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The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald. by Munist Left That Was Even Called Politics, Michael Wreszin

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The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald. by Munist Left That Was Even Called Politics, Michael Wreszin though he was entirely serious about his politics and founded and edited for its five-year life in A REBEL IN DEFENSE OF TRADITION: the 1940s an influential journal of the noncom- The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald. By munist Left that was even called Politics, Michael Wreszin. Basic Books. 590 pp. $30 Macdonald was not a profound or original po- litical thinker. By the 1950s he abandoned poli- Dwight Macdonald was probably contrary in tics altogether and moved to the New Yorker, his cradle. Of principled opposition, intellectual where lus criticisms of America were framed by independence, and educated crankiness he went glittering commercial endorsements of the very on to make a life's work. Born in Manhattan to way of life he censured. And it is as a cultural upper-middle-class parents in 1906 and edu- critic, a Savonarola against masscult, midcult, cated at scl~oolsappropriate to his class, and kitsch, that he is best remembered. The Macdonald became one of the more conspicuous merging of lug11 and low culture, the homogeni- political, social, and cultural critics in America, zation, the leveling of all values, standards, and and frequently of America, from the 1930s until distinctions struck him as another form of totali- his death in 1982. In this first biography, Wreszin tarianism. guides the reader along the dizzying course of He chose his targets well. The permissiveness Macdonald's shifting political of Webster's Third NmInterna- enthusiasms: the flirtation with tional Dictionary was an abdica- communism, the embrace of tion of responsibilityby an edu- Trotskyite socialism, the unre- cated elite and encouraged an mitting anti-Stalinism, the en- ignorance of tradition; it mir- during opposition to totalitari- rored "a plebeian attitude to- anism and nationalism and the ward language." The "revised state, the pacifism, the ill-con- standard version" of the Bible cealed impatience with the gave up the grandeur of the masses, the deep cultural con- King James version and substi- servatism. Perhaps it's no surprise that, by the tuted a blandness all 60symptomatic of American end of his life, Macdonald had become a radical cultural hfe at midcentury. Macdonald compared even a Republican could love. the revisers' work to the bombing of Dresden. After graduating from Yale University in the Style was everything to him: An idea did not late 1920s, Macdonald worked for Henry Luce's exist apart from the words used to express it. Fortune, using the capitalist forum to write sym- The possibility that the Bible-a book of faith, pathetically of communists. During the 1920s after all-might be comprehended more easily and 1930s he believed that liberal democracy in in its plain new dress by millions of people would the Western world was finished, a casualty of the not have occurred to him, and might have been rid- World War. Dictatorship was no alternative culed if it had. In fact, a good deal seems not to have (though he did retain some reluctant admiration occurred to him, wluc11 is why he frequently ap- for the dictators of the time).That left Macdonald pears naive and a bit ridiculous, in his personal seeking some third way between contending life no less than in his politics. By the 1960s and forces, as he was often, to do in life, like Moses 1970s, Macdonald was smoking pot and protest- negotiating the Red Sea. ing against Vietnam and fellow-traveling with But he was rarely as successful as Moses. He the youth movement, his belly hanging bare over opposed World War 11, for example-both sides his belt and a cocktail serving as compass. were brutal and reprehensible-and argued for Wreszin's biography takes Macdonald from a pacifist middle course. But as evidence of the cradle to grave and moves him dutifully tluough Holocaust began to emerge, he had no choice but all the crowds and controversies between. But to cast a cooler eye on Germany than he was Macdonald may be a 300-page subject trapped naturally disposed to do. in a 500-page book. The length would be forgiv- Perhaps it should come as no surprise that, able if Wreszin wrote with Macdonald's own BOOKS 81 ~niscl~ievo~~snessand wit. ("The Ford Founda- fluence of sometime-revolutionary and future tion is a large body of money surrounded by a royalist Georges Sorel. Under his direction, it lot of people who want some.") Perhaps only an became an antipolitical movement that called for autobiography would have done the man justice. direct action by workers, demonized capitalists If he had lived to read this book, he would no (but not capitalism), and championed moral re- doubt have been flattered by all the attention, well generation rather than economic transformation deserved after all. And then, honest Dwight to the as the avatar of revolution. Sorel imagined that end, he would have turned on it with his rapier. workers would be moved to violence not by a sensible platform of reform but by a cluliastic call to arms, with apocalypse to follow~orwhat he THE BIRTH OF FASCIST IDEOLOGY. By called the General Strike. Zeeu Sternhell with Mario Szmjder and Main Ashen. How did syndicalism's passionate advocacy Trans. by David Maisel. Princeton. 338 pp. $29.95 of class warfare turn into a desire for war be- tween nations? How did a putatively leftist de- Fascism has never received the respect it de- sire to transform a whole society for the sake of serves-or so Sternhell has spent nearly two social justice evolve into a national socialist decades arguing. A professor of political science manifesto for autl~oritariansocial engineering? at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he maintains Sternhell argues that such tendencies lay barely that fascism is neither a bizarre by-product of dormant within Sorel's own theories. The Gen- World War I nor a tl~o~~ghtlessMiddle-European eral Strike blurs easily into national mobilization detour into authoritarianism. Rather, it is a full- for war, while an acceptance of capitalism's in- fledged ideology in its own right. Formed by the evitability lends itself to quietism on questions confluence of the 19th century's two major ide- of class and the economy. ologies, socialism and nationalism, fascism must But Italy in the teens was also characterized be analyzed with all the analytical rigor applied by fiscal insolvency and jingoistic chauvinism, to its major rivals, liberalism and communism. which produced a renewed faith in such sources Moreover, Sternhell sees in the cultural milieu of communal authority as the army and the of fin-de-siecle Europe~itsnihilism, its disgust church. Sternhell provides a strikingly simple with the universals of Enlightenment thinking, quacks-like-a fascist test: Those leftist intellectu- its festering national and racial cl~a~~vinism-a als who abandoned Marxist calls for economic seedbed for the political ideals that were even- transformation and spoke of "moral elevation," tually to make ex-socialists such as Benito 'etlucal transformation," and the purging of "para- Mussolini into dictators. sites" instead of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie Sternhell's previous book, Neither Right nor were, or were on the way to becoming, fascists. Left: Fascist Ideology in France (1986),generated a This book is so densely documented that storm of controversy and brought on one suc- patches of comparatively thin analysis stand out. cessful libel suit, primarily because Sternhell It is quite strange, for example (though many suggested that French intellectual life in the critics will say it is not strange at all), that in mak- 1920s and '30s was rife with fascism. His new ing his case for the intellectual complexity and co- book has already provoked a similar contro- herence of fascist ideology Stemhell should have versy in Italy, although this time his analysis is so meticulously documented its leftist origins focused on the movement he believes initiated while leaving so murky its rightist wellsprings. the final descent into fascism-syndicalism. If He remains conspic~~o~~slysilent about the socialism is fascism's godmother on the Left and Catholic corporatism and old-guard Italian con- nationalism its godmother on the Right, syndi- servatism that did so much to put fascism into calism is its disreputable father, of troublesome power and that, as Sternhell rather grudgingly origins and questionable intentions. admits, "finally produced a regime from which Launched in the 1890s in France as a trade- all elements of socialist origin were banished." unionist ideology not too different from Marx- Still, The Birth of Fascist Ideology adds up to ism, syndicalism rapidly mutated under the in- compelling intellectual history. Stemhell forces us 82 WQ SPRING 1994 .
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