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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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.

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Mencken on the Democracy and Morality

Mencken on the Democracy and Morality

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 democracy and morality, pages 162-176. Below is an overview of his discussion on democracy and morality; my comments are in brackets.
    “Liberty gone, there remains the majestic phenomenon of democratic law.” A glance at the law is sufficient to reveal “the identity of democracy and Puritanism.” [Puritanism extends far beyond vice, which today is a minor part of Puritanism — drug laws, especially anti-tobacco laws, and, to a declining extent, the prohibition of prostitution being about the only aspects of this type of Puritanism remaining. Today, Puritanism appears mostly as political correctness, abortion, civil rights laws, laws controlling businesses, zoning laws, hostility toward Confederate monuments, hostility toward Christianity, and the like.] They are merely “different facets of the same gem. In the psyche they are one.” Both derive “their primal essence out of the inferior man’s fear and hatred of his betters, born of his observation that, for all his fine theories, they are stronger and of more courage then he is, and that as they go through this dreadful world they have a far better time.” [Although Mencken description of the inferior man fits many, if not, most Whites, it fits nearly all Blacks. Yet, the old Black man said that he was glad that he was Black instead of White because Blacks knew how to have a good time and Whites did not.] This fear and hatred lead to envy.
    Envy is not “a speciality of democratic man. It is the common possession of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort, at all times and everywhere.” Nevertheless, democracy liberates it; “it is only under democracy that it is liberated; it is only under democracy that it becomes the philosophy of the state.” [Therefore, all democratic countries have evolved into a welfare-state, which is based and built on envy.]
    Although humanity owes the old autocracies a great debt, the democrat is not likely to remember that debt. About the old autocracies, Mencken writes, “Their service, perhaps, was a by-product of a purpose far afield, but it was a service none the less: they held the green fury of the mob in check, and so set free the spirit of superior man.” When Flavius Honorius collapsed, Europe fell into chaos for four hundred years. [Flavius Honorius {384 –423} was the Western Roman Emperor from 393 to 423.] Charlemagne revived the autocracy and made possible the Renaissance and the modern age. [Charlemagne {742 –814}, King of the Franks {768–814} and Emperor of the Romans {800-814} united much of Europe during the early Middle Ages.] The autocracies kept the mob “from the throat of civilization.”
    Mencken points to the French and Russian Revolutions to illustrate what happens when the autocracy collapses: “The instant such a catastrophe liberates the mob, it begins a war to the death upon superiority of every kind not only upon the kind that naturally attaches to autocracy, but even upon the kind that stands in opposition to it. The day after a successful revolution is a blue day for the late autocrat, but it is also a blue day for every other superior man.”
    Mencken continues, “Democracy, as a political scheme, may be defined as a device for releasing this hatred born of envy, and for giving it the force and dignity of law.” Moreover, “the democratic state, despite the contrary example of France, almost always shows a strong tendency to be also a Puritan state.” Especially, in the field of public law, Puritan legislation “is a thing of many grandiose pretensions and a few simple and ignoble realities. The Puritan . . . always tries to convince himself (and the rest of us) that it is grounded upon altruistic and evangelical motives — that its aim is to work the other fellow’s benefit against the other fellow’s will.” [This is true even after Puritanism abandoned the Bible, of which Mencken probably approved, and became a secular religion.]
    Mencken notes, “The Puritan’s actual motives are (a) to punish the other fellow for having a better time in the world, and (b) to bring the other fellow down to his own unhappy level. . . . Primarily, he is against every human act that he is incapable of himself.” [Mencken has just described the motives of the Yankee.] However, he notes, “The Puritan is surely no ascetic. Even in the great days of the New England theocracy it was impossible to restrain his libidinousness: his eyes rolled sideways at buxom wenches quite as often as they rolled upward to God. But he is incapable of sexual experience upon what may be called a civilized plane; it is impossible for him to manage the thing as a romantic adventure; in his hands it reduces itself to the terms of the barnyard. Hence the Mann Act.” [The Mann Act makes it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of people for the purpose of prostitution or illegal sexual acts.] Likewise, with an alcoholic beverage, the Puritan “can have experience of it only as a furtive transaction behind the door, with a dreadful headache to follow. Hence Prohibition.” [Every chance that Mencken gets to condemn Prohibition, he does so.] Also, “with the joys that come out of the fine arts. Looking at a picture, he sees only the model’s pudenda. Reading a book, he misses the ordeals and exaltations of the spirit, and remembers only the natural functions. Hence comstockery.” [Today, censorship appears in the form of political correctness and vulgar mobs preventing anyone with whom these low-lives disagree from speaking peacefully on college campuses. Now, books are seldom removed from libraries because of sexual content, most sexual content now being politically correct, but because of political content, i.e., the book is politically incorrect because it disagrees with democracy, liberalism, progressivism, socialism, communism, Marxism, or the ever-growing power of the government or is considered “racist.”]
    The Puritan’s “delight in his own rectitude is grounded upon a facile assumption that it is difficult to maintain that the other fellow, being deficient in God’s grace, is incapable of it. So he venerates himself, in the moral department, as an artist of unusual talents, a virtuoso of virtue.” Mencken continues, “His error consists in mistaking a weakness for a merit, an inferiority for a superiority.” Being moral in the Puritan sense “is not actually a sign of spiritual eminence; . . . it is simply a sign of docility, of lack of enterprise and originality, of cowardice.” Once the Puritan forgets “his mainly imaginary triumphs over the flesh and the devil, . . . [he] always turns out to be a poor stick of a man in brief, a natural democrat.” [Thus, Puritans and democrats are twins, and “Puritan” is merely another name for “Yankee.”]
    Mencken adds, “No Puritan has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a poem worth reading — and I am not forgetting John Milton, who was not a Puritan at all, but a libertarian, which is the exact opposite. The whole Puritan literature is comprised in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” He continues, “Even in the department wherein the Puritan is most proud of himself, i.e., that of moral legislation, he has done only second- and third-rate work.” [Puritanism explains the low quality, meddlesome legislation flowing from Washington and most State capitals.] “His fine schemes for bringing his betters down to his own depressing level always turn out badly.”
    “Since the first uprising of the lower orders, the modern age has seen but one genuinely valuable contribution to moral legislation: . . . the Code Napoleon. It was concocted by a committee of violent anti-Puritans, and in the full tide of a bitter reaction against democracy.”
