Yesterday, I started reading Joan Didion’s collection of essays on the strange, nonsensical logic of American democracy, Political Fictions. Although it includes her well-known New York Review of Books essay on the 1988 presidential primaries, “Insider Baseball,” the book as a whole is marginal within the Didion canon; it certainly doesn’t have the same devoted readership as The Year of Magical Thinking or Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and I rarely see people writing about it. I have a tentative theory about why this is — and it’s not because her writing in Political Fictions is inferior — but because I’ve never read the collection all the way through, it’s not a very good theory. I want to fix that!

Rather than write a formal review after I’m done, I’m gonna blog about my impressions (i.e., the stuff I would normally write in the margins of my print copy) as I work through the book. So here are some notes on Didion’s foreword, which is basically an essay unto itself:

• One consequence of Didion’s enshrinement as a literary icon and preternatural social observer is that we don’t hear about her politics often enough. That’s unfortunate because her political opinions are really odd! She would deny this characterization — and in fact she does deny it, writing that her politics were often deemed “eccentric, opaque, somehow unreadable,” an interpretation she categorically rejects. But her explanation of why she rejects it only confuses things further: She voted “ardently” for Barry Goldwater in 1964 but was so repulsed by the Republican Party’s embrace of Ronald Reagan that she registered as a Democrat. In other words, she was so disillusioned by what she perceived as Reagan’s dilution of “authentic” conservatism — despite the fact that the Goldwater campaign was instrumental in creating the possibility for Reagan’s ascent in American politics — that she allied herself with liberals. Eccentric seems like a correct description to me!

• Didion is a good media critic. Perhaps because she didn’t get her start as an explicitly “political” writer, she seems willing to identify (and dismantle) the ossified narratives that traditional campaign reporters rely upon and replicate, year after year, presidential cycle after presidential cycle. The “conventional wisdom” that underlies many election stories is just that: Convention. Reporters’ assumptions about how politics work don’t necessarily depend on empirical reality. Didion’s primary example here is the political media’s tendency to identify “apathy” as the biggest force in American elections, even though a careful reading of polling data suggests that voters are much more likely to be angry and disenchanted by a political system in which they feel powerless — a much different, more complicated stance than apathetic disinterest.

• Political Fictions was published in 2001, and Didion ends the foreword with a discussion of the disastrous events in Florida following the 2000 election. She doesn’t explore the ins-and-outs of the recount, but highlights the extent to which “the political process” at end of the twentieth century, had become utterly divorced from the ordinary people who were, in theory, supposed to justify its existence and participate in democratic governance:

“Florida,” in this light, could be seen as a perfectly legible ideogram of the process itself, and of where that process had taken us: the reduction of a national presidential election to a few hundred voters over which both parties could fight for thirty-six days was the logical imaginative representation of a process that had relentlessly worked, to the end of eliminating known risk factors, to restrict the contest to the smallest possible electorate.

• One question I have going forward is this: How many of Didion’s observations are still actually relevant? To what extent is her analysis in this book simply a historical archive of how politics functioned in the late twentieth century? Has the emergence of Trump and the MAGA movement changed the political environment so much that Didion’s writings will feel anachronistic?