Steve Reads

I’ve been ordering cheap used books off Amazon recently — mostly books I’ve read before and loved, and which really ought to be on my bookshelf. That’s how I came to buy a copy of Joan Didion’s Political Fictions and After Henry. Recall that Didion started her writing career as an acerbic depressive watching the spirit of the 1960′s decay into Altamont. Over the next 20 years, she evolved into writing about the political “process,” using that word as icily as she could: the “process” is the fake little dance that the power brokers go through, mostly for each other, ostensibly with us in mind. Clearly, though, they’ve failed at bringing the rest of us into line: most of us don’t vote, and many of us think that we’re asked every four years to vote for the lesser of two evils. This is because they’ve choreographed the dance for themselves, not for us. Political coverage is orchestrated entirely by the politicians, using the media as their willing tool. As Didion puts it in “Eyes on the Prize”:

Such reduction of political language to coded messages, to “middle class” and “reward for work,” to safe children and Sister Souljah, has much to do with why large numbers of Americans report finding politics deeply silly.

(hyperlink mine, obviously)

It’s really valuable to read “Eyes on the Prize” soon after Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal. Krugman has been fighting hard since at least the 2000 campaign to convince us that there really is a difference between the Republicans and the Democrats: contra Nader, they are not an indistinguishable blob called “The Republicrats.” Krugman argues this very persuasively, and I think he’s right: the essence of the Republican party, at least since the 1930′s, has been racism, jingoism, and defense of big business at the expense of labor. The fight against unions at times has found protective cover under Red-baiting.

All of that is true, but it’s easy to forget while reading Krugman: what we’ve seen before our very eyes since Bush took office is a Democratic Party that has resolutely refused to stand up for anything. Reading Didion puts our milquetoast party in its proper historical context: since at least 1980, the Party has been trying as hard as it can to cater to Reagan Democrats. You grew disenchanted with the Democrats in the 70′s and 80′s when it looked like law and order were breaking down? Well, come back to us, because we’ll use all the right codewords to suggest that we feel your pain.

And yet this plainly loses the Party elections. Americans want a party that stands for something; the Democrats have shown them no spine. Clintonian “triangulation” and the Sister Souljah show were natural for a party that first fought off Jesse Jackson, then Jerry Brown. When you’re scared of standing for something, and you think the American people will be scared of forceful liberals, you’ll end up with a Dick Morris campaign.

The actual business of governing, says Didion, isn’t even what the major parties are after anymore. Rather, they’re in the business of running elections. Whatever they need to say to win, they’ll say; what they’ll do when they get into office is secondary, if not tertiary. (I believe Didion made the same point about film and music production: doing the deal is primary, the actual film or album much further down the list.) But clearly that hasn’t worked for them, as Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry can attest. Somehow a series of loser strategists has both stripped them of novel ideas in an attempt to co-opt Republicans, and yet still lost them votes. Which is a brilliant trick.

This all does fit with Krugman, up to a point. He’s unwilling, though, in his columns or his books, to say much that attacks the Democrats. In The Conscience of a Liberal, he places much of the blame for the nation’s rightward shift on the decline of unions. They’ve lost power, he says, because of outright illegal firings and because the Republicans looked the other way. He doesn’t blame the Democrats for abandoning what used to be their core constituencies, namely the poor, minorities, and unionized labor. These should be their core constituencies, anyway, if it’s in fact true that a) the Republicans are the party of the Rich And Greedy, and b) that Democrats are light years away from the Republicans. Krugman points out all the times when Republicans use phrases like “states’ rights” that their audience knows are disguised racial slurs. He’s less willing to point out Clinton’s co-opting of Republican codewords. He’s perfectly silent on the Democrats’ running away from Jesse Jackson, for fear that Jackson would destroy the Democrats’ chances in the election. The Democrats destroyed their chances quite skillfully even without Jackson, thanks. Wouldn’t it be better to lose elections standing on our feet rather than on our knees?

Much of what Didion says about earlier elections carries over — spine-chillingly — to today. Everyone stands for “change,” for instance; everyone says he or she is looking to change a system that only works for the people inside of it. Democrats sought this “change” in earlier elections from a narrow subset of voters (Reagan Democrats) who do not represent the electorate as a whole, and surely don’t represent the Democrats’ erstwhile biggest supporters. To put it quickly: the Democrats have focus-grouped themselves to death. Focus groups may be fine, if they clue you in to how the population is feeling, but

1. Your focus group needs to be a random sample.
2. Wouldn’t it be better to decide what you stand for first, then bring those stands to the American public and let them decide whether you’re worth voting for?