    Mencken continues, “If democracy had not lain implicit in Puritanism, Puritanism would have had to invent it. Each is necessary to the other. Democracy provides the machinery that Puritanism needs for the quick and ruthless execution of its preposterous inventions.” Puritans face great difficulty in advancing their schemes under autocracies. They can only convince the King if the King is crazy. Even then, the King’s ministers will restrain him. “But the mob is easy to convince, for what Puritanism has to say to it is mainly what it already believes: its politics is based upon the same brutal envies and quaking fears that lie under the Puritan ethic.” Continuing, Mencken notes that “the political machinery through which it [democracy] functions provides a ready means of translating such envies and fears into action. There is need only to sound the alarm and take a vote: the debate is over the moment the majority has spoken.” Thus, in democratic countries, “even the most strange and dubious legislative experiments are” enacted with ferocious haste. [Examples are Bush’s police state laws, which were mostly passed by Congress without anyone in Congress reading them and with little or no debate, and Obamacare, which Congress passed without reading or even knowing what was in it. Unfortunately, once enacted even the most egregious, intrusive, meddlesome, cumbersome, ineffective, inefficient laws are next to impossible to  repeal.]
    Mencken remarks “that this process of law-making by orgy, with fanatics supplying the motive-power and unconscionable knaves steering the machine, is bound to fill the statute-books with enactments that have no rational use or value save that of serving as instruments of psychopathological persecution and private revenge.” [And now you know why we have the laws that we do and so many of them.] Most laws “involve gross invasions of the most elementary rights of the free citizen, but they are popular with the mob because they have a virtuous smack and provide it with an endless succession of barbarous but thrilling shows.” Mostly, the victims of these laws are men whom “the mob naturally envies and hates — men of unusual intelligence and enterprise, men who regard their constitutional liberties seriously and are willing to go to some risk and expense to defend them. Such men are inevitably unpopular under democracy, for their qualities are qualities that the mob wholly lacks, and is uneasily conscious of  lacking: it thus delights in seeing them exposed to slander and oppression, and railroaded to prison.” [Although most members of the mob had never traded a stock, the mob was delighted when Martha Stewart went to prison.] Mencken notes that a district attorney is always ready to prosecute a superior man because “district attorneys are invariably men who aspire to higher office, and no more facile way to it is to be found than by assaulting and destroying a man above the general.” These are the type of district attorneys who become Congressmen. (One “is seldom promoted because he has been jealous of the liberties of the citizen.”) Furthermore, many judges reach “the bench by the same route.” [Most of the laws that Mencken uses as illustrations are petty, irritating laws. He seldom mentions the really despotic laws such as the wartime laws enacted during the Wilson administration that have been used since then to terrorize and imprison people who disagreed with the government. The laws that he mentions are nothing compared to today’s tax laws, which gather the mob’s support because they feed the mob’s envy: The mob is convinced that the tax laws are written to punish the rich and give the inferior man a free ride.]
    Mencken continues, “The whole criminal law in America thus acquires a flavour of fraud. It is constantly embellished and reinforced by fanatics who have discovered how easy it is to hurl missiles at their enemies and opponents from behind ranks of policemen. It is executed by law officers whose private prosperity runs in direct ratio to their reckless ferocity.” [If one listens to talk radio for a few days, especially on the shortwave and the Internet, he would discover the truthfulness of Mencken’s observation. He would discover that America has many political prisoners whose real crime, as opposed to the fraudulent crime of which they have been convicted with the aid of bias, prejudice judges, is that they stood for liberty.] Morons “whose chief delight lies in seeing their betters manhandled and humiliated” applaud this injustice. [Political cartoonists on the left are among the most idiotic of these morons.]
    “In the criminal courts a rich man not only enjoys none of the advantages that Liberals and other defenders of democracy constantly talk of; he is under very real and very heavy burdens.” Railroading a “better,” especially one who stands for liberty, is morally excusable. Sarcastically, Mencken asserts, “The district attorney is an altruist whose one dream is Law Enforcement; he cannot be terrified by the power of money; he is the spokesman of the virtuous masses against the godless and abominable classes.”
    Next, Mencken discusses Prohibition and the evils that it has brought instead of the paradise promised by its proponents. At the time that Mencken wrote, even the mob had turned against Prohibition, but its promoters refused to “repudiate their original nonsense.” [This sounds familiar. How many other laws are still being enforced that the mob has turned against? At least the mob got Prohibition repealed — and that required a constitutional amendment instead of a simple legislative enactment.] Prohibitionists are moved by “the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate.” [We see this with other laws — probably all mala prohibita laws. {Mala prohibitum is an offense prohibited by statute, but not inherently evil or wrong, such as failure to submit a report or to have a permit or license, failure to pay taxes, and most traffic violations. They are wrong because the government declares to be wrong. Opposite of mala prohibitum is mala in se, which is an offense that is evil or wrong from its own nature, irrespective of a statute, such as murder, rape, or robbery. Basically, the difference between the two is that mala in se is what God prohibits and mala prohibitum is what man prohibits.}] Like Prohibition, such laws become a means to “badger and annoy everyone who” does not comply with the letter of the law or its spirit, whichever is the most oppressive. Such laws “fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offences” [as the drug laws do today]. Most of all, such laws satisfy “the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy.” Moreover, the Puritans can do this “with a safe line of policemen and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal risk.” Freedom from personal risk is the secret of the Puritans’ continual frenzy.
    Mencken notes “the American mob, far from being lawless, is actually excessively tolerant of written laws and judicial fiats, however plainly they violate the fundamental rights of free men, and . . . this tolerance is sufficient to protect them [the Prohibitionists, Puritans, and other meddlesome busybodies] from what, in more liberal and enlightened countries, would be the natural consequences of their anti-social activity.  If they had to meet their victims face to face, there would be a different story to tell.” However, “they seldom encounter this embarrassment. Instead, they turn the officers of the law to the uses of their mania.” He continues, “Thus, under democracy, the normal, well-behaved, decent citizen — the Forgotten Man of the late William Graham Sumner — is beset from all sides, and every year sees an augmentation of his woes.” [Sumner {1840–1910} was a classical liberal, a libertarian, and an American social scientist.] “In order to satisfy the envy and hatred of his inferiors and the blood lust of a pack of irresponsible and unconscionable fanatics, few of them of any dignity as citizens or as men and many of them obviously hypocritical and corrupt, this decent citizen [the Forgotten Man] is converted into a criminal for performing acts that are natural to men of his class everywhere, and police and courts are degraded to the abhorrent office of punishing him for them.” [Although Mencken writes this about Prohibition, it is true of most mala prohibita laws.]
    [What Mencken has written about the Puritan could just as well have been written about the Yankee. Substituting “Yankee” for “Puritan” would not change the meaning of what Mencken has written. The two are synonymous.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on Liberty in a Democracy

