Name: Political fictions
ISBN: 9780375718908

Political fictions

In 1988, Joan Didion began looking at the American political process for The New York Review of Books. What she found was not a mechanism that offered the nation's citizens a voice in its affairs but one designed by--and for--"that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." The eight pieces collected here from The New York Review build, one on the other, to a stunning whole, a portrait of the American political landscape that tells us, devastatingly, how we got where we are today.In Political Fictions, tracing the dreamwork that was already clear at the time of the first Bush ascendance in 1988, Didion covers the ways in which the continuing and polarizing nostalgia for an imagined America led to the entrenchment of a small percentage of the electorate as the nation's deciding political force, the ways in which the two major political parties have worked to narrow the electorate to this manageable element, the readiness with which the media collaborated in this process, and, finally and at length, how this mindset led inexorably over the past dozen years to the crisis that was the 2000 election.

What Hacker News says

PaulHouleDec 2021

Political Fictions is my favorite Joan Didion book, particularly her essay on Insider Baseball., which together with Asimov’s Franchise anticipates 538 and all the other media on elections that ultimately disenfranchise voters.

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wglbNov 2012

I also thought her book Political Fictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Fictions was in a similar vein.

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PaulHouleAug 2025

Yes.

The situation with the press is far worse than you think for structural reasons, it's a bit naive that you're asking this kind of question at all.

I'm old enough that I've had an experience where an "event" (French theorists would say l' événement) happens and

-- I watch it live on TV

-- I watch it again on the evening news

-- I read about it in the daily paper the next day

-- I read about it in a weekly paper (say The Economist) next week

-- I read about it in a monthly paper (say The Atlantic) next month

And then 25-30 years later a book comes out that is meticulous researched, they looked over all the primary sources, they interviewed everyone they could, etc. The picture of l' événement that I get from that book is entirely different than the picture that I recall having at the time, some of that is drift in my memories, some of that is the failure of my meaning making at the time, some of that is errors of commission, omission, connotation and denotation on the part of the media. I take the blame for my memory (although everybody's memory drifts over time), but the media + the meaning making process are fairly considered to be a system, and it doesn't work well.

To back this up

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armies_of_the_Night

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_on_the_Campa...

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Fictions (anything by Didion!)

-- https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/News/The-Inf... (1971 book that predicted you'd be reading the news on the WWW around 1980 or so -- the author prepared a report for the RAND corporation and was really angry and bitter that the media industry didn't want to make the investments to make it happen... and thus was the origin story of a legendary critic of the media who is more famous for https://www.amazon.com/effete-conspiracy-other-crimes-press/... and https://www.amazon.com/New-Media-Monopoly-Completely-Chapter...)

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