most of her ideas were, especially in the wake of the recent 2008 election.
Various thoughts and notes I made on the book are as follows:
• A 1995 essay about Newt Gingrich concludes that “personal popularity among large numbers of voters may continue to elude him.” While it is difficult to argue with Mr. Gingrich’s intellect, I think time has revealed that his style has not played everywhere.
• Donna Brazille is, in my humble opinion, a poor campaign strategist, as evidenced not only in her handling of the Gore campaign, but also the comments attributed to her here as part of the Dukakis campaign in 1988, of which I was not aware that she was a part of – yet her opinion is still solicited today. Odd.
• The essay about Jesse Jackson and the spirit of inclusiveness of his campaign and how its message of hope, really foreshadowed some of the greater themes of the successful Obama campaign.
• In my humble opinion, Bill Clinton was a rather slimy and divisive campaigner.
• The essay about President George H.W. Bush and the need for camels really presaged the importance of stagecraft in politics. Reagan was the master at stagecraft and Obama uses it to tremendous effect, as well.
• One of the first ideas I got from reading the book was the importance of branding in politics and how branding and marketing has assumed even more importance since these essays were crafted.
• The initial essay about the Clinton/Lewinsky affair and the public’s apathy towards it was simply remarkable. Didion hits at Kenneth Starr and his Ahab-like pursuit of the white whale. She talks about the unreliable first-person narrator aspect of the Starr Report and she just hits a perfect pitch.
• Didion hints at the notion that the Clinton impeachment was certainly clearly political. The Republicans focus on the strict rule of law was not so essential during the Ollie North version of the Iran-Contra Affair.
• Clearly the coziness of Republicans in the name-that-Clinton-scandal was an issue. Although the vast right wing conspiracy argument made by Hillary Clinton was a bridge too far, there sure were lots of Republican elves like Ann Coulter working their magic - all a bit too close to the Office of Independent Counsel.
• The pundit class in Washington did not then, and does not now, understand the rest of America.
• How very damaging Joe Lieberman was to the Gore campaign. Polls showed that 68% of voters in February 1999 did not want the impeachment issue brought up in the campaign with only 1/3 concerned about the effect of Clinton’s actions on the country. Lieberman brought back all of those ghosts because his resume at that time consisted almost solely of chastising the President.
Various thoughts and notes I made on the book are as follows:
• A 1995 essay about Newt Gingrich concludes that “personal popularity among large numbers of voters may continue to elude him.” While it is difficult to argue with Mr. Gingrich’s intellect, I think time has revealed that his style has not played everywhere.
• Donna Brazille is, in my humble opinion, a poor campaign strategist, as evidenced not only in her handling of the Gore campaign, but also the comments attributed to her here as part of the Dukakis campaign in 1988, of which I was not aware that she was a part of – yet her opinion is still solicited today. Odd.
• The essay about Jesse Jackson and the spirit of inclusiveness of his campaign and how its message of hope, really foreshadowed some of the greater themes of the successful Obama campaign.
• In my humble opinion, Bill Clinton was a rather slimy and divisive campaigner.
• The essay about President George H.W. Bush and the need for camels really presaged the importance of stagecraft in politics. Reagan was the master at stagecraft and Obama uses it to tremendous effect, as well.
• One of the first ideas I got from reading the book was the importance of branding in politics and how branding and marketing has assumed even more importance since these essays were crafted.
• The initial essay about the Clinton/Lewinsky affair and the public’s apathy towards it was simply remarkable. Didion hits at Kenneth Starr and his Ahab-like pursuit of the white whale. She talks about the unreliable first-person narrator aspect of the Starr Report and she just hits a perfect pitch.
• Didion hints at the notion that the Clinton impeachment was certainly clearly political. The Republicans focus on the strict rule of law was not so essential during the Ollie North version of the Iran-Contra Affair.
• Clearly the coziness of Republicans in the name-that-Clinton-scandal was an issue. Although the vast right wing conspiracy argument made by Hillary Clinton was a bridge too far, there sure were lots of Republican elves like Ann Coulter working their magic - all a bit too close to the Office of Independent Counsel.
• The pundit class in Washington did not then, and does not now, understand the rest of America.