Mencken on Liberty in a 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 liberty in a democracy, pages 157-162. Below is an overview of his discussion on liberty in a democracy; my comments are in brackets.
    Whenever the liberties of the people “are invaded and made a mock of in a gross and contemptuous manner,” as occurred “in the United States during the reign of Wilson,” some observers always marvel that people bear such “outrage with so little murmuring.” About such observation, Mencken remarks, “Such observers only display their unfamiliarity with the elements of democratic science. The truth is that the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary.” [The response of most people to 9-11 supports Mencken. Their quick surrender of liberty to the ruling elite shows their lack of love of liberty.] Unfortunately, for the lovers of liberty, the common man, of whom the masses comprise, is not “happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the herdsman with it.” Thus, “[l]iberty is not a thing for such as he. He cannot enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it in others only as something to be taken away from them.”
    When liberty is a reality, it is the “exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of men, like knowledge, courage and honour. A special sort of man is needed to understand it, nay, to stand it — and he is inevitably an outlaw in democratic societies.” Mencken continues, “The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.” [Hence, the response of the average person to 9-11: throw away liberty for safety — and end up with neither. The common man, the inferior man, the democratic man, fails to realize that without liberty, real safety cannot exist.]
    Mencken cites Nietzsche as saying that liberty “was something that, to the general, was too cold to be borne.” However, Nietzsche “believed that there was an unnatural, drug-store sort of yearning for it in all men, and so he changed Schopenhauer’s will-to-live into a will-to-power, i.e., a will-to-free-function.” [Friedrich Nietzsche {1844 –1900} was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, and philologist. Arthur Schopenhauer {1788 –1860} was a German philosopher.] Mencken believes that Nietzsche “went too far, and in the wrong direction: he should have made it, on the lower levels, a will-to-peace.” Mencken remarks, “What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty.” [As statists promise such peace, statists always have an advantage over lovers of liberty, libertists, in a democracy.]
    The common man loves peace and safety far more than he loves liberty. This may “explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take — his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact.” Mencken adds, “A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him [the common man] (a) from his superiors, (b) from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all.” [In reality, the ultimate job of the police is to protect the ruling elite, the real powers behind the political leaders, from the masses, i.e., the common man.] “In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls.” [To Mencken, the primary job of the police is to prevent personal vice.]
    Although the common man is deceived about liberty, “he starts from a sound premise: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for his hands — or, as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine. Worse, he sees in it something that is a weapon against him in the hands of his enemy.”
    Mencken adds, “The history of democracy is a history of efforts to force successive minorities to be untrue to their nature. Democracy, in fact, stands in greater peril of the free spirit than any sort of despotism ever heard of.” He continues, “The despot, at least, is always safe in one respect: his own belief in himself cannot be shaken. But democracies may be demoralized and run amok, and so they are in vast dread of heresy, as a Sunday-school superintendent is in dread of scarlet women, light wines and beer, and the unreadable works of Charles Darwin.” Then he remarks, “It would be unimaginable for a democracy to submit serenely to such gross dissents as Frederick the Great not only permitted, but even encouraged.” He notes, “Once the mob is on the loose, there is no holding it. So the subversive minority must be reduced to impotence; the heretic must be put down.”
    If a primary purpose “of all civilized government is to preserve and augment the liberty of the individual, then surely democracy accomplishes it less efficiently than any other form.” [The dictatorship of the proletariat does a much worse job. But, then, Mencken considers the dictatorship of the proletariat to be a form of democracy.] If the individual is worth thinking about, then “the superior individual is worth more thought than his inferiors.” Yet, “the superior individual  . . . is the chief victim of the democratic process. It not only tries to regulate his acts; it also tries to delimit his thoughts. . . . The aim of democracy is to break all such free spirits to the common harness. It tries to iron them out, to pump them dry of self-respect, to make docile John Does of them.” [Nearly all laws coming out of Congress and the statehouses seem to have as their primary objective the breaking of all free spirits to a common harness.]
    Democracy measures its success by the extent that it brings down superior men and makes them common. “The measure of civilization is the extent to which they resist and survive. Thus the only sort of liberty that is real under democracy is the liberty of the have-nots to destroy the liberty of the haves.” [Thus, the inferior man is a strong supporter of the welfare state because it brings down the superior man and destroys the liberties of the haves.] Mencken adds, “This liberty is supposed, in some occult way, to enhance human dignity.” In one aspect, perhaps, it does: “The have-not gains something valuable when he acquires the delusion that he is the equal of his betters. It may not be true but even a delusion, if it augments the dignity of man, is something.” Under this apparent reality, “the peasant no longer pulls his forelock when he meets the baron, he is free to sue and be sued, he may denounce Huxley as a quack.” [Thomas Huxley {1825–1895} was an English biologist and a prominent proponent of evolution, in which Mencken ardently believed.] Unfortunately, as the inferior is raised, the superior is lowered. Mencken notes, “If democracy really loves the dignity of man, then it kills the thing it loves.” It reduces all to a common level.

