The steady drizzle of bitter memories in [Democracy] keeps directing the reader to "one night outside Honolulu in the spring of 1975 … when the C130s and the C141s were already shuttling between Honolulu and Anderson and Clark and Saigon … bringing out the dependents, bringing out the dealers, bringing out the money, bringing out the pet dogs and the sponsored bar girls and the porcelain elephants…." From this string of scornful images we can tell that the American system of government is going to have the ignominious fate of disappointing Joan Didion.

It's not the first time we have been privy to Didion's vexations of the spirit, and we have by now grown accustomed to the tone of sad concern for our national well-being that insidiously infiltrates so much of her prose. She collects (and sells) ominous symptoms as if they were sea shells. She becomes mournful over...