• How very damaging Joe Lieberman was to the Gore campaign. Polls showed that 68% of voters in February 1999 did not want the impeachment issue brought up in the campaign with only 1/3 concerned about the effect of Clinton’s actions on the country. Lieberman brought back all of those ghosts because his resume at that time consisted almost solely of chastising the President.
November 25, 2024
*3.5 rounded up
“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 𝘙𝘦𝘱𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘺𝘦𝘵 𝘯𝘦𝘶𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘤𝘺 𝘪𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘴𝘰 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘶𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘸.”
- The last line of the book, which Didion wrote in 2000 in an essay titled 𝘎𝘰𝘥’𝘴 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺
Sadly though, this new generation is so cooked that it doesn’t have the literary skills to stay competent in a turning country. Disappointment streaks these last days of 2024, and I’m glad I made the decision to leave the country that I wanted to call home for so long that it seems so foreign to me. It seems so foreign because ugliness has, once again, reigned truth of character.
Though mostly dry, a majority of the rub lies in points made on Reagan and Clinton and their character versus their overall person when it comes to campaigning, not until Clinton ruined that by misplacing morality with his scandal.
When it comes right down to it, I don’t think the public is ready to admit that polices are actually what make the country when they spend so much time trivializing on character. On social media. On making appearances. All of this matters. It matters because it is public. It matters because 90% of success is showing up. But when you realize it’s all grand show and big talk with very little work towards a good place for good people, the US has decided that history must repeat itself to show it’s an old dog that knows no new tricks.
Didion predicted the divide. She saw it since Dukakis. She detailed everything out for us, only to be doomed in the end.
*so glad I saved this now for a better understanding of a country I want so much to love, but have left it [for good].
“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 𝘙𝘦𝘱𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘺𝘦𝘵 𝘯𝘦𝘶𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘤𝘺 𝘪𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘴𝘰 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘶𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘷𝘰𝘸.”
- The last line of the book, which Didion wrote in 2000 in an essay titled 𝘎𝘰𝘥’𝘴 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺
Sadly though, this new generation is so cooked that it doesn’t have the literary skills to stay competent in a turning country. Disappointment streaks these last days of 2024, and I’m glad I made the decision to leave the country that I wanted to call home for so long that it seems so foreign to me. It seems so foreign because ugliness has, once again, reigned truth of character.
Though mostly dry, a majority of the rub lies in points made on Reagan and Clinton and their character versus their overall person when it comes to campaigning, not until Clinton ruined that by misplacing morality with his scandal.
When it comes right down to it, I don’t think the public is ready to admit that polices are actually what make the country when they spend so much time trivializing on character. On social media. On making appearances. All of this matters. It matters because it is public. It matters because 90% of success is showing up. But when you realize it’s all grand show and big talk with very little work towards a good place for good people, the US has decided that history must repeat itself to show it’s an old dog that knows no new tricks.
Didion predicted the divide. She saw it since Dukakis. She detailed everything out for us, only to be doomed in the end.
*so glad I saved this now for a better understanding of a country I want so much to love, but have left it [for good].
December 28, 2021
4.5*
Superb book of essays on US presidential politics (1985-2000) and the way the work of politicians, political consultants and operatives and the media within the political process is divorced from the "real" issues of the day.
True, as far as it goes, but their jobs are not to diagnose and cure the country's ills but to win elections, win consulting assignments and flourish in their writing careers. Examined in the same way as JD does, would any other profession (as a whole) look different?
But excellent observations and exposure of the distortions in the political processes and the untruths we put up with. I would have loved to read her take on the Trump Presidency, but apparently she refused to write about him. The pickings were too easy I guess.
Superb book of essays on US presidential politics (1985-2000) and the way the work of politicians, political consultants and operatives and the media within the political process is divorced from the "real" issues of the day.
True, as far as it goes, but their jobs are not to diagnose and cure the country's ills but to win elections, win consulting assignments and flourish in their writing careers. Examined in the same way as JD does, would any other profession (as a whole) look different?
But excellent observations and exposure of the distortions in the political processes and the untruths we put up with. I would have loved to read her take on the Trump Presidency, but apparently she refused to write about him. The pickings were too easy I guess.
