During the late 1950s and the 1960s, Macdonald wrote
cultural criticism, especially about the rise of
mass media and of
middle-brow culture, of mediocrity exemplified; the blandly wholesome worldview of the play
Our Town (1938) by
Thornton Wilder, the commodified culture of the
Great Books of the Western World, and the simplistic language of the
Revised Standard Version (1966) of the Bible: His
New Yorker review of
Webster's Third Edition, published in 1961, became the definitive review for the dictionary's critics.
President Kennedy read Macdonald's review of
Michael Harrington's book on
poverty in the United States,
The Other America, as a major factor in the start of Kennedy's plan for a war on poverty, which President Johnson adopted after Kennedy's assassination. In
The New Republic essay "The Browbeater" on 23 November 2011,
Franklin Foer accused Macdonald of being a hatchet-man for
high culture, going on to say that in his
Masscult and Midcult: Against The American Grain (2011), a new edition of
Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture (1962), Macdonald's cultural criticism "culminated in a plea for
highbrows to escape from the
mass culture" that dominates the mainstream of American society. Macdonald, Foer suggests, would welcome a time when "highbrows would flee to their own hermetic little world, where they could produce
art for one another, while resolutely ignoring the masses." Cultural critic and historian
Louis Menand, writing in
The New Yorker, argued that "Macdonald was not a prude. He was not in the business of blaming people for enjoying what they enjoyed or admiring what they admired. His business was getting people to realize that they were often not actually enjoying or benefitting from the cultural goods they had been persuaded to patronize," those cultural goods being what Macdonald labeled "Midcult"—ostensibly "sophisticated" cultural products intended for mass consumption. In the book
Dwight Macdonald on Culture: The Happy Warrior of the Mind, Reconsidered (2013), Tadeusz Lewandowski argued that Macdonald's approach to cultural questions as a
public intellectual placed him in the conservative tradition of the British cultural critic
Matthew Arnold, of whom he was the literary heir in the 20th century. Previously, in the field of
cultural studies Macdonald was placed among the radical traditions of
the New York Intellectuals (left-wing anti-Stalinists) and of the Marxist
Frankfurt School. ==Political radical renewed==