Some of Us Were Worried about America Before the Election (part 2)

Last updated on: February 23, 2017 at 3:57 pm by D. G. Hart

Some of Us Were Worried about America Before the Election (part 2) 2017-02-23T15:57:50-04:00 D. G. Hart

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Dwight Macdonald, a mid-twentieth century Marxist critic who wrote for the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, New Republic, and Partisan Review (among others), was worried about the effects of mass culture (think Donald Trump’s celebrity in The Apprentice) on American institutions. The following is from his famous essay, “Masscult & Midcult“:

The question of Masscult is part of the larger question of the masses. The tendency of modern industrial society, whether in the USA or the USSR, is to transform the individual into the mass man. For the masses are in historical time what a crowd is in space: a large quantity of people unable to express their human qualities because they are related to each other neither as individuals nor as members of a community. In fact, they are not related to each other at all but only to some impersonal, abstract, crystallizing factor. . . . Paradoxically, the individual in a community is both more closely integrated into the group than is the mass man and at the same time is freer to develop his own special personality. Indeed, an individual can only be defined in relation to a community. A single person in nature is not an individual but an animal; Robinson Crusoe was saved by Friday. The totalitarian regimes, which have consciously tried to create the mass man, have systematically broken every communal link — family, church, trade union, local and regional loyalties, even down to ski and chess clubs — and have reforged them so as to bind each atomized individual directly to the center of power.

Which raises the question of whether mass society, mass media, and social media have given us Donald Trump. But lots of Americans were swimming along as individuals in the sea of Facebook, identity politics, and binge streaming, well before Donald Trump became POTUS. (By the way, Macdonald wrote a lot of movie reviews and their merits are defended here.)

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