January 12, 2017
I experienced a large range of low emotions in the wake of the 2016 presidential election: disbelief, shock, anger, indignation, confusion, revulsion, despair, depression, anxiety. I chose this book, in part, because I wanted to settle back in to Didion’s exacting language after enjoying two of her books so much, and because I was seeking some political and historical perspective.
The connecting theme of this collection is the creation of narrative - the media appearances, showmanship and public relations efforts that create the image and stories we the people then digest about the politicians for whom we vote and in whom we place our trust, such as it is. There are two essays that qualify as brilliant and one real dud (about Newt Gingrich). The best essays in this collection come first, and my favorite, “Insider Baseball” (about the 1988 Bush-Dukakis campaign), provided some of the historical perspective I had been seeking. (The comparisons between Dukakis and Jackson are especially interesting when viewed through the 2016 lens of Clinton and Sanders.)
The key new idea I took from this book is simple, but I hadn’t really articulated it for myself before - that the increasing disenfranchisement of the American citizen - the shrinking electorate (only an estimated 57.9% of eligible voters voted in 2016) - is not actually a “problem” for those in power, that small insider political class. It is, in fact, the desired outcome. It is to the advantage of this political class, and this disenfranchisement has been going on for many cycles, the political system operating almost completely outside of the experience and concerns of so-called regular people.
Of this political class, Didion writes: "These are people who speak of the process as an end in itself, connected only nominally, and vestigially, to the electorate and its possible concerns."
Of the Dukakis campaign, Didion writes: "What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the actual life of the country."
It is at once comforting and cruelly disheartening to reflect on the notion that “things” (the political process, the media, the machinery of American government) are not really getting “worse” - they may have always been a tangled web of lies. Media cycles move faster now, and I grow older and, I hope, less naive, but even the most cynical and analytical of us may still “buy in” to “the story” sometimes, to our peril.
Here is “Insider Baseball” in the NY Review of Books, available to read for free:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/...
The connecting theme of this collection is the creation of narrative - the media appearances, showmanship and public relations efforts that create the image and stories we the people then digest about the politicians for whom we vote and in whom we place our trust, such as it is. There are two essays that qualify as brilliant and one real dud (about Newt Gingrich). The best essays in this collection come first, and my favorite, “Insider Baseball” (about the 1988 Bush-Dukakis campaign), provided some of the historical perspective I had been seeking. (The comparisons between Dukakis and Jackson are especially interesting when viewed through the 2016 lens of Clinton and Sanders.)
The key new idea I took from this book is simple, but I hadn’t really articulated it for myself before - that the increasing disenfranchisement of the American citizen - the shrinking electorate (only an estimated 57.9% of eligible voters voted in 2016) - is not actually a “problem” for those in power, that small insider political class. It is, in fact, the desired outcome. It is to the advantage of this political class, and this disenfranchisement has been going on for many cycles, the political system operating almost completely outside of the experience and concerns of so-called regular people.
Of this political class, Didion writes: "These are people who speak of the process as an end in itself, connected only nominally, and vestigially, to the electorate and its possible concerns."
Of the Dukakis campaign, Didion writes: "What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the actual life of the country."
It is at once comforting and cruelly disheartening to reflect on the notion that “things” (the political process, the media, the machinery of American government) are not really getting “worse” - they may have always been a tangled web of lies. Media cycles move faster now, and I grow older and, I hope, less naive, but even the most cynical and analytical of us may still “buy in” to “the story” sometimes, to our peril.
Here is “Insider Baseball” in the NY Review of Books, available to read for free:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1988/...
June 6, 2019
The essays in Joan Didion's Political Fiction cover American politics from the mid-1980s to the 2000 "election" of George Bush. They rest on a premise Didion validates over and over again: the stagecraft of national leadership in the United States is individual ambition in search of popular wherewithal, and when no wherewithal is to be found, it is readily enough created and then sold to an increasingly alienated, largely nonvoting public as "true" by a collaborationist press.
