Mencken on the Occasional Exception

Mencken on the Occasional Exception

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 occasional exception, pages 124-126 and 128-130. Below is an overview of his discussion on the occasional exception; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken acknowledges that “a man of unquestionable integrity and ability occasionally gets to the bench, even of the State courts. In the same way a man of unquestionable integrity and ability sometimes finds himself in high executive or legislative office; there are even a few cases of such men getting into the White House.” When such a man does get elected, it happens because of “a failure of the rule.” However, “[t]he self-respecting candidate obviously cannot count on that failure: the odds are heavily against him from the start, and every effort he makes to diminish them involves some compromise with complete candour. He may take refuge in cynicism, and pursue the cozening of the populace as a sort of intellectual exercise, cruel but not unamusing, or he may accept the conditions of the game resignedly, and charge up the necessary dodges and false pretences to spiritual profit and loss, as a chorus girl charges up her favours to the manager and his backer; but in either case he has parted with something that must be tremendously valuable to a self-respecting man, and is even more valuable to the country he serves than it is to himself.”
    Most members of the U.S. House of Representatives have compromised their honor [if they began with any honor]. “They have been broken . . . [and] have learned how to leap through the hoops of professional job-mongers.” Furthermore, they keep quiet about good causes and speak on causes known to be evil. “The higher they rise, the farther they fall.” [Senator Jesse Helms is an example of such a man. He entered the Senate as an honorable man of integrity. The longer he served, the lower he fell. By his last term, he was little more than a puppet of the Israeli-Zionist lobby.]
    “The occasional mavericks . . . last a session, and then disappear. The old Congressman, the veteran of genuine influence and power, is either one who is so stupid that the ideas of the mob are his own ideas, or one so far gone in charlatanry that he is unconscious of his shame.” [Most speakers of the House and Senate presidents pro tempore are examples of the former. Senator John McCain is an extreme example of the latter.]
    Unfortunately, the laws are made mostly “by men who have sold their honour for their jobs, and they are executed by men who put their jobs above justice and common sense.” Mencken concludes, “We are dependent for whatever good flows out of democracy upon men who do not believe in democracy.”
    “The democratic politician . . . tries to save his amour propre [self-esteem] in a characteristically human way; that is to say, he denies them. . . . The democratic politician, confronted by the dishonesty and stupidity of his master, the mob, tries to convince himself and all the rest of us that it is really full of rectitude and wisdom.” Mencken adds, “This notion that the mob is wise . . . is not to be taken seriously: it was invented by mob-masters to save their faces.”
    Then Mencken remarks, “The best democratic statesmanship, like the best non-democratic statesmanship, tends to safeguard the honour of the higher officers of state by relieving them of that degrading necessity [of going to the mob for support].” Consequently, the president of the United States is not elected by popular vote.
    He adds that when an “office becomes steeped in intolerable corruption, . . . [it should be taken] out of the gift of the mob and make . . . appointive.” Nevertheless, “[t]he aspirant, of course, still has to seek it, for under democracy it is very rare that office seeks the man, but seeking it of the President, or even of the Governor of a State, is felt to be appreciably less humiliating and debasing than seeking it of the mob.”

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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