In 1929, Macdonald was employed at Time magazine; he had been offered a job by Henry Luce, a fellow Yale alumnus.
[8] As an editor, he fostered intellectuals (academic and public), such as Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Bruno Bettelheim, and C. Wright Mills.
In the 1960s, the quality of his movie-review work for Esquire granted Macdonald public exposure in the American cultural mainstream as a movie reviewer for The Today Show, a daytime television talk-show program.
[12][13][14][15] At the same time, Macdonald was fiercely critical of the illiberal policies that elected democratic governments introduced in the name of opposing fascism and Bolshevism.
Over the course of World War II (1939–1945), he suffered from increased fatigue and psychological depression as he observed the progressive horrors of the war, especially the commonplace practice of the bombing of civilian populations and the destruction of entire cities, in particular the fire bombing of Dresden (February 1945), as well as the mistreatment of German civilians.
[12][15][16] In that vein, when debating East–West politics with the writer Norman Mailer in 1952, Macdonald said that if absolutely forced to choose a side (which he agreed with Mailer was not necessary in most cases but rather only in a limited number), he would reluctantly side with the Western bloc because he regarded Bolshevism as the greatest single threat to civilization worldwide in the post-war era.
[12][19] 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: To make the Bible readable in the modern sense means to flatten out, tone down, and convert into tepid expository prose what in [the King James Version] is wild, full of awe, poetic, and passionate.
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.
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.
[27] The social historian Maurice Isserman said that the War on Poverty (1964) derived from the Johnson administration's having noticed the sociological report of The Other America by way of Macdonald's book-review essay.
[29] Likewise, along with the American public intellectuals Mitchell Goodman, Henry Braun, Denise Levertov, Noam Chomsky, and William Sloane Coffin, Macdonald signed the antiwar manifesto "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" (12 October 1967) and was a member of RESIST, a non-profit organization for coordinating grass-roots political work.