U.S. political leaders, Didion shows, really don't want to have to deal with voters; they want to perform for each other and through media magic trick voters into believing what they say and do is in the national interest. There isn't, in Didion's view, that much difference between Republicans and Democrats at the highest levels except who is in power at a given moment. And both parties do their best to be the party in power by concocting political fables du jour that bewilder, belittle, and turn off the voting public. It's safe to cry, "Fire!", in the theater of American politics because there's almost no one in that theater anymore--the noise you hear is a canned soundtrack, a cacophony of special interests substantially unrelated to anything resembling your interests or mine.
Didion's descriptions of Bill Clinton, Robert Dole, Newt Gingrich, and Bob Woodward are masterpieces of skewering still living flesh and then roasting it thoroughly. She presents Clinton and Gingrich as a pair of fraternal twins, which they were: two boys bounced around in weakly-fathered circumstances and determined through narcissistic resentment and odd brilliance (yes, they're smart, in a way) to be elected president of the senior class, the president of the United States, or Speaker of the House. The main theme in the Clinton portrait is self-pity, lots of it, the kid who is always on the comeback trail. The main theme in the Gingrich portrait is wacky intellectual self-delusion. But both guys were salesmen, and boy, did they sell whatever they thought the public would buy.
As Bob Dole put it, he might start out saying one thing in a campaign, find that it didn't work, and end up saying something else. So what? That was politics. And with a bizarrely uncritical press led by a figure like Bob Woodward, the minstrel of method, not substance, Dole could say something like that and more or less (he lost the presidency to Clinton, after all) get away with it.
Didion's analysis of how a group of sanctimonious "evangelical" fundamentalists, led in one battle by Ken Starr, is an excellent study of how even a failed impeachment/removal effort targeting Bill Clinton still shifted the national fantasy agenda away from security and prosperity to "values," i.e., the Ten Commandments, the obligatory declaration by highest level aspirants that they were the followers of Christ Jesus our lord and savior. This led George W. Bush to espouse the nutty theology of a decidedly lesser saint propounding compassionate conservatism and faith-based organizations. And it led Al Gore to choose as his running mate the perpetually sincere, God-fearing Joe Lieberman (whose natural successor, of course, is the oddity known as Mike Pence.)
Were Americans really that revolted by Bill Cinton's hijinks with Monica Lewinsky? Didion offers poll after poll indicating that they really weren't--that in fact a high percentage of Americans found themselves to be divorced Americans because they indulged in the same kind of private satisfactions.
But polls themselves, Didion shows, are artful fictions designed by the political class to serve the political class's interests, and they seldom get at what average Americans want from political leaders.
Over the last two decades, politics in America have just gotten worse. The ways in which the Reagan administration lied about what it was up to in Central America were fairly high-grade nutrition in comparison to the zero calorie lies machine-gunned our way on an almost hourly basis by the Trump administration.
Trump himself validates Didion's thesis: lying doesn't matter in politics. Empty phrases like "Make America Great Again" or "I'm going to build a wall" matter, at least for the time being. To say that this is bad for the republic is to understate the case. The last forty years of political class leadership have been ever darker experiences. The white lies have turned into black lies, bald lies, insulting lies, boorish lies but apparently that's okay. Income inequality isn't a problem, guns aren't a problem, climate change isn't a problem...and if you think otherwise, why, let's simply declare we're going to have Medicare for all, college is going to be free, and all the polluting corporations in the U.S. are going to clean up their act. That's the kind of gobbledygook that Didion documented in her lifetime and we are living through in ours.
U.S. political leaders, Didion shows, really don't want to have to deal with voters; they want to perform for each other and through media magic trick voters into believing what they say and do is in the national interest. There isn't, in Didion's view, that much difference between Republicans and Democrats at the highest levels except who is in power at a given moment. And both parties do their best to be the party in power by concocting political fables du jour that bewilder, belittle, and turn off the voting public. It's safe to cry, "Fire!", in the theater of American politics because there's almost no one in that theater anymore--the noise you hear is a canned soundtrack, a cacophony of special interests substantially unrelated to anything resembling your interests or mine.
