Mencken on the Future of Democracy

Mencken on the Future of 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 the future of democracy, pages 207-224. Below is an overview of his discussion on the future of democracy; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken does not know if democracy will survive until the end of the age — the Second Coming. Nevertheless, democracy “came into the world as a cure-all, and it remains primarily a cure-all to this day. Any boil upon the body politic, however vast and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote; any flux of blood may be stopped by passing a law.” Under democracy “[t]he aim of government is to repeal the laws of nature, and re-enact them with moral amendments.” Thus, “[w]ar becomes simply a device to end war.” Moreover, “[t]he State, a mystical emanation from the mob, takes on a transcendental potency and acquires the power to make over the father which begat it.”
    Under democracy, nothing “remains inscrutable and beyond remedy, not even the way of a man with a maid. It was not so under the ancient and accursed systems of despotism, now happily purged out of the world. They, too . . . had certain pretensions of an Homeric gaudiness, but they at least refrained from attempts to abolish sin, poverty, stupidity, cowardice, and other such immutable realities.” [Thus, democracy has its war on poverty, war on drugs, war on the male and female sexes, war on racism, war on Confederate monuments, war on Christianity {Mencken may have approved of this war}, war on common sense, war on ____ {you fill in the blank}.] In the time of absolute monarchs, the “evils of the world were incurable: one put off the quest for a perfect moral order until one got to heaven.” Consequently, “a scheme of checks and balances [arose] that was consummate and completely satisfactory, for it could not be put to a test, and the logical holes in it were chinked with miracles. But no more. To-day the Holy Saints are deposed. Now each and every human problem swings into the range of practical politics.”   He continues, “Democracy becomes a substitute for the old religion, and the antithesis of it.” [Today, all issues have been politicized. Thus, everything preached in a church relates to politics — so much for the separation of church and state unless churches cease to exist, of which Mencken might have approved.]
    Mencken notes that democracy “shows all the magical potency of the great systems of faith. It has the power to enchant and disarm; it is not vulnerable to logical attack.” For proof, he comments on James Bryce’s Modern Democracy. Bryce “amasses incontrovertible evidence that democracy doesn’t work — and then concludes with a stout declaration that it does.” Then he cites “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, with its argument that the North fought the Civil War to save self-government to the world! — a thesis echoed in falsetto, and by feebler men, fifty years later.”
    Continuing, Mencken remarks, “There is, in the human mind, a natural taste for such hocus-pocus. It greatly simplifies the process of ratiocination, which is unbearably painful to the great majority of men. . . . No doubt there is an explanation here of the long-continued popularity of the dogma of the Trinity, which remains unstated in plain terms after two thousand years.”
    He continues, “Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. One cannot discuss it without colliding with preposterous postulates, all of them cherished like authentic hairs from the whiskers of Moses himself.” An example is the “acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved.” Corollaries to this belief “are even more naive. One, for example, is to the general effect that optimism is a virtue in itself — that there is a mysterious merit in being hopeful and of glad heart, even in the presence of adverse and immovable facts. This curious notion turns the glittering wheels of Rotary, and is the motive power of the political New Thoughters called Liberals.”
    Mencken illustrates Liberal optimism with the League of Nations — which offered “superb clinical material to the student of democratic psychopathology.” The Liberal “began by arguing that the League would save the world.” [The same is seen with its descendant, the United Nations.] According to Mencken, “this sweet democratic axiom . . . is, fundamentally, what is the matter with the United States.”
    In spite of its multitude of flaws, Mencken believes that democracy “has some valuable merits.” He argues “that its [democracy] manifest defects, if they are ever to be got rid of at all, must be got rid of by examining them realistically.” For this to be accomplished, democracy must cease being a religion. Mencken has found no evidence that would convince “an ordinary jury, that vox populi is actually vox Dei. The proofs, indeed, run the other way. [In the Bible, God always chooses a spokesman of one and never chooses the majority.] The life of the inferior man is one long protest against the obstacles that God interposes to the attainment of his dreams, and democracy, if it is anything at all, is simply one way of getting round those obstacles.” Thus, democracy “represents, not a jingling echo of what seems to be the divine will, but a raucous defiance of it.” According to Mencken, democracy is truly civilized when it is “an effort to remedy the blunders and check the cruel humours of the Cosmic Kaiser.” [Thus, the primary usefulness of democracy is overcoming God.]
    Mencken states that “democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be.” Then he comments on some of the “paradoxes in its philosophy,” some of which “have a suicidal smack.” For example, “[i]t offers John Doe a means to rise above his place beside Richard Roe, and then, by making Roe his equal, it takes away the chief usufructs of the rising. . . . [T]he history of democratic states is a history of disingenuous efforts to get rid of the second half of that dilemma. There is not only the natural yearning of Doe to use and enjoy the superiority that he has won; there is also the natural tendency of Roe, as an inferior man, to acknowledge it.” Mencken adds, “Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them. . . . [Further,] [d]emocratic man . . . is quite unable to think of himself as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear and loneliness and the group, of course, must have its leaders.”