Which brings me to Obama. I hope he’s not the bland paste that comes out of focus groups; I hope he really does have the power to bring out the best in Americans and motivate us to attain what Bill Clinton never could. To do this, he has to stand for something: “unity” is not enough if it’s unity around repackaged Republican talking points.

I’m fairly certain of the following: if Obama is elected and turns out to do nothing, or Clinton is elected and gives us more of the same, or for that matter if McCain is elected and brings us Bush v. 2, a lot of Americans who thought they saw hope in politics will realize that the whole ugly edifice just needs to disappear. A lot of us will tune out: we’ll realize that all the talk of “change” is just that: talk.

I hope I’m wrong. I donated $125 to Obama the other day. I hope he makes us proud.

Lots of people are talking about Bob Woodward’s latest book, State of Denial. Let’s not pretend that Woodward is a serious journalist anymore; he has long since become a political operator within the world he ostensibly undermined back in the 1970’s. For the most efficient conceivable takedown of Woodward, see Joan Didion’s essay “The Deferential Spirit”, reprinted as “Political Pornography” in her outstanding essay collection Political Fictions.

(As for the claim that journalists’ ever-vigilant eyes brought down a president, Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent should have long since shot that canard.)

The All-Didion-and-Linux-all-the-time blog party continues. I spent yesterday and a bit of today reading Political Fictions, which seems to be no more realist than her earlier works. Indeed, it reproduces her “Insider Baseball” as the first essay in the book.

Having established the framework for her analyses in earlier books, this one was less of a surprise. It does what Didion has thus far done best, which is take a knife to the various media pieties — most powerfully in this case, perhaps, in her attack on the notion that American voters are voting for “values.” The media spent a lot of time in 2000 telling us that Al Gore was trying to distance himself from the “immoral” man with whom he’d been associated for eight years, and that Clinton was a fairly severe liability for him. This despite the evidence that Americans really didn’t care about the Lewinsky scandal, the fairly routine statistics about American rates of infidelity and divorce, and the fact that Americans on average lose their virginity at 16 while on average getting married at 27. All of these things would indicate that Clinton wasn’t much of a problem for Gore at all, but this was the story that the media focused on, empirical reality be damned.

My recent exultation aside, I do think that Didion would be better in a best-of essay collection. What makes Didion so breathtaking is her relentless refusal to accept an easy answer, her exhaustive coverage of all the available media, and her second-order analysis of a story — her coverage of how the story is made, rather than the story itself. Once one has grown awed by her use of these techniques, her essays are often — maybe 3/4 of the time — straightforward applications of these devices. A best-of essay collection would include “Insider Baseball,” “Clinton Agonistes,” “Sentimental Journeys,” “The White Album,” and others — and the collection Vintage Didion (not a valedictory — it’s just published by Vintage) contains these very essays, among others.

Next up will probably be A Book of Common Prayer, which Adam Rosi-Kessel recommended to me and about which I’ve heard good things otherwise.

I went to sleep last night after reading an essay of Joan Didion’s in which she describes the 1988 presidential campaign as a perfectly closed loop: media events are staged for the benefit of the media (not for the benefit of the people who are ostensibly in the audience for those events), and heartwarming stories about the candidates get “leaked” so that the media can then put together a consensus photo of the candidate: Dukakis was “becoming tough,” the elder Bush was someone who had cast off the privilege of growing up wealthy in Connecticut and had remade himself in Texas, which now made him “tough,” etc. The whole process was entirely artificial, and the media-political axis formed its own insular world that only occasionally touched on the people out here in the United States.

I woke up this morning, and NPR was playing a story about how parts of President Bush’s speech on withdrawal from Iraq had been “leaked.” I started thinking about Bob Woodward and Judy Miller, both of whom were apparently in some kind of incestuous relationship with members of the Executive Branch. I thought about how the “Dean Scream” was sufficient to kill him, because the media story immediately turned to questions of his mental health, and then quickly into “Americans tonight are discussing only one thing: Howard Dean’s mental health.” The process of reporting on Dean had almost nothing to do with the campaign itself; it had to do with the storyline that the media decided to adopt.

Didion goes into much better detail and says all of this much more eloquently. You should read her essay “Insider Baseball,” in the collection called After Henry. Suddenly the way that the media work makes so much more sense.

(“Insider Baseball” is apparently available through the New York Review of Books — where Didion has published most of her stuff, I take it — but it’s behind a paywall.)