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on News Editors and Public Servants

Mencken on News Editors and Public Servants

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 news editors and public servants, pages 145-148. Below is an overview of his discussion on news editors and public servants; my comments are in brackets.
    About newspaper editors, Mencken writes, “Their very lack of sound knowledge and genuine intelligence gives them a special fitness for influencing the mob, and it is augmented by their happy obtuseness to notions of honour. Their daily toil consists in part of praising men and ideas that are obviously fraudulent, and in part of denouncing men and ideas that are respected by their betters.” The typical American editor “is, like the politician, an adept trimmer and flatterer. His job is far more to him than his self-respect.” Furthermore, “the influence of such men upon public affairs is generally evil that their weight is almost always thrown against the public man of dignity and courage — that such a public man cannot hope to be understood by them, or to get any useful support from them.” [Does this explain the old media’s opposition to President Trump?] “Thus they give their aid to the sublime democratic process of eliminating all sense and decency from public life.” [What Mencken writes about newspaper editors is true about editors in other media — especially, television.]
    Mencken continues, “Coming out of the mob, they [editors] voice the ideas of the mob. The first of those ideas is that a fraud is somehow charming and reassuring. . . . The second is that an honest and candid man is dangerous — or, perhaps more accurately, that there is no such animal.” [Again, does this explain the old media’s opposition to President Trump?]
    Then Mencken adds, “The newspaper editor who rises above this level encounters the same incredulous hostility from his fellows and his public that is encountered by the superior politician, cast into public life by accident. If he is not dismissed at once as . . . a Bolshevik, [today, he would be called a racist, homophobe, sexist, fascist, islamophobe, or all these] i.e., one harbouring an occult and unintelligible yearning to put down the Republic and pull God off His throne, he is assumed to be engaged in some nefarious scheme of personal aggrandisement.”
    Mencken remarks, “The democratic process, indeed, is furiously inimical to all honourable motives. It favours the man who is without them, and it puts heavy burdens upon the man who has them. Going further, it is even opposed to mere competence.”
    He concludes with some comments on the competent public servant. “The public servant who masters his job gains nothing thereby. His natural impatience with the incapacity and slacking of his fellows makes them his implacable enemies, and he is viewed with suspicion by the great mass of democrats.” Then he paraphrases Emile Faguet of the French Academy: “Under democracy, . . . the business of law-making becomes a series of panics — government by orgy and orgasm. And the public service becomes a mere refuge for prehensile morons — get yours, and run.”
    [Governments are criticized for waiting for a problem to occur and then reacting. However, when they try to prevent a problem before it occurs, they are also criticized. Recently, people saw this criticism in North Carolina. After adopting a law requiring people to use the restroom, locker room, and the like of their biological birth sex, one would have thought that the General Assembly had ordered a first-strike nuclear attack from the way that liberals and their lackeys in the old media reacted. The law made illegal for a man to say that he felt like a woman and then being allowed to use the women’s locker room so that he could see naked women. {Liberals preferred the General Assembly forcing business to allow men to use the women’s locker room if they claimed that they felt like a woman.} Oddly, some of the most vocal opponents of this law were those who holler rape if a man looks at a woman. Like all good politicians, the legislators succumbed to the boisterous mob led by the lowest of inferior men, i.e., entertainers and leaders of sports teams and sports associations {they must have wanted their male players to be entertained by naked women} and heavily diluted the law.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on the Politician Under Democracy

Mencken on the Politician 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 the politician under democracy, pages 107-115. Below is an overview of his discussion on the politician under democracy; my comments are in brackets.
    “The politician . . . is the courtier of democracy.” Mencken remarks that “the essence of the courtier’s art and mystery that he flattered his employer in order to victimize him, yielded to him in order to rule him. The politician under democracy does precisely the same thing.” The politician’s business “is never what it pretends to be. Ostensibly he is an altruist devoted whole-heartedly to the service of his fellow-men, and so abjectly public-spirited that his private interest is nothing to him. Actually he is a sturdy rogue whose principal, and often sole, aim in life is to butter his parsnips.” His business is “to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out he will try to hold it by embracing new truths.” Furthermore, he has “no shadow of principle or honour.” His moral code allows him “to get into office by false pretences . . . [and] to change convictions overnight. . . . Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough. . . . [P]ower is the commodity that he has for sale.”
    Mencken states that the above characterization of the democratic politician describes him “in his role of statesman — that is, in his best and noblest aspect.” However, the democratic politician flourished “on lower levels, partly subterranean.” At the lower levels, public honor is an inconvenience, so he “contents himself with power.” These lower level politicians lie to the “weaknesses and knaveries of the common people — in their inability to grasp any issues save the simplest and most banal.” Lower level politicians excite the common people’s “petty self-seeking and venality . . . [and] their instinctive envy and hatred of their superiors — in brief, in their congenital incapacity for the elemental duties of citizens in a civilized state.” The lower level politician is the local party boss who owns his constituency. “He is the state as they apprehend it; around him clusters all the romance that used to hang about a king. . . . His barbaric code, framed to fit their gullibility, becomes an example to their young. . . . He exemplifies its reduction of all ideas to a few elemental wants.” Moreover, “he reflects and makes manifest the inferior man’s congenital fear of liberty — his incapacity for even the most trivial sort of independent action.” [Mencken’s description of the high-level and low-level politician fits almost every politician in the United States for the past 200 years.]
    Mencken continues, “Life on the lower levels is life in a series of interlocking despotisms. The inferior man cannot imagine himself save as taking orders — if not from the boss, then from the priest, and if not from the priest, then from some fantastic drill-sergeant of his own creation.”
    Initially, reformers in the United States “concentrated their whole animus upon the boss: it was apparently their notion that he had imposed himself upon his victims from without, and that they could be delivered by destroying him.” When the boss was overthrown, “the prehensile Methodist parson” filled the void.
    The art of politics under democracy has two branches: “There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shotgun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners.” Mencken notes, “The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself.” According to Mencken, “[e]very man who seeks elective office under democracy has to be either the one thing or the other, and most men have to be both. The whole process is one of false pretences and ignoble concealments.”
    Only by a miracle, could an educated man be elected to office in a democratic state. “His frankness would arouse fears, and those fears would run against him.”
    A politician’s job in a democracy is “to arouse fears that will run in favour of him. Worse, he must not only consider the weaknesses of the mob, but also the prejudices of the minorities that prey upon it.” These minority factions “not only know how to arouse the fears of the mob; they also know how to awaken its envy, its dislike of privilege, its hatred of its betters [i.e., the superior man].” Nowhere does a minority faction include “a majority of the voters among its subscribing members, and its leaders are nowhere chosen by democratic methods.” These minorities control the political process in the United States. They have “filled all the law-making bodies of the nation with men who have got into office by submitting cravenly to [their] dictation, and [they have] filled thousands of administrative posts, and not a few judicial posts, with vermin of the same sort.” [In a democracy, the vociferous minorities drive politicians much more than the more civil minorities and even more than the large silent majority. Thus, the vociferous minorities direct the government instead of the majority. Most of the time the agenda of the vociferous minorities is detrimental to the large silent majority. Nevertheless, the large silent majority acquiesce to this minority control by failing to end it, which is in the majority’s power. Moreover, minorities that seek to expand the power of government are far more successful in controlling politicians than minorities that seek to reduce the size of government — perhaps, because the former is more vociferous and the latter is more civil.]
    Consequently, dishonorable men “enjoy vast advantages under democracy. The mob, insensitive to their dishonour, is edified and exhilarated by their success. The competition they offer to men of a more decent habit is too powerful to be met, so they tend, gradually, to monopolize all the public offices.”
    Such a man is the typical American law-maker. The typical American law-maker “is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons.” Moreover, “[h]e has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretences. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him.” Such is the democratic politician at his normalcy — not at his worst. “[N]o man may make a career in politics . . . without stooping to such ignobility.” [How many good, honorable men have been elected to office only to become slimy, sleazy, dishonorable scalawags, i.e., typical politicians, by the time that they leaves office?]
    Where the ideals of democracy have been reached, “it has become a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office, . . . save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness even of God.” [Mencken has a low opinion of the common man and the leaders whom they elect. Unfortunately, so far, they have not proven him wrong.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on the Two Types of Democracy

