Mencken on the Democratic Man

Mencken on the Democratic Man

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes the democratic man, pages 9-15. Below is an overview of his discussion on the democratic man; my comments are in brackets.
    Emerging “as Rousseau’s noble savage in smock and jerkin,” the democratic man came forth “to shame the lords and masters of the civilized lands.” Being at the bottom of the social scale, i.e., being inferior, he acquired “a mystical merit, an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude” that “by some strange magic became sort of superiority — nay, the superiority of superiorities.”
    Thus, enlighten countries have moved evermore “toward the completer and more enamoured enfranchisement of the lower orders.” For, in this democratic man “lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom, unpolluted by the corruption of privilege.” Whatever baffles statesmen, the democratic man can solve “instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition.”
    Moreover, his “yearnings are pure.” Only he is “capable of a perfect patriotism,” and in him “is the only hope of peace and happiness on this lugubrious ball.” [If true, no hope exists for peace. The democratic man is as much of a warmonger as are the aristocrat and the upper class; only his wars are far more brutal and destructive as World War I and World War II demonstrate.] Thus, “[t]he cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!”
    This notion of the democratic man “originated in the poetic fancy of gentlemen on the upper levels — sentimentalists who, observing to their distress that the ass was over-laden, proposed to reform transport by putting him into the cart.” These gentlemen were “the direct ancestors of the more saccharine Liberals of to-day, who yet mouth their tattered phrases and dream their preposterous dreams.”
    Then Mencken gives a description of the rise of the democratic man during the French Revolution. “Early democratic man seems to have given little thought to the democratic ideal, and less veneration. What he wanted was something concrete and highly materialistic — more to eat, less work, higher wages, lower taxes. He had no apparent belief in the acroamatic virtue of his own class, and certainly none in its capacity to rule.” [Thus, the democratic man seems to have shown more common sense than his aristocratic overlords and other members of the upper class who propelled him into governing.] Extermination of the baron was not his goal; his goal was “to bring the baron back to a proper discharge of baronial business.” In his attempt to force the barons back to baronial business, the baronage ended and others from among the democratic man took the barons’ place. The democratic man quickly showed his “opinion of them by butchering them deliberately and in earnest.” Once the blood began flowing, “it was a great deal more dangerous to be a tribune of the people than to be an ornament of the old order.” “[H]aving been misled into killing its King in 1793,” the democratic man “devoted the next two years to killing those who had misled” him. Then he got another king [Napoleon], “with an attendant herd of barons, counts, marquises and dukes, some of them new but most of them old, to guard, symbolize and execute his sovereignty.” So overjoyed was the democratic man at the return of a king, “that half France leaped to suicide that their glory might blind the world.”
    The blood flow in Europe slowed the rise of the democratic man. However, America had been spared such slaughters; thus, the popularity of the democratic man rose more quickly in the United States.
    Nevertheless, the conditions of the democratic man improved. “Once a slave, he was now only a serf. Once condemned to silence, he was now free to criticize his masters, and even to flout them, and the ordinances of God with them. As he gained skill and fluency at that sombre and fascinating art, he began to heave in wonder at his own merit. He was not only, it appeared, free to praise and damn, challenge and remonstrate; he was also gifted with a peculiar rectitude of thought and will, and a high talent for ideas, particularly on the political plane. So his wishes, in his mind, began to take on the dignity of legal rights, and after a while, of intrinsic and natural rights, and by the same token the wishes of his masters sank to the level of mere ignominious lusts. By 1828 in America and by 1848 in Europe the doctrine had arisen that all moral excellence, and with it all pure and unfettered sagacity, resided in the inferior four-fifths of mankind.” [In 1828, the supporters of Andrew Jackson formed today’s Democratic party got Jackson elected President.]
    Then in 1867, a philosopher [Marx] arose from the gutter and declared “that the superior minority had no virtues at all, and hence no rights at all — that the world belonged exclusively and absolutely to those who hewed its wood and drew its water.” Within a few decades, “he had more followers in the world, open and covert, than any other sophist since the age of the Apostles.” [Today, in the United States, his disciples dominate the Progressives, Liberals, Neo-conservatives, the Democratic party, and even the Republican party.] As the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union showed, this extreme philosophy had some problems. [Unfortunately, for Americans, the followers of the ruling elite have learned little from the experience of the Soviet Union, as the ruling elite is trying to turn the United States into its version of the United Soviet States of America.]
    The failure of the democratic man’s dictatorship of the proletariat did not slow the march of the democratic man. World War I was fought in the name of democracy, and all the defeated countries embraced it “with loud hosannas.” All Christendom now embraced the fundamental axioms of democracy: “(a) that the great masses of men have an inalienable right, born of the very nature of things, to govern themselves, and (b) that they are competent to do it.” [Viewing all the democratic and so-called democratic countries of the world brings into question that the democratic man is competent to govern. They present an argument much greater that he lacks the competence to govern.] When the democratic man is  “detected in gross and lamentable imbecilities,” it is because he is “misinformed by those who would exploit [him]: the remedy is more education.” [Education is the solution to all problems in a democratic society, even when, or especially when, education means indoctrination.] If, at times, he is “a trifle naughty, even swinish, . . . it is only a natural reaction against the oppressions [he] suffer[s]: the remedy is to deliver them.”
    Further, liberation of the democratic man is the “central aim of all the Christian governments of to-day,” which seek to augment his power. Moreover, a good government is one that “responds most quickly and accurately” to the desires and ideas of the democratic man. A bad government is one that “conditions [his] omnipotence and puts a question mark after [his] omniscience.”
    [Mencken’s description of the democratic man is a fairly accurate description of the typical supporters of the Democratic party and the typical supporters of RINOs {Republicans in name only}. Perhaps, this is because, as Mencken notes, the ancestors of Liberals and Progressives are the progenitors of democracy, i.e., ever expanding suffrage.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Allen.

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