II. Politics for the Nursery Set
JAMES BURNHAM
THE
editors of PARTISAN REVIEW have been kind enough to offer me
a number of pages in which to comment upon Dwight Macdonald's essay.
I do not think, however, that it would be justifiable for me to take full
advantage of their kindness.
Macdonald, in the present leap of his somewhat jerky career, is
busily occupied with the defense of a program of revolution in one
psyche. To
this
program I have no objection; and in it I have no inter–
est. It provides Macdonald himself with that glow of self-righteousness
which seems to be his most compelling need. The lurid rhetoric in which
the program is expressed gives an outlet less dangerous than available
alternatives to the frustrations of his readers.
And the program has the culminating perfection of being precluded
from any possibility of influencing actual political events. This is care–
fully guaranteed not only by its lack of connection with historical reality,
but by its own overt prescriptions. The program, calling solely for loud
talk, prohibits any political action whatever-no party, group, or league,
all being impure, shall be allowed to wear the Macdonald cockade. A
year or two of slumming in real politics convinced Macdonald apparently,
as it did all of those who observed him at first hand, that his talents and
taste lay elsewhere.
His present program, incorporating the lesson, is the political ana–
logue of the program of that cautious mother whom we all came to know
in nursery days: hang your bourgeois clothes (rather untidily) on a con–
venient theoretical limb; exhibit yourself on the bank of the revolution–
ary river; but never, never go near the water. Thumb your nose, and
jeer at the grownups, but remember it's all in fun, really. In short :
spoiled-child politics.
So, like a spoiled child, Macdonald whines because I have called
him a "sentimental dilettante" in politics. ('fhe spoiled child is naughty
in order to attract attention, but always complains when the attention
turns out to be unflattering.) He protests that he cannot be a political
dilettante because he devotes all his time to editing what he coyly refers to
as a "trade journal in that field." This is comparable to his reply, in hi
magazine, to a critic of his views on popular culture: "I go to the movies
often; I read detective stories; I was simply enchanted by the New York
World's Fair ... ; I
think
Bob Hope, Red Skelton and Jimmy Durante
are very funny; I enjoy several comic strips-Moon Mullins, Krazy Kat.
and above all Segar's Thimble Theatre, starring Wimpy and Popeye."
Macdonald never has been able to understand what it means to
think politically.
Since he interprets all things only in reference to his
own personal predicament, he cannot grasp the fact that when I, and