Mencken on the Two Types 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 two types of democracy, pages 79-85. Below is an overview of his discussion of the two types of democracy; my comments are in brackets.
    [Representative democracy and direct democracy are the two types of democracies that Mencken discusses.]
    Mencken states, “Sovereignty is in him [the lowly Christian, i.e., the inferior man], sometimes both actually and legally, but always actually. Whatever he wants badly enough he can get. If he is misled by mountebanks and swindled by scoundrels it is only because his credulity and imbecility cover a wider area than his simple desires.” Continuing, Mencken writes, “The precise form of the government he suffers under is of small importance. Whether it be called a constitutional monarchy, as in England, or a representative republic, as in France, or a pure democracy, as in some of the cantons of Switzerland, it is always essentially the same. There is, first, the mob, theoretically and in fact the ultimate judge of all ideas and the source of all power. There is, second, the camorra of self-seeking minorities, each seeking to inflame, delude and victimize it. The political process thus becomes a mere battle of rival rogues. But the mob remains quite free to decide between them.” Occasionally and miraculously, the mob chooses the relatively honest and enlightened. More often, it chooses the thieves “because their words are words it understands and their ideas are ideas it cherishes.” Nevertheless, the mob “has the power to throw them off at will, and even at whim, and it also has the means.” [As the lowly Christian is now a minority of the mob in most democratic countries, if Mencken were to write this today, he would need to use another descriptor of the mob. Possibly, he uses “Christian” because he has a low opinion of Christians.]
    Mencken contends, “A great deal of paper and ink has been wasted discussing the difference between representative government and direct democracy.” Many of these pundits conclude that representative government is full of defects. “Not only does it take the initiative in law-making out of the hands of the plain people and leave them only the function of referees; it also raises certain obvious obstacles to their free exercise of that function.” Being scattered and unorganized, the people are unable “to formulate their virtuous desires quickly and clearly, or to bring to the resolution of vexed questions the full potency of their native sagacity. Worse, they find it difficult to enforce their decisions, even when they have decided.”
    Liberals cry over this fact. Their remedy is usually a “purer democracy.” That is, they propose “the recall, the initiative and referendum, or something else of the sort, and so convert the representative into a mere clerk or messenger.” Thus, they place “the final determination of all important public questions . . . in the hands of the voters themselves.” Only the voters “can muster enough wisdom for the business, and they alone are without guile. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.” [As witnessed in the United States, as the qualifications needed to be a voter has been lowered, the quality of government has declined. As the quality of government has declined, its power over and control of the people have grown.]
    Mencken notes that more democracy has never cured the evils of democracy. He adds, “Certainly no competent historian believes that the citizens assembled in a New England town-meeting actually formulated en masse the transcendental and immortal measures that they adopted, nor even that they contributed anything of value to the discussion thereof.” Mencken remarks that this “notion is as absurd as the parallel notion, long held by philologues of defective powers of observation, that the popular ballads surviving from earlier ages were actually composed by the folk. The ballads, in point of fact, were all written by concrete poets, most of them not of the folk; the folk, when they had any hand in the business at all, simply acted as referees, choosing which should survive.” Likewise, “the New England town-meeting was led and dominated by a few men of unusual initiative and determination, some of them genuinely superior, but most of them simply demagogues and fanatics. The citizens in general heard the discussion of rival ideas, and went through the motions of deciding between them, but there is no evidence that they ever had all the relevant facts before them or made any effort to unearth them, or that appeals to their reason always, or even usually, prevailed
over appeals to their mere prejudice and superstition. . . . Some of the most idiotic decisions ever come to by mortal man were made by the New England town-meetings, and under the leadership of monomaniacs who are still looked upon as ineffable blossoms of the contemporary Kultur.” [What would one expect from Puritans?]
    Nevertheless, “the difference between representative democracy and direct democracy is a great deal less marked than political sentimentalists assume. Under both forms the sovereign mob must employ agents to execute its will, and in either case the agents may have ideas of their own, based upon interests of their own, and the means at hand to do and get what they will. Moreover, their very position gives them a power of influencing the electors that is far above that of any ordinary citizen.” [Thus, incumbents usually win elections.]
    Mencken adds that “both forms of democracy encounter the difficulty that the generality of citizens, no matter how assiduously they may be instructed, remain congenitally unable to comprehend many of the problems before them, or to consider all of those they do comprehend in an unbiased and intelligent manner.” [This inability to comprehend in an unbiased and intelligent manner is also true of most members of Congress and State legislatures.]
    Continuing, Mencken remarks that “the great masses of Americans of to-day, though they are theoretically competent to decide all the larger matters of national policy, and have certain immutable principles, of almost religious authority, to guide them, actually look for leading to professional politicians, who are influenced in turn by small but competent and determined minorities, with special knowledge and special interests.” [Liberals and progressives consider the people intelligent and competent enough to decide who will govern the country, at least until they elected Donald Trump, but they consider the people too stupid and incompetent to govern their own lives. The people need enlightened liberals and progressives whom they have elected to govern the country to govern their lives.] By this means, the plain people were shoved into World War I. “They were, in overwhelming majority, against going in, and if they had had any sense and resolution they would have stayed out. But these things they lacked.” [The same thing happened with World War II. Roosevelt maneuvered the people into war that most did not want by maneuvering Japan into attacking U.S. territory.]
    In conclusion, the difference between representative democracy and pure democracy is more apparent than real.