Didion's descriptions of Bill Clinton, Robert Dole, Newt Gingrich, and Bob Woodward are masterpieces of skewering still living flesh and then roasting it thoroughly. She presents Clinton and Gingrich as a pair of fraternal twins, which they were: two boys bounced around in weakly-fathered circumstances and determined through narcissistic resentment and odd brilliance (yes, they're smart, in a way) to be elected president of the senior class, the president of the United States, or Speaker of the House. The main theme in the Clinton portrait is self-pity, lots of it, the kid who is always on the comeback trail. The main theme in the Gingrich portrait is wacky intellectual self-delusion. But both guys were salesmen, and boy, did they sell whatever they thought the public would buy.
As Bob Dole put it, he might start out saying one thing in a campaign, find that it didn't work, and end up saying something else. So what? That was politics. And with a bizarrely uncritical press led by a figure like Bob Woodward, the minstrel of method, not substance, Dole could say something like that and more or less (he lost the presidency to Clinton, after all) get away with it.
Didion's analysis of how a group of sanctimonious "evangelical" fundamentalists, led in one battle by Ken Starr, is an excellent study of how even a failed impeachment/removal effort targeting Bill Clinton still shifted the national fantasy agenda away from security and prosperity to "values," i.e., the Ten Commandments, the obligatory declaration by highest level aspirants that they were the followers of Christ Jesus our lord and savior. This led George W. Bush to espouse the nutty theology of a decidedly lesser saint propounding compassionate conservatism and faith-based organizations. And it led Al Gore to choose as his running mate the perpetually sincere, God-fearing Joe Lieberman (whose natural successor, of course, is the oddity known as Mike Pence.)
Were Americans really that revolted by Bill Cinton's hijinks with Monica Lewinsky? Didion offers poll after poll indicating that they really weren't--that in fact a high percentage of Americans found themselves to be divorced Americans because they indulged in the same kind of private satisfactions.
But polls themselves, Didion shows, are artful fictions designed by the political class to serve the political class's interests, and they seldom get at what average Americans want from political leaders.
Over the last two decades, politics in America have just gotten worse. The ways in which the Reagan administration lied about what it was up to in Central America were fairly high-grade nutrition in comparison to the zero calorie lies machine-gunned our way on an almost hourly basis by the Trump administration.
Trump himself validates Didion's thesis: lying doesn't matter in politics. Empty phrases like "Make America Great Again" or "I'm going to build a wall" matter, at least for the time being. To say that this is bad for the republic is to understate the case. The last forty years of political class leadership have been ever darker experiences. The white lies have turned into black lies, bald lies, insulting lies, boorish lies but apparently that's okay. Income inequality isn't a problem, guns aren't a problem, climate change isn't a problem...and if you think otherwise, why, let's simply declare we're going to have Medicare for all, college is going to be free, and all the polluting corporations in the U.S. are going to clean up their act. That's the kind of gobbledygook that Didion documented in her lifetime and we are living through in ours.
December 8, 2022
Torn on this one. Didion is hilarious, and tears into Reagan, Gingrich, Clinton, and the DC media apparatus with equal gusto. Some great extended meditations on the nature of political scandal. Marred by a sneering contempt for the religious right that seems akin to the self-satisfaction she skewers elsewhere. Does Marvin Olasky have “a view of women not far from that of the Taliban”? Didion says yes.
July 1, 2024
Oh Joan! I wish you had written about the debate.
July 22, 2023
Although she voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and repeatedly stated that she would have voted for him again had he run, Joan Didion in Political Fictions wrote a series of even-handed essays about the race for the White House in the two decades between Ronald Reagan and George W Bush.
No one comes across particularly well, though she does a great job of lambasting the Reagan White House and the Evangelical/Conservative political alliance in the years following.
I would have rated the book higher except that I am mortally sick of the political divisions in our country (which led me to belong to neither party) and the mischief that has caused since 1980.
No one comes across particularly well, though she does a great job of lambasting the Reagan White House and the Evangelical/Conservative political alliance in the years following.
I would have rated the book higher except that I am mortally sick of the political divisions in our country (which led me to belong to neither party) and the mischief that has caused since 1980.
November 1, 2018
Didion is now being sniped at by the new, identitarian left as too snobbish. Well, she is. She is a conservative too, in the old, old sense of that word. But by gum, she is observant; she knows the linguistic rules of order; and she can generate a mystic sense of oracular terror out of a copyright note. She may loom the largest, both poetically and prophetically, of the mid century giants. (The last quarter here, a series of book reviews that snipe at Newt Gingrich, is dullish.)
