Joan Didion has been the unassailed Queen of the New York liberal elite for decades – essayist, novelist, political commentator. Her latest NYRB piece is hard-hitting but reads like a lament for lost freedoms and lost certainties in the post-9/11 United States – a good place to start to understand the crisis in the American liberal consensus produced by the War on Terror and the resurgent right.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.