• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1010 0

art and literature with formalism and self-reflexivity (“painting about painting”), an aesthetic value that never appealed to Macdonald. “If one had no other data to go on,” Macdonald wrote, “a study of Popular Culture would reveal capitalism to be an exploitative class society and not the harmonious commonwealth its apologists say it is.” He blamed the American worker’s indifference to socialism on “the deadening and warping effects of long exposure to movies, pulp magazines, and radio.” T.S. Eliot (no friend of socialism) read Macdonald’s essay and cited it in his little book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, published in 1948. “Mr. Macdonald’s theory strikes me as the best alternative to my own that I have seen,” Eliot wrote, which, for Eliot, was pretty approving. Eliot (a self-proclaimed royalist) and Macdonald (a self-proclaimed anarchist) began a correspondence, heavy on expressions of mutual respect, that persisted until Eliot’s death, in 1965.

Macdonald was a remarkable editor, and although it had, at its peak, only around five thousand subscribers, Politics was a remarkable magazine, notable for its serious coverage of, and commentary on, the war, reflecting Macdonald’s antiwar and pacifist point of view. Still, in the end, running Politics led Macdonald to reject politics—or, at least, politics in the old Marxist, science-of-history sense. Macdonald’s manifesto was a very long essay, “The Root Is Man,” that appeared in Politics in 1946, and was brought out as a little book, by the Cunningham Press, in 1953. Macdonald asserted a conviction (borrowed in part from James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution [1941] and The Machiavellians [1943], though Macdonald had written critically of those books) that the United States was headed toward a social system that was the moral equivalent of German and Soviet totalitarianism. The United States was a society in which “war has become an end in itself,” and in which “the ever more efficient organization of technology in the form of large, disciplined aggregations of producers implies the modern mass-society which implies authoritarian controls and the kind of irrational—subrational, rather—nationalist ideology we have seen developed to its highest pitch in Germany and Russia.”

The belief that, armed with the correct political philosophy, the process could be reversed belonged to the progressive politics of Marxism and other utopian schemes, Macdonald argued. The war, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb showed that humanity is not so reformable. The only hope was “to reduce political action to a modest, unpretentious, personal level...People should be happy and should satisfy their spontaneous needs here and now.” The essay angered some of Macdonald’s old Partisan Review comrades, but it was prescient of a general migration from the political to the personal in New York intellectual life in the postwar decades.

In 1953, Macdonald published a revised and expanded version of his Politics essay on popular culture, renamed “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Diogenes, a journal funded by the Ford Foundation. (“A Theory of Mass Culture” was reprinted four years later in the widely circulated anthology Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America.) Macdonald now cited, along with Greenberg, critical work on mass culture by writers associated with the Frankfurt School—Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, and Theodor Adorno, whose analysis of standardization in popular music Macdonald called “brilliant.” For the Frankfurters, too, had made a marriage between anticapitalist politics and modernist aesthetics.

“Kitsch ‘mines’ High Culture the way improvident frontiersmen mine the soil, extracting its riches and putting nothing back,” Macdonald argued in the new essay. “Folk Art was the people’s own institution, their private little garden.... But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political domination.” The most insidious development, though, was what he called l’avant-garde pompier, phony avant-gardism.