The previous issue of the New York Review of Books features a series of takes on the current election season from some of the Review’s frequent contributors. Joan Didion, of course, stole the show for me. She frames the current election in a contrarian light:
. . . what seemed striking about the long and impassioned run-up to this election was not how different it had been—but precisely how similar it had been to previous such seasons.
We had kept talking about how different it was, but it wasn’t.
On a single mid-September morning these phrases would appear on the front page of The Washington Post : “stocks plummet,” “panic on Wall Street,” “as banks lost faith in one another,” “one of the most tumultuous days ever for financial markets,” “giant blue-chip financial institutions swept away,” “banks refusing to lend,” “Russia closing its stock market,” “panicked selling,” “free fall,” and “the greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen.”
These were not entirely unpredictable developments.