Review of Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century by Dwight Macdonald (University of Chicago Press, 2026)
A common refrain of centrist liberals nostalgic for the halcyon days of West Wing–inspired politics is that once upon a time, America was a country. By this, they mean a place where things ran more or less as expected, which is to say more or less the way centrist liberals think they ought to be run.
Like most forms of nostalgia, this variant is not grounded in reality. It is rather a product of an unconscious form of selective forgetting. America’s cult of idolatry around the Constitution, a document treated with as much reverence as the Ten Commandments, proved so incapable of holding the country together in the nineteenth century that a civil war broke out followed by what constitutional scholars call a complete “second founding.”
The twentieth century was as volatile as the nineteenth. For the United States, the Great Depression, two world wars, and bombing campaigns across Indochina took place against the backdrop of civil rights and sexual revolutions, as well as a Cold War that threatened to destroy the modern world.
Politically, the twentieth century was, for better and for worse, considerably more ideologically diverse than it is usually understood to be. The 1930s witnessed fascist proto–America Firsters, Trotskyists, Christian socialists, anarchists and more battling to sway and influence US politics during a peculiarly open-minded time in the country’s history.
It was in this tumultuous environment that the seminal socialist journalist Dwight Macdonald cut his teeth. Ideologically ever on the move, his career charted the aspirations, shattered hopes, and moral integrity of the mid-century American left. Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century, a new collection of Macdonald’s writing, assembles some of his best work for a new generation that is…
Auteur: Matt McManus
