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This past Thursday would have been Joan Didion’s ninetieth birthday. In our October 21, 2004, issue, she examined the state of American politics in the run-up to that year’s presidential election—the first in a country still reeling in the aftermath of 9/11.

Joan Didion
Politics in the ‘New Normal’ America

“During the spring and summer of 2004 some Americans, most but not all of them nominal Democrats, spoke of the November 2 presidential election as the most important, or “crucial,” of their lifetimes. They told not only acquaintances but reporters and political opinion researchers that they had never been more “concerned,” more “uneasy,” more “discouraged,” even more “frightened” about the future of the United States. They expressed apprehension that the fragile threads that bound the republic had reached a breaking point; that the nation’s very constitution had been diverted for political advantage; that the mechanisms its citizens had created over two centuries to protect themselves from one another and from others had been in the first instance systematically dismantled and in the second sacrificed to an enthusiasm for bellicose fantasy.”

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