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 grappling, once again, with the rise of a far-right hostile to democracy.

A History of Violence

Macdonald was born in 1906 into a prosperous New York family. Precocious and well-loved, he sojourned at Yale before deciding to pivot into journalism just as the Great Depression put an end to the roaring 1920s. The 1930s made him a Trotskyist, and anti-fascism kept him in that camp through much of the World War II. But eventually, dissatisfaction with the rigidity of party Marxism led to a break.

At the outset of the Cold War, he declared he stood with the more open West against the closed East, although this didn’t result in a shift to the political right, as it would for the neocons a generation later. Instead, Macdonald gradually came to be identified with more democratic and libertarian forms of socialism; he spent the final years of his journalistic career fiercely criticizing American imperialism in Vietnam and beyond.

Macdonald cannot reasonably be described as an organic intellectual. He was a child of privilege who absorbed the rarefied literary sensibilities that came with that upbringing. But he was much more materialist than many orthodox historical materialists in his refusal to accept idealized ideological categories and binaries.

He maintained a deep admiration for Christian socialism and good old-fashioned moralism — an outlook that some might dismiss as utopian for its refusal to invest hopes in an organized working-class party. Macdonald compensated for this lack with a savvy responsiveness to events on the ground and a refusal to abstract away from the lives of ordinary people in the name of grandiose ideological projects. At his best, this gave him an ability to shine a bright light on his country’s worst crimes. He insisted, against a nationalist liberal and conservative establishment, that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought Americans down to the moral level of the Nazis they opposed.

At 9:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped a single bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Exploding with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT, The Bomb destroyed in a twinkling two-thirds of the city, including, presumably, most of the 343,000 human beings who lived there. No warning was given. This atrocious action places “us,” the defenders of civilization, on a moral level with “them,” the beasts of Maidanek. And “we,” the American people, are just as much and as little responsible for this horror as “they,” the German people.

While Macdonald was a product of the Cold War and was often very critical of Soviet authoritarianism, he was never a partisan cold warrior. He was continuously thoughtful and willing to call out morally reprehensible acts wherever they occurred. This lent his work an admirable moral maturity that took the form of a hostility to the juvenile countercultural sensibility that delights in subverting expectations and is terrified of being labeled and possibly negated. Macdonald was never self-absorbed enough to care about these kinds of purely aesthetic concerns.

Even if you disagree with him — I often did — reading this volume, it’s hard to doubt that his ideas are motivated by an open-minded sincerity. When thinking about Macdonald’s earlier essays defending pacifism in World War II, I found myself agreeing with an older Macdonald who came to recognize, in the face of fascist contempt for the “weak,” that no amount of passive civil disobedience would have averted the horrors brought about by that conflict.

But even the young Macdonald was undoubtedly right to force us to accept an uncomfortable truth: while assertions of moral equivalence can be forms of equivocation, they can also be a reminder that we are doing unto others what we condemn as evil when it is done unto us. In an especially brutal essay, Macdonald points out how the Nazis never had the equipment to bomb civilians on anywhere near the scale the Allies did, but if they’d had the means to do so they surely would have.

Often possessing the means to cause immense harm can become a reason to do so. Something like this logic seems to have been at play when Donald Trump ordered an attack on Venezuela, a nation that is orders of magnitude poorer and less powerful than the United States, while he looked on joyfully at the spectacle of the war crimes he was committing and compared it to a television show.

American Idiots

Macdonald may have chosen the “West” over what he saw as the totalitarian “East,” but he was hardly reconciled to how things were. His reflections on American jingoism are especially acute, even if his armchair sociology ought to be taken with a grain of salt. Macdonald tirelessly emphasized that America, despite its self-presentation as the land of the free and exporter of democracy, was a country on a permanent war footing.

The United States, he saw, combined a world-historical capacity and appetite for violence with an equally unprecedented unwillingness to think about its own motivations or the impact of its actions. It is this combined ability to inflict enormous suffering while maintaining an equally enormous sense of self-righteousness that defines the outlook of American imperialism.

Writing of the US’s wars in Indochina, Macdonald observed that something about our national culture made us capable of what he called “absent-minded genocide.” “‘Sorry about that’ has become the most popular slang phrase used by our troops in Vietnam — ironical, cynical, a little shamefaced.” Later, drawing on Mary McCarthy’s reports on South Vietnam, he describes American officials in unsparing terms.

The picture she gives, in scrupulous detail, is unrelievedly depressing, and all the more so because the American officials she interviewed were often so sincere-and so obtuse. They had the best intentions — we always do — and were quite unconscious of the ruin their simply being there is inflicting on the South Vietnamese, a ruin caused by our civilian as well as our military presence. “Friend, thou has no business here.”

It is hard to read these essays today and not think about the United States’ ongoing war on Iran. The past few months have seen the alleged “Peace” president indulge in military adventurism on an alarming scale, bringing the world economy screeching to a halt.

In his book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn criticizes those who see America’s war machines as fundamentally lawless. Not because he wants to defend imperialism as a “humane” enterprise carried out by a civilized people, but because dignifying American military intervention with the trappings of law, humanity, and Habermasian communicative rationality helps ideologically justify ever more interventions. The logic of this line of argument, if followed through, is that America is allowed to intervene whenever and forever, because it alone does so with good intentions and through due process.

By contrast, the kind of naked interventionism of the Trump administration looks very different. Some people have compared Trump to a neoconservative. There are undeniable similarities, not least the belief that macho imperial power need not bow to any “reality-based” community since it can create its own reality. But the neoconservatives and their Cold War predecessors always felt compelled, as Macdonald and Moyn rightly observe, to pay a modest tribute to virtue by insisting — as bad liars always do — that all the bombs dropped paved the road to democratic peace: a Chili’s on every corner of Baghdad.

There is something bracing about the pure avarice and naked “strong do as they will, weak suffer what they must” mentality of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Whatever is underlying it is no longer motivated by the kind of cloyingly sentimental earnestness Macdonald was familiar with. Although that’s no reason to be nostalgic for the rule fetishists Moyn so carefully described.