    Mencken remarks that “there is a form of human striving that is understood by democratic man . . . and that is the striving for money. Thus the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it.” [This is the Puritan mentality at work: Acquiring wealth is all-important.] However, a plutocracy “lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage — above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal.” [Actually, the plutocracy does have a goal: the acquisition of absolute power. Anyway, the heads of multinational corporations and big banks fit Mencken’s description of a plutocrat.] The most all-powerful plutocrat comes “out of the mob only yesterday — and from the mob they bring all its peculiar ignobilities.” [Examples are the billionaires in the high technology industry and multimillionaires in entertainment and sports.] “As practically encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the honnete homme [gentleman] as it stands from the Holy Saints.” The main characteristic of the plutocracy is its incurable timorousness; it is for ever grasping at the straws held out by demagogues.” Mencken claims, “Half a dozen gabby Jewish youths, meeting in a back room to plan a revolution . . . are enough to scare it half to death.” [Today, as was the situation when Mencken wrote, the plutocrats would be backing these “gabby Jewish youths” — guiding, inspiring, and financing them.]
    Mencken continues, “The plutocracy . . . is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men: it is not by accident that Christianity, a mob religion, paves heaven with gold and precious stones, i.e., with money.” However, “reactions against this ignoble ideal among men of more civilized tastes, even in democratic states [do occur], and sometimes they arouse the mob to a transient distrust of certain of the plutocratic pretensions. But that distrust seldom arises above mere envy, and the polemic which engenders it is seldom sound in logic or impeccable in motive.”
    A plutocracy lacks the disinterestedness of an aristocracy. No body of opinion stands behind a plutocracy that is a free opinion. “Its chief exponents, by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another which is to say, men chiefly marked by their haunting fear of losing their jobs. Living under such terrors, with the plutocracy policing them harshly on one side and the mob congenitally suspicious of them on the other, it is no wonder that their revolt usually peters out in metaphysics, and that they tend to abandon it as their families grow up, and the costs of heresy become prohibitive. The pedagogue, in the long run, shows the virtues of the Congressman, the newspaper editorial writer or the butler, not those of the aristocrat.” If the pedagogue “persists in contumacy beyond thirty, it is only too commonly a sign, not that he is heroic, but simply that he is pathological.” He is a fanatic and not a statesman.
    “Thus politics, under democracy, resolves itself into impossible alternatives[:] . .  . the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.” Mencken remarks that “what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into a workable system.” That is, what democracy “needs beyond everything is a party of liberty.” Mencken concludes, “It [democracy] produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, just as despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them in the same drum-head way. It will never have a party of them until it invents and installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them.
    Mencken closes with democracy “is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. . . . It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as every one knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. . . . More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world — that he is genuinely running things. . . . [He is convinced] that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters.” Moreover, happiness for the democrat is illusionary. “The seeds of his disaster . . . lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naive delusion . . . that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow. . . . Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. . . . [Thus,] the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the spectator.” Mencken contends, “The fraud of democracy . . . is more amusing than any other — more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion.”
    [Most of Mencken’s animosities toward religion as presented in this book seems to flow primarily from Methodists and Baptists of the South and West with some minor input from the New England religions. Their support of Prohibition, creationism, censorship, and general opposition to vice seems to be the major cause of his rancor toward religion. Moreover, Mencken seems to judge Christianity by the charlatan, scoundrels, buffoons, fanatics, Puritans, sharpies, shysters, and ignoramuses who speak in its name rather than by the words on which it is founded. If he studied the Bible instead of relying on those who claim to speak for God, he may have still concluded that religion, Christianity, is a fraud. {For all that I know, he may have done this.} However, his judgment would be based on the Bible and not what others claim about it or say about it. Unfortunately, too many Christians take the lazy and easy way out by following the charlatan, scoundrels, buffoons, fanatics, Puritans, sharpies, shysters, and ignoramuses instead of studying the Bible themselves. Most of the problems that Mencken associates with Christianity come from these lazy Christians taking the easy road of following the wrong leaders.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More political articles.