July 1, 2023
Somewhere between 3.5 and 4 stars. Not the most captivating Didion read, but overall enjoyed the critical look at the political landscape, a cohesive story told through the lens of multiple presidential terms / campaigns. The strength of it comes from her outsider perspective - not the typical political journalism / commentary.
July 15, 2024
ok… yes this did take me an entire year to read BUT i’m so glad it did because everything Joan Didion wrote is still (unfortunately) super relevant. Reading this during the shitshow that is the current american electoral campaign was a gift and some much needed sense!!!!!!!! Last essay was the PERFECT explanation of american neoconservativm and how christian nationalism continues to dictate the republican party’s political optics. anyway blah blah this was super good go read !!!!!!!!!!!!
February 1, 2025
Omnipotent Joan Didion. A lot of the references and nods to political icons were lost on me due to the decades of politics she’s referencing, but the lessons and commentary from this remain eerily relevant, especially amidst the administration turnover. Evangelicals ruining America & the Democrats inability to ever take a stance on the correct issue in order to capture a lead :(
August 31, 2022
Joan Didion drags prominent Democrats and Republicans from the '80s to early 2000's. It's fun, engaging, and offers an outsider's perspective on the American political process that is rarely granted the level of access she's allowed. The resulting anecdotes highlight idiosyncrasies that are often taken for granted by the political class. Would recommend!
May 5, 2022
God I cannot express strongly enough how happy I am to be done with this book, which sucks because I was so excited when I bought it.
This is probably the best part of the book and it’s literally the opening to the first chapter, Didion excels when she writes like this, but unfortunately this kind of writing does not return in this book.
For someone who was so preoccupied with being perceived as serious, and for a writer with a reputation for being very cleverly funny when writing about political/social issues, the ridiculous movie Bullworth (1998) is funnier and more serious than these 338 pages of filler content. Her theses were often incoherent, her politics annoyingly pessimistic, and her writing style inappropriately blasé. Her usually clinically precise cynicism, in the first couple essays comes off as nothing more than typical of the boomer generation — adding nothing original to the discourse and reminding me that I’d read about the same events from much more serious sources. Only Eyes on the Prize really stands out as a “good” essay start to finish — finally an essay that felt important, timeless. Newt Gingrich Superstar also had me laughing out loud as I was reading it on the train.
Clinton Agonistes and Vichy Washington threw me for a loop as they were so disgusting that I think I lost a little respect for Joan. It’s funny because in the latter essay she completely loses her cool (figuratively but also like her “cool” voice that she usually writes with) as she frantically defends Clinton, so much so that I found it a bit embarrassing to compromise integrity/quality for something like that… She’s redeemed only slightly by the fact that she grew up in a different era and the principle of these essays is strong despite Clinton’s sexual history being the hill she’s choosing to die on for said principles.
I guess, it just seems obvious when she’s invested in what she’s writing about and I believe she’s expressed that she didn’t really like writing about politics, so sometimes that shows. I’m glad that this kind of writing of hers is out there because it’s an indicator that a celebrity I like has generally ok politics, but otherwise a waste of my time apart from a couple specific essays or ingenious one-liners.
2.5/5 stars
“It occurred to me, in California in June and in Atlanta in July and in New Orleans in August, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations. They had not run for student body office. They had not gone on to Yale or Swarthmore or DePauw, nor had they even applied. They had gotten drafted, gone through basic at Fort Ord. They had knocked up girls, and married them, had begun what they called the first night of the rest of their lives with a midnight drive to Carson City and a five-dollar ceremony performed by a justice still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles. They paid their bills or did not pay their bills, made down payments on tract houses, led lives on that social and economic edge referred to, in Washington and among those whose preferred locus is Washington, as "out there." They were never destined to be, in other words, communicants in what we have come to call, when we want to indicate the traditional ways in which power is exchanged and the status quo maintained in the United States, "the process."
This is probably the best part of the book and it’s literally the opening to the first chapter, Didion excels when she writes like this, but unfortunately this kind of writing does not return in this book.
