Tag: American culture

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Dwight Macdonald (ed. by John Summers)
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
New York: New York Review Books, 2011

Long before Paul Fussell’s Class, or Jilly Cooper’s Class, or such dubious offerings of social criticism as The Preppy Handbook and The Yuppie Handbook, we had Dwight Macdonald’s Masscult and Midcult, a long essay originally written for the Partisan Review and published as a slight volume in 1961. More recently (2011) it was republished as a New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics title, bound together with an Introduction by Louis Menand and a collection of pointed and frothy Macdonald writings from the same era, originally published as Against the American Grain. (more…)

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Our latest livestream was an Ask Me Anything with Counter-Currents’ old friend, the redoubtable Millennial Woes (official website here), who was joined by Morgoth (Substack, Odysee). It is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

00:03:33 On Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, “the most famous Rabbi in America”
00:07:14 How the media is losing its grip on the narrative thanks to Twitter/X
00:08:16 On hate-speech laws (more…)

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SPOILERS BELOW

In the style of Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays — e.g., Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) — Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, his first English-language feature film, is a smart and stinging rebuke to the celebrity of influencer culture, consumer capitalism, and perhaps most provocatively, cancel culture. As such, there is a decidedly conservative streak to this satirical film with, at one point, overt references made to the “Alt Right” and Intellectual Dark Web-aligned figures (e.g. Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson). (more…)

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It’s been said that the greatest political divide in America is urban vs. rural, with Democrats controlling cities and Republicans controlling small towns and villages. Beyond this political divide, there’s also a deep cultural divide between Red and Blue America. Hell, there’s even a physical divide, manifested in the physiognomy of the people. (more…)

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Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) wasn’t the first American writer. That was William Hill Brown (no relation), whose The Power of Sympathy (1789) was an epistolary novel imitating Richardson with moral purpose and a satisfying ending of virtue triumphant. Then there was Susanna Rowson. Her Charlotte Temple (1790), was America’s first bestseller, another fine moral tale of a young woman choosing virtue and so (again) triumphing. (more…)

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Audio version here

As a European, I was taught to dislike Americans from a young age. In school, and through cultural osmosis, a young European is taught to look down on these cultureless, backwards savages with their guns, their Christian dogmatism, their unrefined tastes, their consumerism, their obesity, and their racism. (more…)

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It’s a tragic thing watching a great nation splinter itself to death. I wonder if it can even be helped? The strong, brilliant center of American culture, which was established and then defended for so long by those of European descent, now appears to the world like the yolk in a cracked egg. Either it’s still whole or it’s rotten . . . we won’t know for sure till Humpty Dumpty has his great fall.

Once upon a time, we were the dominant culture, derived from the waves of Northern European settlers who had come to the New World to break the land and hew a civilization out of a savage landscape. (more…)

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Questions by Gene H. Hogberg

Translated by Dr. David Wainwright

Part 6 of 6. (For the rest of the interview, click here.)

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