A Letter: Comparison of Secession of the Baltic States to the Southern States

A Letter: Comparison of Secession of the Baltic States to the Southern States

Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: The following is a letter written in 1990 responding to Mr. Howard Ruff about an article that he wrote for his newsletter, “The Ruff Times.”]

    In your speech for Bush to give Gorbachev, your analogy with the Southern States fighting for freedom and independence fails on all points. Gorbachev is correct. He is analogous to Lincoln. The Soviet Union is analogous to the United States. The Baltic States are analogous to the Southern States.
    True, South Carolina voluntarily entered the Union. It had the right under the Tenth Amendment to voluntarily leave the Union. Nowhere did (and nowhere does) the United States Constitution deny a State the right to secede. Moreover, both Virginia and New York entered the Union on the expressed condition that they could leave it at will. Until 1861, almost every political scientist and political philosopher in America believed that a State had the legal right to secede freely in peace.
    True, South Carolina did not subject its ordinance of secession to a plebiscite. Some Southern States did, although their plebiscite would not qualify under your criteria because they were undemocratic in that they did not allow women or Blacks to vote, but what State or country did allow women and Blacks to vote in the mid-nineteenth century? South Carolina’s secession convention was popularly elected to consider secession as were all the other secession conventions in the other Southern States. Even without a plebiscite, the support, sacrifice, and loyalty shown by a majority of the woman and Blacks of the South for the cause of Southern independence showed that secession did have popular support even among the disfranchised.
    If denying women and Blacks the right to vote is to deny legitimacy to political action, then the action undertaken by Lincoln and the North would have to be illegal because neither woman nor Blacks were allowed to vote for or against Lincoln or other Northern political leaders. In fact, following your theory that secession is illegal unless supported by a plebiscite in which women and Blacks are allowed to vote, the founding of the United States was (and remains) illegal and unacceptable. The secession of the colonies from Great Britain was not supported by any plebiscite. Not only were women and Blacks not allowed to vote on the question, but neither were white male property owners. To follow your democratic argument to its logical conclusion, everything that the United States did politically before 1920 was illegal because women did not have the right to vote.
    False, Lincoln did not wage war to end slavery. Midway through the war when ending slavery became politically expedient, he did issue his Emancipation Proclamation. However, not only did he not have any legal authority to issue the proclamation, he did not free a single slave with it. His proclamation proclaimed freedom to slaves in areas under the control of the Confederate army while excluding slaves in areas under the control of the Union army.
    Lincoln opposed secession by the Southern States for many of the same reasons that Gorbachev opposes secession by the Baltic States.  Both lusted for power and empire. Still, more important, both wanted the wealth of the seceding States. Lincoln said that he did not care if the Southern States seceded if the United States continued to collect the taxes (tariffs).
    The modern Baltic States came into being in 1917/1918 when they seceded, with the help of Germany, from the Russian Empire just like the Southern Confederation came into being when several Southern States seceded from the United States and then formed the Confederate States of America. During World War II, Russia conquered her lost provinces of the Baltic States and reincorporated them into the Soviet Union just like the United States conquered the Southern States and reincorporated them into the United States. After 1940, the Baltic States became conquered territories just like the Southern States after in 1865. The Baltic States had less of a legal right to secede in 1917-1918 than the Southern States had in 1860-1861. The Baltic States have just as much or just as little right to secede as the Southern States have today.
    If the United States were to support the Baltic States, they would have to admit, if they were at least slightly honest, that they were wrong in subjugating the Southern States in 1861–1865. The Southern States had (and still have) just as much right to leave the United States as the Baltic States have to leave the Soviet Union.
    Another reason that the United States offer no support to the Baltic States is quid pro quo. Russia supported the United States in their suppression of Southern independence. Now the United States can return the favor by supporting the Soviet Union in its suppression of Baltic independence.
    Perhaps the most important reason that the United States refuse to support the Baltic States drive for independence is that the official foreign policy of the United States has been since World War I, and still is, to support and expand communism and the Soviet Empire at all cost to freedom. [With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States have replaced their support of the Soviet Union with support of China and have made China an industrial giant.]
    The United States should show the Soviet Union and the rest of the world by example how to treat secession. They should let the Southern States create a free and independent confederation of free and independent Southern State and let them go in peace and friendship. Then the Soviet Union could learn how to let go of the Baltic States. All that the United States have shown the Soviet Union and the rest of the world is how to stifle freedom and independence by stifling secession. [As events turned out, the reverse is true. The Soviet Union allowed the Baltic States to secede in peace and friendship. Thus, it gave the United States the example to follow in the treatment of seceding States. Will the United States learn from the now-defunct Soviet Union about the proper treatment of secession?]
    Gorbachev is correct in claiming that he is acting like Lincoln. The argument that he is not acting like Lincoln is an untenable, unconvincing, and invalid argument. To admit that Lincoln was a despot and his suppression of Southern independence was tyrannical and to argue that when Gorbachev emulates Lincoln, he is nothing more than a despot copying Lincoln’s tyrannical methods, is much more tenable, cogent, and valid.