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on the Eternal Christian Mob

Mencken on the Eternal Christian Mob

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 eternal Christian mob, pages 74-76. Below is an overview of his discussion on the eternal Christian mob; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken notes that in the past two thousand years, the inferior man has moved “from the obscenities of the Saturnalia to the obscenities of the Methodist revival. So he lives out his life in the image of Jahveh.”
    Mencken questions the inferior man’s “simple piety, his touching fidelity to the faith.” He continues, “Is it argued by any rational man that the debased Christianity cherished by the mob in all the Christian countries of to-day has any colourable likeness to the body of ideas preached by Christ? . . . The plain fact is that this bogus Christianity has no more relation to the system of Christ than it has to the system of Aristotle. It is the invention of Paul and his attendant rabble-rousers — a body of men exactly comparable to the corps of evangelical pastors of to-day, which is to say, a body devoid of sense and lamentably indifferent to common honesty.” [Paul did not change the teachings of Christ; he merely explained and applied them.] Then he adds, “The mob, having heard Christ, turned against Him, and applauded His crucifixion.” The mob turned against Christ because “His theological ideas were too logical and too plausible for it, and his ethical ideas were enormously too austere.” [The mob did not turn against Jesus because his theological ideas were too logical and too plausible. It turned against him because the Pharisees and the Sadducees excited it to demand the execution of Jesus. These two groups and, to a lesser extent, the Herodians were the aristocrats and superior men of their society. Thus, the superior men were behind Jesus’ execution. They turned the mob against Jesus because his logical, plausible theology condemned them.]
    What the mob “yearned for was the old comfortable balderdash under a new and gaudy name, and that is precisely what Paul offered it. He borrowed from all the wandering dervishes and soul-snatchers of Asia Minor, and flavoured the stew with remnants of the Greek demonology. The result was a code of doctrines so discordant and so nonsensical that no two men since, examining it at length, have ever agreed upon its precise meaning.” [Paul’s teachings are no more confusing than Jesus’. What makes Paul’s writings seem confusing are theologians reading into his writings what is not there and reading out of his writings what is there. Moreover, if his writings are so confusing and, thus, difficult to understand, why does the ignorant, uneducable inferior man seems to grasp them, for as Mencken notes, the inferior man tries to destroy what he does not understand. Nevertheless, Paul’s writings, which are usually fairly straightforward, are easier to comprehend than most of the Prophets and Revelations with their flowery, allegorical, and metaphorical language. Furthermore, Jesus’ teaching may not be as logical and plausible and as clear and simple as Mencken asserts. If they were, theologians agree about what Jesus taught. For example, in Matthew 24:36, Christ says that he does not possess the divine trait of omniscience. Antitrinitarians use this statement to prove that the Trinity Doctrine is wrong. Trinitarians ignore it or try to explain it away. Another is Matthew 24:1-31. Some claim that this prophecy of Jesus was fulfilled in 70 A.D. Others claim that only part of it was fulfilled in 70 A.D.; the remainder is yet to come. Thus, Jesus’ teachings are at least as confusing as Paul’s.] Nonetheless, “Paul knew his mob: he had been a travelling labour leader. He knew that nonsense was its natural provender — that the unintelligible soothed it like sweet music.” Moreover, Paul was the progenitor “of all the Christian mob-masters of to-day, terrorizing and enchanting the mob with their insane damnations, eating their seven fried chickens a week, passing the diligent plate, busy among the women.” [Many ministers in Mencken’s day, and even today, were charlatans, hustlers, and scoundrels, who manipulated Christians for their own benefit. That Paul was such a person is highly doubtful, and such a notion is certainly not supported by the Scriptures. No such person would have endured what Paul endured.]
    Continuing, Mencken writes, “Once the early church emerged from the Roman catacombs and began to yield to that reorganization of society which was forced upon the ancient world by the barbarian invasions, Paul was thrown overboard, as Methodists throw Wesley overboard when they acquire the means and leisure for golf, and Peter was put in his place. Peter was a blackguard, but he was at least free from any taint of Little Bethel. The Roman Church, in the aristocratic feudal age, promoted him post mortem to the Papacy, and then raised him to the mystical dignity of Rock, a rank obviously quasi-celestial.” [The theology of the Catholic Church fits much closer the animadversions that Mencken pours on Paul than Paul’s theology.]
    Nevertheless, “Paul remained the prophet of the sewers. He was to emerge centuries later in many incarnations — Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and so on. He remains to-day the arch-theologian of the mob. His turgid and witless metaphysics make Christianity bearable to men who would be repelled by Christ’s simple and magnificent reduction of the duties of man to the duties of a gentleman.” [Mencken is not the only one who believes that Paul corrupted the teachings of Jesus. Some have accused Paul of Judaizing the teachings of Christ, which he did not.]
    [As can be seen from the above, Mencken has a low opinion of Christianity. On that point, he agrees with Marx. Moreover, Mencken seems to believe that only inferior men, scoundrels, and demagogues are religious, and the scoundrels and demagogues are fakers, who use religion to manipulate the inferior man. He seems to believe that one cannot be both religious and of the better sort simultaneously.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on the Inferior Man and Progress