For someone who was so preoccupied with being perceived as serious, and for a writer with a reputation for being very cleverly funny when writing about political/social issues, the ridiculous movie Bullworth (1998) is funnier and more serious than these 338 pages of filler content. Her theses were often incoherent, her politics annoyingly pessimistic, and her writing style inappropriately blasé. Her usually clinically precise cynicism, in the first couple essays comes off as nothing more than typical of the boomer generation — adding nothing original to the discourse and reminding me that I’d read about the same events from much more serious sources. Only Eyes on the Prize really stands out as a “good” essay start to finish — finally an essay that felt important, timeless. Newt Gingrich Superstar also had me laughing out loud as I was reading it on the train.
Clinton Agonistes and Vichy Washington threw me for a loop as they were so disgusting that I think I lost a little respect for Joan. It’s funny because in the latter essay she completely loses her cool (figuratively but also like her “cool” voice that she usually writes with) as she frantically defends Clinton, so much so that I found it a bit embarrassing to compromise integrity/quality for something like that… She’s redeemed only slightly by the fact that she grew up in a different era and the principle of these essays is strong despite Clinton’s sexual history being the hill she’s choosing to die on for said principles.
I guess, it just seems obvious when she’s invested in what she’s writing about and I believe she’s expressed that she didn’t really like writing about politics, so sometimes that shows. I’m glad that this kind of writing of hers is out there because it’s an indicator that a celebrity I like has generally ok politics, but otherwise a waste of my time apart from a couple specific essays or ingenious one-liners.
2.5/5 stars
July 16, 2013
Kind of an "After-After Henry," unfortunately plunked down right around 9/11 and therefore pretty much instantly irrelevant to Topic A. This book collects Didion's long-form, analytical essays (some of which were very long book reviews in the NYRB) through the Clinton years. On the one hand, "Political Fictions" is lacking another half-dozen or so essays that would round it out -- the margins are narrow and the type is leded-out, reflecting a paucity of material to choose from; she just wasn't writing as much by then (and perhaps got too bogged down in her 1996 novel "The Last Thing He Wanted"). On the other hand, the "Foreward" at the beginning is a brilliant essay in which she describes how she was all but forced into reporting on the 1988 presidential campaign and how that bizarre experience (the tale of getting aboard the Jesse Jackson campaign plane is worth the price of the whole book) pushed her work in a far more serious exploration of American politics.
My best memory of this book is meeting her, just another hardcore fan at her Politics & Prose reading and signing in the fall of 2001. Everything they say about her (and what she says about herself) is true: She's not a great speaker, not great at answering questions about her work in any satisfying way; she seems terrified of the attention and fragile as a baby bird. She once wrote that writers leave their game at the keyboard; in person, they can be a real letdown. I wasn't at all let down; I was impressed that she nailed herself as well as she nails others.
My best memory of this book is meeting her, just another hardcore fan at her Politics & Prose reading and signing in the fall of 2001. Everything they say about her (and what she says about herself) is true: She's not a great speaker, not great at answering questions about her work in any satisfying way; she seems terrified of the attention and fragile as a baby bird. She once wrote that writers leave their game at the keyboard; in person, they can be a real letdown. I wasn't at all let down; I was impressed that she nailed herself as well as she nails others.
June 20, 2007
I would have a hard time articulating why I can't stand Joan Didion even if her husband and daughter hadn't just died; these days, complaining about the woman feels like torching an infirmary. But Political Fictions struck me as just unbelievably arch when I read it. When it comes to Democrats, she definitely has a bad case of Monday Morning Quarterback combined with New Convert Syndrome, so she wants ideological purity to lead them immer weiter to victory and gets bitterly mad when it doesn't.
February 19, 2018
I've never read Joan Didion before and I enjoyed the hell out of this book. Her analysis is so smart - with apparently very little effort she provides some Chomsky-level critiques of the American political system. A joy to read.
The best parts are when Didion chooses a target like Dinesh D'Souza or Bob Woodward and ruthlessly deconstructs their work. The way she disassembles, piece by piece, D'Souza's self-serving Reagan hagiography brings a smile to my face. The way she plucks apart all the conventional wisdom surrounding Bob Woodward's entire post-Watergate career, oh dude, you just have to read it for yourself. It is excellent. Didion also puts the entire political media under the microscope and exposes their hapless lack of self-awareness to great effect.