Copyright © 1990, 2019 by Thomas C. Allen.

More political articles.

A Letter: Communist Democracy, Genocide, Fascism

A Letter: Communist Democracy, Genocide, Fascism

Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: The following is a letter written in 1990 responding to Mr. Howard Ruff about an article that he wrote for his newsletter, “The Ruff Times.”]

    I agree with your comments in the March 12, 1990, issue of “The Ruff Times” about the dangers of Gorbachev consolidating power in his hands. Anyone who prefers liberty to despotism seeks to decentralize and disperse power rather than to centralize and concentrate it as Gorbachev is doing.
    However, I disagree with you that “communist democracy” is an oxymoron, much less the oxymoron of the year. Enclosed is a short article that I wrote for the “Southern National Newsletter” about a year ago in which I aver that democracy is much more compatible with and akin to socialism, of which communism is just one branch, than a free market economy and that democracy has little to do with freedom — at least in the sense that freedom was thought of before the coming of the welfare state. If you want to pursue an oxymoron, try the ever-popular, ever-present oxymoron “Judeo-Christian.” [Judaism teaches that Jesus was a bastard, sorcerer, blasphemer, and worse. How does that compare the teachings of the Christian New Testament about Jesus?]
    As for South Africa, your prognostication is not as dismal as mine. The Afrikaner is on his way to extinction. The genocide of the Afrikaner will be both by the more traditional violent method typically practiced in Africa and by the more subtle method typically practiced in the United States and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. [The Black controlled government of South Africa is now actively promoting genociding the Afrikaner and other White South Africans.] Most likely, Apartheid will win in the end. As the various South African tribes war with each other for supremacy, South Africa will become divided into several countries. There will be only four winners: the Black African leaders who survive to become dictators, the British multinational corporations, the international bankers, and the Soviet Union. [We can now omit the Soviet Union from the list. I guess that the globalist, i.e., the multinational corporations and international bankers, no longer have any use for the Soviet Union. Most likely, China will take the place of the extinct Soviet Union in South Africa.]
    Perhaps the reason that “genocide” is such an abused term is to conceal from the American public that genocide, as defined by the Genocide Convention, is an official governmental policy of the United States. Enclosed is an article that I wrote for the “Southern National Newsletter” after Congress approved legislation to implement the Genocide Convention in which I aver that according to the Convention, genocide is an official governmental policy in the United States.
    To conceal from the American public that they live in a fascist country, albeit a democratic fascist country if you want an apparent oxymoron, is perhaps why the term “fascist” is abused as much as if not more than “genocide.”  The United States are a fascist country. It has adopted the welfare state and it has total control of all property in the United States — both of which are key elements of fascism. As in the autocratic fascist countries about 50 years ago [now 75 years ago], individuals are allowed to own property, pay taxes on their property, and are held responsible and liable for their property.  However, the government tells them what they may, can, and shall do with their property and what they may not, cannot, and shall not do with their property. (The government may not be involved in all areas of property usage, but the people have conceded it the right to be so.) The government has the benefits of ownership while the property owners have the responsibility.