Mencken on the Inferior Man and Progress

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 inferior man and progress, pages 58-73. Below is an overview of his discussion on the inferior man and progress; my comments are in brackets.
    The inferior man is the natural enemy of progress, liberty, and justice. “[B]eing a natural slave himself, [the inferior man] is quite unable to understand the desire for liberty in his superiors. If he apprehends that desire at all, it is only as an appetite for a good of which he is himself incapable. He thus envies those who harbour it, and is eager to put them down.”
    For the inferior man, justice “is always unpopular and in difficulties under democracy, save perhaps that false form of so-called social justice which is designed solely to get the labourer more than his fair hire.” Moreover, “[t]he wars of extermination that are waged against heretical minorities never meet with any opposition on the lower levels. The proletarian is always ready to help destroy the rights of his fellow proletarian.” Mencken illustrates this with the use of the American Legion and the America Federation of Labor in the program against the Reds just after World War I. Another illustration is that “[t]he city workman, oppressed by Prohibition, mourns the loss of his beer, not the loss of his liberty.” [If the war on drugs is substituted for prohibition, the same is true today. How many are really concerned about the loss of liberties that the war on drugs has brought?] The inferior man, the proletarian, “is ever willing to support similar raids upon the liberty of the other fellow, and he is not outraged when they are carried on in gross violation of the most elemental principles of justice and common decency.” [As happens in the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on cancer, war on Confederate monuments, and all the other wars that the elite who controls the U.S. government creates.]
    The “few genuine believers in liberty and justice survive, huddled upon a burning deck. Is it to be marvelled at that most of them, on inspection, turn out to be the grandsons of similar heretics of earlier times?” Mencken thinks not because it “takes quite as long to breed a libertarian as it takes to breed a racehorse. Neither may be expected to issue from a farm mare.”
    According to Mencken, the inferior man, the masses, opposes progress. He writes, “The whole progress of the world, even in the direction of ameliorating the lot of the masses, is always opposed by the masses. The notion that their clamour brought about all the governmental and social reforms of the last century, and that those reforms were delayed by the superior minority, is sheer nonsense.” He cites several examples of these reforms — most of which extends the government’s control over the masses and which the masses initially opposed. In Germany, the elite enacted various types of social legislation, such as workman’s insurance, minimum wage, and child labor restriction laws. The United States and other countries followed Germany’s example. However, the masses tended to oppose these acts. [Libertarians naturally oppose such laws as they reduce liberty by forcing people to do what they would not naturally do. Socialists naturally support such laws as they provide for the security of workers, which socialists consider liberty. Since these laws reduce liberty by giving the government more control over the masses and, therefore, less real liberty, the masses were standing for liberty against the elites, their betters as Mencken called them, who were extending their control of the masses via the government. Here Mencken seems to contradict his arguments about liberty and the masses. That Mencken would consider these laws as progress is amazing since he claims to be a libertarian. If he does consider these laws as progress and an extension of liberty, he needs to congratulate the superiors, the elites, for educating the uneducable. Now, the inferior man would strongly resist their repeal.]
    Mencken writes, “Public policies are determined and laws are made by small minorities playing upon the fears and imbecilities of the mob — sometimes minorities of intelligent and honest men, but usually minorities of rogues.” In agreement with Maine, Mencken notes that universal suffrage would have prohibited the use of industrial inventions and machines, such as the spinning-jenny, power looms, and threshing-machines. [Sir Henry Maine {1822-1888} was a British comparative jurist and historian.] Moreover, universal suffrage “‘would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; it would have restored the Stuarts. It would have proscribed the Roman Catholics, with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield’s house and library in 1780; and it would have proscribed the Dissenters, with the mob which burned Dr. Priestley’s house and library in 1791.’” [As suffrage has been extended, the quality of political leaders has declined. First, the vote was given to Black males {1870}, next to women {1920}, and then to eighteen-year olds {1971}; along the way, the requirement to pay taxes was removed {1964}. Each time the quality of political leaders declined. The last Jeffersonian president was Cleveland {1885-1889 and 1893-1897}. Has not the time come to require voters to understand the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution of their State and to pay a minimum but more than token direct tax? When voters had to meet these requirements, the country had much higher quality of political leaders.]
    In the United States, Mencken identifies democracy as leading to anti-vivisection and anti-contraception statutes, the licensing of osteopaths (which he considers a fraud), and restrictions on free assembly and free speech. [The police state laws enacted during the War on Terrorism has restricted assembly and speech, and the controllers of various internet sites, such as search engines and social media sites, have also restricted free speech. Also, Mencken’s attitude toward osteopathy appears like that of an inferior man. He does not understand it, and, therefore, fears it. Fearing it, he wants to suppress it as quackery. He has the same attitude toward chiropractic.]
    Mencken agrees with Lecky: “‘Nothing in ancient alchemy was more irrational than the notion that increased ignorance in the elective body will be converted into increased capacity for good government in the representative body; that the best way to improve the world and secure rational progress is to place government more and more under the control of the least enlightened classes.’” [William Lecky {1838- 1903} was an Irish historian, essayist, and political theorist.]
    Mencken explains the inferior man’s opposition to things that benefit him: “He is against it because it is complex, and, to his dark mind, occult — because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity for taking in ideas, and thus propels him into the realm of the unknowable and alarming. His search is always for short cuts, simple formulae, revelation.” Continuing, Mencken adds “that all political platitudes and shibboleths [have] . . . one aim [and that] is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious.”
    Also, Mencken condemns Fundamentalism, creationism, chiropractic, “osteopathy, Christian Science, spiritualism and all the other half rational and half supernatural quackeries with it” as food for the ignorant, uneducable masses. [Mencken was an evolutionist and believed that creationism was a myth and a superstition — and so was much of Christianity. Being uneducable, the inferior man believed in creationism. Now, most inferior men believe in evolution, and even more theologians are evolutionists. Moreover, Christianity is waning. Would Mencken congratulate the superior man for doing the impossible of educating the uneducable inferior man? As science learns more about paleontology and genetics, evolution becomes more untenable. Would this new information cause him to change his mind about evolution? Would he recognize that today evolution has become a religion based on a set of beliefs?]
    Mencken laments, “It is a tragic but inescapable fact that most of the finest fruits of human progress, like all of the nobler virtues of man, are the exclusive possession of small minorities, chiefly unpopular and disreputable. Of the sciences, as of the fine arts, the average human being, even in the most literate and civilized of modern States, is as ignorant as the horned cattle in the fields. What he knows of histology, say, or protozoology, or philology, or paleontology, is precisely nothing. Such things lie beyond his capacity for learning, and he has no curiosity about them. The man who has any acquaintance with them seems to him to be a ridiculous figure, with a touch of the sinister. Even those applied sciences which enter intimately into his everyday existence remain outside his comprehension and interest.” [Unfortunately, he is close to the truth. For this reason, the nefarious elite finds the common man easy to manipulate.]
    About learning, Mencken writes, “Learning survives among us largely because the mob has not got news of it. If the notions it turns loose descended to the lowest levels, there would be an uprising against them, and efforts would be made to put them down by law.” He warns against putting the fine arts into the common school curriculum because once the ignorant uneducable masses discover them, they will seek to suppress them. [Instead of suppressing the fine arts overtly, they supplant them with trash that is promoted as art, with the elite doing most of the promotion.]
    Mencken adds that “there is a great deal less of yearning for moral perfection than there is of mere hatred of beauty.” Continuing he writes, “Beauty fevers and enrages him [the inferior man] for another and quite different reason. He cannot comprehend it, and yet it somehow challenges and disturbs him. If he could snore through good music he would not object to it; the trouble with it is that it keeps him awake. So he believes that it ought to be put down, just as he believes that political and economic ideas which disturb him and yet elude him ought to be put down. The finest art is safe from him simply because he has no contact with it, and is thus unaware of it.”
    Moreover, “[t]he common man, as a matter of fact, has no yearning for moral perfection. What ails him in that department is simply fear of punishment, which is to say, fear of his neighbours. He has, in safe privacy, the morals of a variety actor.”
    In summary, human progress passes the inferior man. “Its aims are unintelligible to him and its finest fruits are beyond his reach: what reaches him is what falls from the tree, and is shared with his four-footed brothers. He has changed but little since the earliest recorded time, and that change is for the worse quite as often as it is for the better. . . . He is still a slave to priests, and trembles before their preposterous magic. He is lazy, improvident and unclean. All the durable values of the world, though his labour has entered into them, have been created against his opposition. He can imagine nothing beautiful and he can grasp nothing true. Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not, he chooses almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race.” “Such is the pet and glory of democratic states.”
    [Mencken seems not to recognize that of the betters, the upper class, the superior man, the elite, only a few love liberty. Most superiors love power more than liberty and use their intellect to feed their lust for it.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on Liberty and the Inferior Man

