Mencken on Lame Ducks

Mencken on Lame Ducks

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 lame ducks, pages 148-154. Below is an overview of his discussion on the lame ducks; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken considers one of the “unpleasant by-products of democracy . . . [to be the] professional politicians who, in the eternal struggle for office and its rewards, have suffered crushing defeats, and are full of rage and bitterness.”
    Under democracy, all politics resolve “into a series of dynastic questions: the objective is always the job, not the principle.” Usually, the defeated candidate “takes his failure very badly, for it leaves him stripped bare. In most cases his fellow professionals take pity on him and put him into some more or less gaudy appointive office, to preserve his livelihood and save his face.” [Hillary Clinton illustrates excellently the abjection of the defeated candidate. Unfortunately for her, but fortunately for the country, no one has pitied her enough to appoint her to some office. However, no appointive position will alleviate her pain.]
    However, for some defeat is so painful that an appointed position will not assuage the pain. “This majestic victim not infrequently seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what remains of his influence with the mob into a weapon against the nation as a whole, and becomes a chronic maker of trouble.” He discusses six examples: Clay, Calhoun, Burr, Blaine, Theodore Roosevelt, and Bryan. [Hillary Clinton is a recent example.]
    Mencken remarks that countries under “despotism escape such lamentable exhibitions of human frailty” of the unsuccessful aspirants for office under democracy. “Unsuccessful aspirants for the crown are either butchered out of hand or exiled to Paris, where tertiary lues quickly disposes of them.” Continuing, he writes, “The Crown Prince, of course, has his secret thoughts, and no doubt they are sometimes homicidal, but he is forced by etiquette to keep them to himself, and so the people are not annoyed and injured by them. He cannot go about praying publicly that the King, his father, come down with endocarditis, nor can he denounce the old gentleman as an idiot and advocate his confinement in a maison de santi.” [Nevertheless, dictators of communist countries have ordered the extermination of millions of their countrymen.] Although everyone “knows what his hopes and yearnings are, but no one has to listen to them.” However, “[u]nder democracy, they are bellowed from every stump.”

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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