Copyright © 1990, 2019 by Thomas C. Allen.

More political articles.

Libertarians and Open Borders

Libertarians and Open Borders

Thomas Allen

Most libertarians favor open borders and unlimited immigration. According to them, everyone ought to be free to live wherever he wants to live if the taxpayer does not have to pay for it. These libertarians place no value on countries (territory) or nations (people). However, most libertarians refuse to acknowledge that open borders and unlimited immigration are highly destructive to liberty — the thing that most libertarians claim to adore, ranking it just behind unrestrained capitalism.
Libertarians who advocate open borders and unlimited immigration are willing to sacrifice their ideology for the sake of their ideology. Do they really believe that if 100 million Latinos, 100 million Asian Indians, and 100 million East Asians migrated to the United States over the next several decades, they would become more libertarian than they are today? Do they really believe that people who have authoritarianism instilled in them for generations really appreciate liberty? If they did, they would already be living in countries that practice libertarian values.
Moreover, most of these people come from countries where only the opinions of people who wield power matter. Only members of the ruling faction have any rights; the purpose of government is to advance their agenda; rulers are above the law. Furthermore, the powerful are not expected to subordinate their ambition to the wishes of others. Political leaders are expected to loot the country. If given the chance, most of the oppressed in these countries would imitate their oppressors. Yet, libertarians want to flood the United States with people who hold these beliefs.
Only countries where the population is White or mostly White (at least 85 percent) have pursued libertarian ideas. When non-White countries have adopted libertarian ideas, Whites have nearly always imposed such ideas on them, and the remainder have copied them from Whites. When Whites withdraw or dwindle below a critical number, libertarian ideas vanish. Africa is a prime example.
One major cause of the United States becoming more Marxist and having a larger and more intrusive government is the influx of people from highly statist societies. Adding ever increasing numbers of these people will move the country further away from libertarian ideas.
Moreover, Marxists and their kindred control the school systems in the United States. Thus, they are indoctrinating the children of these new arrivals and the children of native-born Americans with Marxist ideas. Unless libertarians are willing to do an unlibertarian thing and capture control of the public school systems and teach these children libertarian ideas, rare will be a student who knows any libertarian ideas.
A historical example of immigration moving the United States from libertarianism toward statism occurred with the failed Revolution of 1848. Many radicals involved in that conflict fled to the United States. Soon afterward, they joined with the Yankee abolitionists and Puritan industrialists and established the imperial president in the person of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln rewarded them by destroying the US Constitution and concentrating all political power in the US government. If a few thousand radicals uniting with the Puritan Yankee could cause this much destruction, imagine what several hundred million aliens united with the progressive liberals, who are descendants of the Puritan Yankee and 1848 radicals, could do to destroy what little remains of the United States. (Although progressive liberals despise nearly everything that libertarians advocate in the economic and political realm, they agree with libertarians on nearly everything that they advocate in the social realm.)
Additionally, many libertarians teach the idea that people should act like atomized individuals with no loyalty to their race, nation (ethnicity), or gene pool — especially those who follow Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Like the neo-conservatives, these libertarians push the notion that the United States are a concept country. With their actions, they adamantly oppose the notion that the United States are a genetic country — or, perhaps more correctly today, were a genetic country since they have degenerated into a multiracial, multicultural empire. Furthermore, most libertarians seem to want to eliminate political borders altogether, which is a goal of the globalists, who are scheming to form a totalitarian global government.
Most libertarians have an uncontrollable compulsion to turn the United States into a third world ghetto with their open borders and unlimited immigration policies. Do they really believe that libertarianism could and would thrive in such an environment? So far, it never has. To the contrary, libertarianism has never even been considered in such an environment. People in such a society are too concerned about their next meal or even surviving the day to bother with libertarian ideas. America’s accumulated capital can only last so long. When it is consumed, such poverty will be the norm.
Open borders and unlimited immigration will end all hope of a libertarian society. Are libertarians this ignorant? Are they suicidal? Are they a front for the ruling elite, who want a one-world totalitarian government? Do they hate Whites and Western Civilization? What is their reason for promoting a policy that will destroy their goal of a libertarian society?

Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More political articles.