Macdonald was a snob, but that does not mean he was a fool. His won his insights from experience on the front lines of literary journalism. He went to work for Henry Luce’s Time Inc. soon after graduating from Yale in 1928 (“As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking”); defected to Partisan Review in 1937; founded and edited Politics in 1944; then spent the 1950s as a staff writer for the New Yorker. From 1960 to 1966, he wrote a film column for Esquire.
Greater snobs, Alexis de Tocqueville and J.S. Mill, for example, had already puzzled over mass culture and produced insights into the moral culture of individuality. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacob Burckhardt, and Jose Ortega y Gasset had interpreted mass phenomena as the erosion of European culture. The Institute for Social Research showed how the weed of fascism flourished in depleted soil. By 1944, when Macdonald published “A Theory of Popular Culture” in Politics, most conservatives and socialists and many liberals in Europe and America had abandoned hope for a democracy of culture. The theory of masses reached a dialectical impasse from which it has not returned.
Macdonald, seeking an opening, fashioned his perspective “conservative anarchism.” How could he blend the conservative’s piety for tradition with the anarchist’s disbelief in authority? “Well, I say, being an anarchist, that I don’t believe in taking people by the hand and force-feeding them culture,” he once told an interviewer. “I think they should make their own decisions. If they want to go to museums and concerts, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t be seduced into doing it or shamed into doing it.”
This raises many questions, including the large one of compulsory schooling. Macdonald, however, was not one for answering with programs or policies. He cited Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America” in favor of cultural pluralism, yet appeared no more inclined to show what that might look like than to coordinate his personal attire. In The End of Ideology, Daniel Bell (another snob!) noted his fondness for wearing clashing pink-and-black-striped shirts. Of Politics, Bell said it was “the only magazine that was aware of and insistently kept calling attention to, changes that were taking place in the moral temper, the depths of which we still incompletely realize.” Can the same be said in favor of Against the American Grain?
Yes, if one remembers the book’s protest against capitalist methods of cultural production and, to say the same thing twice, refuses to be misled by sentences like the following: “The great cultures of the past have all been elite affairs, centering in small upper-class communities which had certain standards in common and which both encouraged creativity by (informed) enthusiasm and disciplined it by (informed) criticism."
