Mencken on Corruption Under Democracy

Mencken on Corruption Under Democracy

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 corruption under democracy, pages 187-203. Below is an overview of his discussion on corruption under democracy; my comments are in brackets.
    Nine-tenth of the Puritan and democrat is “cruelty, envy and cowardice.” About the early Puritans of New England, Mencken writes, “He was not only a very carnal fellow, and given to lamentable transactions with loose women and fiery jugs; he was also a virtuoso of sharp practices, and to this day his feats in that department survive in fable.” Then he notes that no perceptible improvements have been found in his successors.
    Mencken remarks, “A sixth of the Americano’s income is rooked out of him by rogues who have at him officially, and in the name of the government; half the remainder goes to sharpers who prefer the greater risks and greater profits of private enterprise.” [Today, the government gets half and the sharpers still get half, if not more, of the remainder. Thus, they typical American has much less to live on than he did in the 1920s.] “All schemes to save him from such victimizations have failed in the past, and all of them . . . are bound to fail in the future.”
    Dreaming eternally of utopia makes the democratic man easy “prey to shibboleths, and those that fetch him in his political capacity are more than matched by those that fetch him in his role of private citizen.” The poor old democrat is always facing schemes “full of virtuous pretences,” only to discover that “they are unmitigated swindles.” [Pick your favorite federal program as an example.]
    “All observers of democracy . . . have marvelled at its corruptions on the political side.” Democracy brings bribery, “and thus destroy[s] the integrity and authority of the State.” [In a democracy, incumbent politicians are notorious for bribing voters with money from the public treasury and businesses with subsidizes and special privileges. Also, lobbyists are notorious for bribing politicians with contribution to their election campaigns and by other means. Foreign governmental officials bribed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with donations to the Clinton Foundation.] Historians marvel that such blatant bribery occurs in a democracy “and marvel even more that democracy takes them calmly, and even lightly.” Democracy seems to accept bribery as inevitable and natural. Commenting on corruption during the Harding administration, Mencken states that a “small body of specialists in rectitude . . . ventured to protest, and in the end they found themselves far more unpopular than the thieves.” [Whenever a whistle blower presents evidence of corruption and even crimes by high-ranking personnel of the U.S. government, most often the whistle blower is persecuted and often prosecuted while the culprit remains unmolested and goes free.]
    Although “[s]uch phenomena . . . puzzle the more academic pathologists of democracy, . . . they seem to be in strict accord with God’s invariable laws.” Then Mencken asks, “Why should democracy rise against bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale bribery.” He adds, “In place of a government with a fixed purpose and a visible goal, it sets up a government that is a mere function of the mob’s vagaries, and that maintains itself by constantly bargaining with those vagaries. Its security depends wholly upon providing satisfactory bribes for the prehensible minorities that constitute the mob, or that have managed to deceive and inflame the mob.” [Thus, bribery is an essential, vital part of democracy.] “The whole process of government under democracy . . . is a process of” granting privileges and benefits to various groups in exchange for granting privileges and benefits to other groups. Moreover, “[t]he very head of the State, having no title to his office save that which lies in the popular will, is forced to haggle and bargain like the lowliest office-seeker.” [Many third-world countries have solved this problem by having  their president elected for life — life being until assassinated or overthrown by some rival gang.] Mencken continues, “There has been no President of the United States since Washington who did not go into office with a long list of promises in his pocket, and nine-tenths of them have always been promises of private reward from the public store. It is surely not regarded as immoral by the democratic ethic to make and execute such promises, though statesmen of lofty pretensions, e.g., Lincoln, sometimes deny having made them.” He adds, “What is reproached as immoral is making them, and then not keeping them.”
    Commenting on the foreign policies of the United States, Mencken writes, “That the United States, in its foreign relations, has descended to gross deceits and tergiversations since the earliest days of the Republic was long ago pointed out by Lecky; it is regarded universally to-day as a pious fraud — which is to say, as a Puritan.” [What would one expect from foreign policies developed and controlled by Yankees? Historically, the United States have been notorious for betraying its friends and aiding its enemies — especially during the Cold War, when they betrayed nearly every ally whose government actively opposed Communism. One of the most detestable of these acts was the U.S. government betraying one its World War II allies, Chiang Kai-shek, in favor of Mao and his communist regime.]
    Next Mencken comments on democracy’s domestic relations. “The government deals with the citizens from whom it has its mandate in a base and disingenuous manner, and fails completely to maintain equal justice among them. It not only follows the majority in persecuting those who happen to be unpopular; it also institutes persecutions of its own, and frequently against men of the greatest rectitude and largest public usefulness.”
    About the Department of Justice, he remarks, “It has been engaged in sharp practices since the earliest days, and remains a fecund source of oppression and corruption to-day.” [Nothing has changed. Many lovers of liberty refer to it as the “Department of Injustice.”] Moreover, “it has actually resorted to perjury in its efforts to undo men guilty of flouting it, and at all times it has laboured valiantly to nullify the guarantees of the Bill of Rights.” [It still does today.]
