Dwight Macdonald After the Death of Liberalism
The defining feature of American imperialism is its combination of an enormous capacity for death and destruction with an equally enormous sense of self-entitlement. Cold War journalist Dwight Macdonald understood this outlook better than most.
Dwight Macdonald’s writing was critical of a Cold War liberalism that spoke in the language of universal rights even as it carpet-bombed Vietnam. Amid a new imperialism unburdened by sentimental illusions, his essays show just how far the US has fallen. (Sylvia Salmi / Bettmann via Getty Images)
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.
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