Mencken on Liberty and the Inferior Man

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 liberty and the inferior man, pages 51-58. Below is an overview of his discussion on the liberty and the inferior man; my comments are in brackets.
    “All the revolutions in history have been started by hungry city mobs.” From this fact, some historians deduce “the doctrine that city life breeds a love of liberty.” To this notion, Mencken replies, “It may be so, but certainly that love is not visible in the lower orders. I can think of no city revolution that actually had liberty for its object, in any rational sense.” For example, freedom of speech “was actually given its first support in law by the most absolute monarch of modern times, to wit, Frederick the Great.” Mencken adds, “When it [the city] wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to [satisfying hunger].” Its next objective “is to butcher all professional libertarians.”
    Mencken notes “that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind. He can imagine, and even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty — for example, the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell for the more obviously dishonest — but the reality is incomprehensible to him.” “[G]enuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he [the inferior man] lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. More, he must be able to endure it — an even more arduous business.” [Perhaps this explains the great clamor for the welfare state by people with a lower-class mentality.] Mencken continues, “Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without.” [Sacrifices the inferior man is not willing to make — especially those in the Democratic party and many in the Republican party.]
    “The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him.” Having no friends, the free man “can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight.”
    The inferior man has no talent for self-reliance. Furthermore, he cannot even “understanding that such a talent exists. Liberty is unfathomable to him.” Moreover, “[h]e can no more comprehend it than he can comprehend honour.” To the inferior man, liberty “is simply the banal right to empty hallelujahs upon his oppressors. He is an ox whose last proud, defiant gesture is to lick the butcher behind the ear.” He shrinks from the responsibility of standing and acting alone.
    Mencken explains that until the latter part of the eighteenth century, 80 percent “of the people of the world, white and black alike, were slaves, in reality if not in name.” Liberty to most people is a recent occurrence. “Thus the lower orders of men, however grandiloquently they may talk of liberty to-day, have actually had but a short and highly deceptive experience of it. It is not in their blood.” He adds, “The heritage of freedom belongs to a small minority of men, descended, whether legitimately or by adultery, from the old lords of the soil or from the patricians of the free towns.” Mencken contends “that such a heritage is necessary in order that the concept of liberty, with all its disturbing and unnatural implications, may be so much as grasped — that such ideas cannot be implanted in the mind of man at will, but must be bred in as all other basic ideas are bred in.” Consequently, most men are “still incapable of bearing the pangs of liberty.” Liberty makes them uncomfortable, alarms them, and fills them with great loneliness. Not only does the common man not long for liberty, “he is quite unable to stand it. What he longs for is something wholly different, to wit, security. He needs protection. He is afraid of getting hurt.” [The type of person whom Mencken is describing can be seen in the masses of people who were ready to abandon all liberties for security following 9-11. They all but shouted from the rooftops, “I will be your slave if you will protect me from the bogeyman.” And many did shout it. Of course, the elite who controlled President Bush was willing to oblige, and they brought forth the police state.]
    As a result, “[t]he great masses of men, though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts.” Obviously, they can resist but do not. “The worst tyrant, even under democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit. The moment the majority decided to overthrow him he would be overthrown. But the majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine taking the risk. So it looks for leaders with the necessary courage, and when they appear it follows them slavishly, even after their courage is discovered to be mere bunkum and their altruism only a cloak for more and worse oppressions.” Consequently, “[p]olitics become the trade of playing upon its [the majority’s] natural poltroonery — of scaring it half to death, and then proposing to save it. There is in it no other quality of which a practical politician, taking one day with another, may be sure. Every theoretically free people wonders at the slavishness of all the others. But there is no actual difference between them.” [Democratic and Republican politicians have become highly skilled at making half the population fear the other half. Only Democrats can save the masses from the evil Republicans, and only the Republicans can save the masses from the evil Democrats. And that is why the country has one party with two names.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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