    “As Mill long ago pointed out, the tyranny of the majority under democracy is not only shown in oppressive laws, but also in a usurped power to suspend the operation of laws that are just.” [John Stuart Mill {1806–1873} was an English philosopher, political economist and civil servant.] To this observation, Mencken adds, “In this enterprise a democratic government always marches ahead of the majority. Even more than the most absolute oriental despotism, it becomes a government of men, not of laws. Its favourites are, to all intents and purposes, immune to criminal processes, whatever their offences, and its enemies are exposed to espionage and persecution of the most aggravated sort.” [We see this today in America’s multitiered “justice” system. The well-connected people, such as Hillary Clinton, are not even charged when they commit crimes that would send a commoner to prison for life. On the other hand, people whose “crime” is merely supporting the Bill of Rights are prosecuted with full vigor and resources of the Department of “Justice” and are charged with a multitude of crimes. These people are usually convicted by a corrupt court system and are sentenced to the maximum possible term in prison. Likewise, specially protected groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the anti-Confederate protestors can violate all sorts of laws with impunity. Although politicians frequently prattle that we have a government of laws and not of men, the opposite is true.] Above all, the government “always shows that characteristically Puritan habit: . . . to wit, of inflicting as much mental suffering as possible upon its victims.”
    Next Mencken writes, “The constant and central aim of every democratic government is to silence criticism of itself. It begins to weaken, i.e., the jobs of its component rogues begin to be insecure, the instant such criticism rises. It is thus fidei defensor [defender of the faith] before it is anything else, and its whole power, legal and extra-legal, is thrown against the sceptic who challenges its infallibility. Constitutional checks have little effect upon its operations, for the only machinery for putting them into effect is under its control.” [Thus, the necessity of a well-armed citizenry — one that outguns the government.] Mencken continues, “No ruler, indeed, ever wants to be a constitutional ruler, and least of all the ruler whose reign has a term, and who must make hay, in consequence, while the sun shines. . . . No man would want to be President of the United States in strict accordance with the Constitution. There is no sense of power in merely executing laws; it comes from evading or augmenting them.”
    Mencken writes, “ I incline to think that this view of government as a group of men struggling for power and profit, in the face and at the expense of the generality of men, has its place somewhere in the dark recesses of the popular mind, and that it accounts, at least in large part, for the toleration with which public corruption is regarded in democratic states. Democratic man, to begin with, is corrupt himself: he will take whatever he can safely get, law or no law. He assumes, naturally and accurately, that the knaves and mountebanks who govern him are of the same kidney.” Democratic man is not shocked “to find them running true to the ordinances of their nature. If, indeed, any individual among them shows an unusual rectitude, and refuses spectacularly to take what might be his for the grabbing, Homo boobiens sets him down as either a liar or an idiot, and refuses to admire him.” [Does this explain in part the popularity of Presidents Clinton and Obama, who grabbed all they could?] “Democratic man is stupid, but he is not so stupid that he does not see the government as a group of men devoted to his exploitation that is, as a group external to his own group, and with antagonistic interests.” Moreover, democratic man believes that the government’s “central aim is to squeeze as much out of him as he can be forced to yield, and so he sees no immorality in attempting a contrary squeeze when the opportunity offers. Beating the government thus becomes a transaction devoid of moral turpitude.”
    Capitalism is secure in democratic societies. “Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of Capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations.” [The type of capitalism described by Mencken should be called crony capitalism. It certainly is not free market capitalism. Under crony capitalism, capitalists use their control of the government, usually from behind the scene, to give themselves subsidies, contracts, and special privileges and to penalize competitors. Moreover, Mencken seems to contradict himself. Earlier in his book he describes the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as being democratic; however, the economy under it was not capitalistic in any form. Nevertheless, being by nature democratic, socialism is much more compatible with democracy than any form of capitalism.]
    Mencken notes, “An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker; but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it.”
    Mencken observes that “the average American banker or business man, whatever his demerits otherwise, is at least more competent professionally than the average American statesman, musician, painter, author, Labour leader, scholar, theologian or politician.” [Perhaps this is why big bankers and big businessmen are the real power controlling the government.] Then Mencken notes, “The capitalists, in fact, run the country, as they run all democracies. . . . They organize and control the minorities that struggle eternally for power, and so get a gradually firmer grip upon the government. . . [T]hey [the capitalists] dispose of . . . [the] demagogues . . . and put the helm of state into the hands of trusted and reliable men.”
                                               
Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More political articles.