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.

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