Abstract
In this chapter I show how Didion’s preoccupation with her own consciousness and her Goldwater conservatism influenced her satirical portrait of liberal politicians in Democracy. I focus on how the protagonist’s husband, a defeated politician trying to return to power by using a think tank as a means to attract attention in the media illustrates how politicians use “pseudo-events” to draw the attention to their campaigns, creating the illusion that they represent certain broad constituencies but that in fact these constituencies are small or even non-existent, giving free rein to their true constituency—the corporate world—represented in the novel by the protagonist’s business family and her lover, an international arms dealer.
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Notes
- 1.
For a brief history of political campaigning and the rise of political consultants after World War II, see Westbrook (1983).
- 2.
In her travels before writing Democracy, Didion did take a tour of the Kai Tak East transit camp for refugees near Kowloon, Hong Kong (Daugherty 2015, 410), and so she could have described in detail the poverty Inez was ostensibly trying to help alleviate. It is telling that she does not do so.
References
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Smit, D. (2019). Joan Didion’s Democracy: Moderate Ruling-Elite Constituencies. In: Power and Class in Political Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26769-8_6
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