I don't believe Joan Didion spent much of her career writing this kind of material but this book was very, very good. I read a lot of political analysis and it is rarely this penetrating or insightful.
The best parts are when Didion chooses a target like Dinesh D'Souza or Bob Woodward and ruthlessly deconstructs their work. The way she disassembles, piece by piece, D'Souza's self-serving Reagan hagiography brings a smile to my face. The way she plucks apart all the conventional wisdom surrounding Bob Woodward's entire post-Watergate career, oh dude, you just have to read it for yourself. It is excellent. Didion also puts the entire political media under the microscope and exposes their hapless lack of self-awareness to great effect.
I don't believe Joan Didion spent much of her career writing this kind of material but this book was very, very good. I read a lot of political analysis and it is rarely this penetrating or insightful.
September 19, 2023
(3.75)
whatever you do, DO NOT make an enemy of Joan Didion.
had i read these essays at the time of publication, i’m sure i’d rate this differently. that being said, i still found myself amazed by how she cuts to the root of the issue and disappointed by how little the discourse has actually changed in our political cycles.
whatever you do, DO NOT make an enemy of Joan Didion.
had i read these essays at the time of publication, i’m sure i’d rate this differently. that being said, i still found myself amazed by how she cuts to the root of the issue and disappointed by how little the discourse has actually changed in our political cycles.
July 11, 2025
kind of meh to me. didion is not always my cup of tea but the cynical style translates relatively well to politics, just the content feels so dated and doesn’t really stand up to the modern political environment
November 8, 2023
Mother has done it again. “Insider Baseball” is I think one of her best essays ever and I do think any young person who is thinking about going into politics or journalism needs to read jt. Asap.
January 11, 2017
Alas, she has spoken to me, the muse of attractive and stylish millennial women, inspiration to well-read 20-somethings. Political Fictions is a collection of essays written between 1988 and 2000 and has been my favorite work of Joan Didion's so far. Perhaps it's the continued relevance and truth her essays contained about the absolute production and shenanigans that go into presidential campaigns or the distance between candidates and their political parties or even the growing disenchantment among voters between politicians, candidates and the American government in general. These essays are sardonic towards Democrats and Republicans and offer views and essays of candidates and politicians from both parties. I know the time in which I read this book contributed to my appreciation for it. I completed it the evening of President Obama's farewell address to the nation, two nights after Meryl Streep used a lifetime achievement award acceptance speech to criticize the president-elect and ten days before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as 45th president of the United States of America. Oh Joan, what do you have to say about 2016?
I enjoyed learning about political campaigns I was not yet alive for and to read essays about Bill Clinton, a president I was too young to really remember, but the first in my memory. My favorite essay was "Eyes on the Prize," about the 1992 Democratic Convention. I thought these essays exhibited what I have been searching for in the previous collections of Joan Didion- smart, witty, unbiased narrative and observations of the cultural and societal phenomenon of the United States.
Politics, it had been until recently understood, is push and pull, give and take, the art of the possible, an essentially pragmatic process by which the differing needs and rights of the nation's citizens get balanced and to some degree met.
I enjoyed learning about political campaigns I was not yet alive for and to read essays about Bill Clinton, a president I was too young to really remember, but the first in my memory. My favorite essay was "Eyes on the Prize," about the 1992 Democratic Convention. I thought these essays exhibited what I have been searching for in the previous collections of Joan Didion- smart, witty, unbiased narrative and observations of the cultural and societal phenomenon of the United States.
Politics, it had been until recently understood, is push and pull, give and take, the art of the possible, an essentially pragmatic process by which the differing needs and rights of the nation's citizens get balanced and to some degree met.
November 19, 2024
“In the understandably general yearning for ‘change’ in the governing of our country, we might pause to reflect on just what is being changed, and by whom, and for whom.” It’s sad how relevant this remains, but it’s refreshing to hear from someone NOT in the political system why our American systems are failing us, and she doesn’t hold back.
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