A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald
By Michael Wreszin
BasicBooks, 1994. 590 pp., $45.00 (hb)Reviewed by Phil Shannon
The US left has an unfortunately rich history of Trotskyist and other socialist intellectuals renouncing Marxism for the delights of capitalism. Dwight Macdonald, a former Trotskyist and a radical journalist-intellectual during 50 years of mid-century political life, appeared destined to play the God-that-failed air, but to his credit and our benefit, he retained other, dissident, strings to his bow.
Wreszin's fascinating biography of Macdonald recalls the ex-Trotskyist Macdonald of the late '40s and '50s defending the US Marshall Plan to restore anti-revolutionary stability to postwar Western Europe, applauding US intervention in Korea, supporting the purging of Communist teachers from schools and publicly "choosing the West". By the '60s, however, Macdonald was having a high old time with the raucous New Left in thumbing his nose at conservative America.
Macdonald's "meandering political odyssey" through the radical left, the extreme right and all points in between is an itinerary with much relevance for people wishing to learn from such cautionary tales and make an effective politics today.
Born in 1906, Macdonald was a pampered youth and a snobbish nerd during his years at Yale, declaring that democracy was a danger to society. He was pulling down $10,000 a year as a journalist with the reactionary Time-Life empire during the Depression until his inactive social conscience was roused by a writing assignment that brought him into contact with union activists and workers in the steel industry in 1936. After a brief dalliance with the Communist Party, Macdonald became a Trotskyist, joining the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)in 1939.
Only two years later, however, Macdonald had criticised Trotsky, sided with the rival Workers Party during the great SWP split of 1940, criticised the Workers Party a mere two months into its existence, and was out for good from the organised left. His cited reasons were theoretical disagreements on the nature of the Soviet Union and the undemocratic structures of the Trotskyist left but, as Wreszin notes, whilst theoretical convictions were involved and whilst there was some rigidity to party life, it was really Macdonald's lifelong "latent anarchism" that triumphed.
Macdonald was ferociously opposed to any disciplined collectivism. Any state, even a democratic workers' state, was illegitimate. Majority decision-making after full and free debate, the essence of democratic socialist parties, was too "authoritarian" for Macdonald, a self-described "conservative anarchist" who was happy only when in a minority of one.
Citing Macdonald's own creed of "scepticism towards all theories, governments and social systems", Trotsky rightly went to town on the conservatism of Macdonald's extreme anarchism. Trotsky was not alone in faulting the personal and political egotism which underlay Macdonald's love of being different, a symptom common to what Trotsky disparagingly, but with ample evidence, saw as common to the "chattering classes", the New York intellectuals.
From here on, Macdonald was paddling his own canoe. Politically, it was all downhill. His "emotional hostility to Stalinism" clouded his critical vision (he was now sporting Cold War glasses and shouting about "aggressive Soviet totalitarianism seeking world domination"). He added fuel to Senator McCarthy's witch-hunting pyres. He lost faith in any socialist vision, writing off the whole labour movement as incorporated into materialistic capitalism.
By 1958, he was churning out articles titled "Why I am not a socialist", working for the CIA-funded Encounter magazine, and writing well-paid bland essays on retail tycoons for the glitzy New Yorker, which the Trotskyist Mcdonald had previously lambasted for its "deliberate cultivation of the trivial" and its "tailored prose and middle class caution".
Concerned at his own deradicalisation, Macdonald turned to cultural criticism, but this was merely an aristocratic assault on Elvis Presley, hot dog stands and other examples of what he called "the spreading ooze of mass culture". Dipping into an anti-science turn, and expounding a vague moralism, Macdonald's vision "had turned inwards", culminating in a phase of nudism and other variants of liberation through sexual freedom as an "expression of anti-bourgeois bohemianism". Radical sociologist C. Wright Mills dismissed this as "Macdonald's gonad theory of revolution".
Macdonald, however, took a step back from the brink of political irrelevance when the call of rebellion resounded from the campuses in the '60s. With his pen and chequebook, he supported students in revolt. He did so, however, with his usual contradictions, plotting civil disobedience against the Vietnam War at one minute and giving a lecture on "The Necessity for an Elite Culture" the next. If he wanted a revolution, it was one with high standards.
He had further inconsistencies — supporting Israel, admiring secretary of defence Robert McNamara, disdaining black militancy — but he was politically revitalised until his death in 1982.
Macdonald may have paddled his own canoe, but he made waves doing so. Wreszin includes many examples of Macdonald's "sharp and engaging" writing style, which added flair to his unorthodoxy.
Wreszin, through his sympathetic but objective treatment of Macdonald and the intellectual circles he moved in, is able to recreate the radical political intensity that characterised US intellectual history. Debate in this milieu "often sought the jugular" and Macdonald gave and received with the best of the polemical street-fighting literati.
During Macdonald's lifetime, he swung to all points of the political compass, pulled by the magnetic attraction of a conservative anarcho-individualism but attracted by counter-currents of anti-establishment rebellion.
Felix Morrow, a '30s Trotskyist, was perhaps justifiably peeved by McDonald's Trotskyist phase — calling him a "contentious, exhibitionist intellectual" — for Macdonald did have trouble getting his bearings right when he renounced the working class and socialism, but his "instinctive contrary stance" added some not invaluable fireworks to the left. Despite many erratic wanderings, Macdonald avoided the worst fate of many others who abandoned socialism. He was a maverick, but he was our maverick.