"[The young British] see standards as inhibiting. I see them as defining. They see tradition as deadening. I see it as nourishing. It may be that, as an American, I idealize the British situation. But I hope not as absurdly as they idealize ours. In 1959 I gave a talk on mass culture at a Universities & Left Review forum in London. I expected the audience, which was much younger than I, to object to my lack of enthusiasm for socialism, though it was distressing to find them still talking about capitalism and the working class in the simplistic terms I hadn’t heard since I left the Trotskyists; the problems we thought about in the ’thirties seem to be just coming up now in England; the illusions we were forced to abandon seem still current there. But what I was not prepared for was the reaction to my attacks on our mass culture. These were resented in the name of democracy. Hollywood to me was an instance of the exploitation rather than the satisfying of popular tastes. But to some of those who took the floor after my talk, Hollywood was a genuine expression of the masses. They seemed to think it snobbish of me to criticize our movies and television from a serious viewpoint. Since I had been criticizing Hollywood for some thirty years, and always with the good conscience one has when one is attacking from the Left, this proletarian defense of our peculiar institution left me rather dazed.

- Dwight MacDonald on an early form of British poptimism