What we need, what I’m begging for here, is for Joan Didion to do what she did in 1988. We need her observations and—let’s say it now—the enormous engine of her prose style to tell us how it is, to get inside “the process” of politics and the characters at the center of this “self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite [who] tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is.”