Politics, stylized as politics, was a journal founded and edited by Dwight Macdonald from 1944 to 1949.
Macdonald had previously been editor at Partisan Review from 1937 to 1943, but after falling out with its publishers, quit to start Politics as a rival publication,TIME April 4, 1994 Volume 143, No. 14 – "Biographical sketch of Dwight Macdonald" by John Elson (Accessed 4 December 2008) first on a monthly basis and then as a quarterly.
Politics published essays on politics and culture and included among its contributors James Agee, John Berryman, Bruno Bettelheim, Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, Mary McCarthy, Marianne Moore, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Hannah Arendt.
The journal reflected Macdonald's interest in European culture. He used Politics to introduce US readers to the thinking of the French philosopher Simone Weil, publishing several articles by her, including "A Poem of Force", her reflections on the Iliad.Moulakis, Athanasios. Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial Translated by Ruth Hein. University of Missouri Press, 1998 (pp. 2-3) He also printed work by Albert Camus. Another European, the Italian political and literary critic Nicola Chiaromonte, was also given space in the journal.
Politics was also Macdonald's vehicle for his repeated and energetic attacks against Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party campaign for President."Dwight Macdonald: Godfather of One-Editor Journals" by Rene Wadlow(Accessed 4 December 2008)
In a letter to Philip Rahv at the end of December 1943, George Orwell mentioned that Macdonald had written asking him to contribute to his forthcoming journal.Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds.). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 3: As I Please (1943–1945) (Penguin) Orwell had replied telling him he might "do something 'cultural'" but not 'political' as he was already writing his "London Letters" to Partisan Review.
In his "As I Please" article for the 16 June 1944 issue of Tribune, George Orwell recommended Politics. He stated that he disagreed with its policy but admired "its combination of highbrow political analysis with intelligent literary criticism." He went on to add that there were no monthly or quarterly magazines in England "to come up to" the American ones, of which there were several.
Macdonald, in an editorial comment for the November 1944 issue of Politics referred to a letter from Orwell which cast interesting light on the 'russification' of English political thought over the last two years. Orwell had read the May issue's review of Harold Laski's Faith, Reason and Civilisation and mentioned that the Manchester Evening News, the evening edition of the Manchester Guardian, had refused to print his own review because of its anti-Stalin implications. Despite considering the book "pernicious tripe", Orwell had praised the author for being "aware that the USSR is the real dynamo of the Socialist movement in this country and everywhere else.", but criticized him for shutting his eyes to "purges, liquidations", etc. Macdonald pointed out that the fact that such a review should be considered "too hot" shows how much the feats of the Red Army had misled the English public opinion about Russia. He added that the "English liberal press had been far more honest about the Moscow Trials than our own liberal journals" and that Trotsky had been able to write in the Guardian.
Dwight Macdonald: Culture as politics – and Politics as culture As a prototypical "one-man magazine", Politics bore the sensibility and characteristic preoccupations of its founding, and sole, editor, the literary and polemical journalist Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982), whose cantankerous past in the face of institutional authority of all kinds furnished a fitting prologue to his six-year tenure in the editor's chair. After his undergraduate years at Yale – during which he gained early notoriety for his critique in the student newspaper of William Lyon Phelps, a pillar of the university's English faculty, and a lecturer and media figure with a national following – and a brief stint in the Executive Training Squad at the R. H. Macy department-store company, Macdonald landed a position as a writer and associate editor in 1929 at Fortune, the business monthly launched the year of the American stock market crash by Henry Luce, a Yale alumnus eight years Macdonald's senior whose stable of iconic magazines had begun in 1923 with Time. Exposure to the many captains of industry whose works and ways he profiled, set against the deepening Depression, sharpened in him a disdain for capitalism which made common cause with an elitist, aristocratic artistic sensibility that admired the classical European past as a sustaining and shaming foil to what he saw as the cultural degradations attendant upon the ascendancy of mass society. As a result, much of Macdonald's outwardly political criticism would take puckish aim at one or another of the stylistic infelicities, whether verbal or in manners, of the reigning pundits and politicians of the day, along with a critical tendency, somewhat like that of an earlier journalistic-literary "rebel in defense of tradition"Wreszin, Michael. A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald. New York: Basic Books, 1994. (to borrow the title of Macdonald's biographer Michael Wreszin), H. L. Mencken, more characteristically negative in tenor than constructive, programmatic or partisan – Mencken's claim that "one horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms" might well have been Macdonald's own.And it was no accident, to speak after the old-Marxist schema, that one whose satiric wit would often take the form of stylistic parody of his antagonists in both politics (e.g., Henry Wallace) and culture (the formulaic style of Time and others among what Macdonald called the "Lucepapers") would eventually, as of 1960, get round to editing one of the best-regarded collections of its kind, Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm – And After.
Upon leaving Fortune in 1936, after a dispute over his epic four-part profile of U.S. Steel one of whose crescendoes was an epigram from Lenin on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, he immersed himself in the works of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, a schooling which, against the backdrop of the Moscow Trials and the bitter divisions over their authenticity across the American left intelligentsia, led him to side with the Trotskyist faction against the Stalinists.In which political opposition style, again, shared center stage: "On the evidence of Stalin's barbarous oratorical style alone, one could deduce the bureaucratic inhumanity and the primitiveness of modern Soviet society." Quoted in Geoffrey Wheatcroft, "From Trotsky to Midcult: In Search of Dwight Macdonald." New York Observer, March 27, 2006. The New York social critic Paul Goodman, whose early essays in Politics seeded his flowering into mainstream fame twenty years later, famously asserted that Macdonald "thinks with his typewriter", a restless, perpetually self-revising (and, often enough in rueful retrospect, self-mocking) quality that saw Macdonald studding the later book versions of his magazine essays with a sort of after-the-fact Greek chorus of second thoughts, self-recriminations and liberal, as it were, doses of l'esprit de l'escalier, that lent his writing a quality one critic labeled "stereophonic."
The Partisan Review prelude Macdonald spent the years from 1937 to 1943 as an associate editor at Partisan Review, among the most famous of 20th-century American little magazines, founded as a Communist journal in 1934 but wrested three years later by a dissident faction led by its to-be veteran co-editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips, a journal synonymous with those "New York intellectuals" wedded equally to an independent radicalism in politics and the modernist avant-garde in literature. Macdonald's steadfast neutrality over the Second World War put him increasingly at odds with his fellow editors, and with much of left opinion following first the attack by Hitler upon Russia and then by the Japanese upon Pearl Harbor affording the Americans, along with Hitler's declaration of war upon the United States in turn, a casus belli unto the larger conflict, prompting him to resign from Partisan Review at the end of 1943, and to launch Politics as a vehicle for his antiwar, pacifist, "third way" perspectives, arising from the belief that the developing crises would trigger soon or late an international worker's movement, socialist in form, equally bent on sweeping away both the capitalist status quo in the west and the Communist dictatorship usurping the revolutionary birthright in the Russian sphere.
Allied conduct of the Second World War As a self-described pacifist and opponent of American entry into the Second World War, Macdonald in the early numbers of his magazine tracking the final year and a half of the war found much to criticize: the cynicism of Allied war aims, the bombing of civilian populations,'Gallicus' (pseud.), "Terror in the Air", Politics, November 1945, pp. 338-342. the betrayal by the Russians of the Polish resistance in the wake of the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising,"Warsaw", an editorial whose grim title in Gothic script between black borders preceded its opening text on the cover of Politics for October 1944, pp. 257-259. the internment of Japanese-Americans, racial segregation in the American armed forces, the sentimental belief of the "liblabs" – Macdonald's term of parodist art for the broad liberal and labor coalition across the Democratic party and the left intelligentsia – that the winning of the war would issue in the triumph of the "Common Man" and a "More Abundant Future for All" (parodic scare-capitals were among Macdonald's standard craftsman's tools), and the punitive ascription of collective guilt to civilian populations for the crimes and war policies of the governments to which they were subject.
Collective guilt In a signature essay in the March 1945 issue of Politics, "The Responsibility of Peoples", also issued as a pamphlet, Macdonald took up this latter subject at great length,Dwight Macdonald, "The Responsibility of Peoples", Politics, March 1945, pp. 82 et. seq. and extended into follow-up debates in the issues for May 1945 and July 1945.George Anthony, Solomon F. Bloom, Louis Clair, Gordon H. Clough, Jim Cork, Sebastian Franck, and Dwight Macdonald, "The Responsibility of Peoples: Further Discussion", Politics, July 1945, pp. 203-204, 205, 206-209
In an editorial item in Politics for April of that year, Macdonald took aim at the collective-guilt mentality as embodied in one of his favorite targets among liberal intellectuals, from which the passage below affords a prime sample of his wry, satiric style:
"The German people have let Max Lerner down. There is no other way to put it--they have failed him and damn near busted his big progressive heart. It seems that Lerner, all dressed up in his War Correspondent's Uniform (see cut), was scooting along behind the advancing Ninth Army in his jeep when he came across a large group of German civilians. 'It was a drizzly afternoon,' he writes (P.M., March 4), 'and they were clustered under a cement shed open at one end. There was a woman with a several-weeks old baby, and there was an old man of 87. Most were men and women in their middle 40's and above, with a scattering of children. They were almost all farmers.' They had been hiding in cellars for three days while American guns destroyed their village in the course of 'the war that they themselves had brought on.' (How 'they themselves had brought it on' not specified.)