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 Failure of Puritanism

Mencken on the Failure of Puritanism

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 failure of Puritanism, pages 177-186. Below is an overview of his discussion on the failure of Puritanism; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken describes the action of Puritanism as follows: “Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.” [For example, ever more things said by a White, especially a White male, and even more so by a White Southern male, that might possibly hurt the feelings of a supersensitive person who is searching for someone to hurt his/her/its feelings is proscribed. If such words do not result in a jail sentence, as often happens in Europe, they certainly lead to expulsion from school and a loss of employment.] As a result, “it is almost a literal fact that the citizen has no rights that the police are bound to respect.” [One can hardly imagine Mencken’s disgust of the power that the police now have in America’s emerging police state where the police can often arrest a person for resisting arrest when the police have not charged the person with any crime.] Mencken continues, “These awful powers, of course, are not exercised against all citizens. The man of influence with the reigning politicians, the supporter of the prevailing delusions, and the adept hypocrite — these are seldom molested.” [Hillary Clinton is an excellent example of one who is not molested; she is shielded.] “But the man who finds himself in an unpopular minority is at the mercy of the Polizei [police], and the easiest way to get into such a minority is to speak out boldly for the Bill of Rights.” [One needs only to listen to talk radio, especially on shortwave and the Internet, to discover many people whom the government has victimized for speaking for the Bill of Rights. Also, many judges deny the defense appealing to the Bill of Rights.]
    The procedure operates as follows: “First an unpopular man is singled out for persecution, and then a diligent search is made, with the police and prosecuting officers and even the courts co-operating, for a law that he can be accused of breaking. The enormous multiplicity of sumptuary and inquisitorial statutes makes this quest easy. The prisoner begins his progress through the mill of justice under a vague accusation of disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace; he ends charged with crimes that carry staggering penalties.” [One cynical commentator claims that between the time the average person gets out of bed and eats breakfast, he has already committed five felonies. During the day, the average person probably commits several felonies and dozens of misdemeanors and even more civil infractions without knowing that he has committed a crime. The government has made a criminal of everyone, which makes imprisoning everyone who becomes a nuisance legally easy. To increase the likelihood of people violating a law, laws are often written to contradict other laws. Thus, by obey one law, the person has to disobey another law.] Making criminals of people “for merely thinking unpopular thoughts,” as many Puritans[, Yankees,] want to do today, is not new. Mencken comments on laws that outlawed unpopular thoughts. He writes, “Once he is accused of such heresy, the subsequent proceedings take on the character of a lynching. His constitutional rights are swept away as of no validity, and all the ancient rules of the Common Law — for example, those against double jeopardy and hearsay are suspended in order to fetch him. Many of the newer statutes actually suspend these safeguards formally, and though they are to that extent plainly unconstitutional, the higher courts have not interfered with their execution.” [This situation that Mencken abhors has gotten infinitely worse since he wrote. For example, double jeopardy appears in the application of many civil rights laws. If a White person is found not guilty of a crime against a Black person, then the U.S. government may file charges against the White person for violating the Black person’s civil rights. The White person is being charged with committing a crime of which he has been found innocent by merely changing the name of the crime.] He cites the Volstead Act as an example of a law that “destroys the constitutional right to a jury trial, and in its administration the constitutional prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures and the rule against double jeopardy.” [The Volstead Act was the law that enforced the Eighteenth Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment. Much of the legislation enacted by Congress since 9-11 voids the Bill of Rights.] He continues, “The mob is always in favour of the prosecution, for the prosecution is giving the show. In the face of its applause, very few American judges have the courage to enforce the constitutional guarantees — and still fewer prosecuting attorneys.” [This explains the lack of popular support for the people who are persecuted and prosecuted for standing up for liberty and the inalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution.]
    Furthermore, “a prosecuting attorney’s success depends very largely upon his ferocity. American practice permits him an extravagance of attack that would land him in jail, and perhaps even in a lunatic asylum, in any other country, and the more passionately he indulges in it the more certain becomes his promotion to higher office, including the judicial.” Judges who had previously been prosecuting attorneys “seem to be generally convinced that any man accused of crime is ipso facto guilty, and that if he is known to harbour political heresies he is guilty of a sort of blasphemy when he mentions his constitutional rights.” [An early television judge showed such bias and prejudice. Whenever someone appeared before him whom he thought was a “racist,” that person lost his case even if the evidence overwhelmingly supported his cause.]
    Mencken notes, “This doctrine that a man who stands in contempt of the prevailing idealogy has no rights under the law is so thoroughly democratic that in the United States it is seldom questioned, save by romantic fanatics, robbed of their wits by an uncritical reading of the Fathers.” [Mencken’s observation may be true of a true lover of liberty, a libertist, but it is not true of others. However, courts have gone out of their way to ensure that the rights of Communists and their allies who want to abolish all real liberties and convert the United States to totalitarianism are protected.]
    Next, Mencken remarks, “It is difficult, indeed, for democracy to reconcile itself to what may be called common decency. By this common decency I mean the habit, in the individual, of viewing with tolerance and charity the acts and ideas of other individuals — the habit which makes a man a reliable friend, a generous opponent, and a good citizen.” [One of the most amusing ironies in America today is that the people who preach tolerance and yell the loudest that we must all be tolerant are the most intolerant people in the country. What would one expect from a Puritan Yankee, to use a tautology?] Then Mencken adds, “The democrat, despite his strong opinion to the contrary, is seldom a good citizen. . . .His eagerness to bring all his fellow-citizens, and especially all those who are superior to him, into accord with his own dull and docile way of thinking, and to force it upon them when they resist, leads him inevitably into acts of unfairness, oppression and dishonour which, if all men were alike guilty of them, would quickly break down that mutual trust and confidence upon which the very structure of civilized society rests. Where democratic man is so firmly in possession of his theoretical rights that resistance to him is hopeless, as it is in large areas of the United States, he actually produces this disaster.” [Can one say “California?”] For “any well-informed and self-respecting man” living in such a community is almost impossible. Not accepting “the democratic epistemology and the Puritan ethic” of such communities, he is harassed until he flees.
    Continuing, Mencken explains the uneasiness in American life: “This irreconcilable antagonism between democratic Puritanism and common decency is probably responsible for the uneasiness and unhappiness that are so marked in American life, despite the great material prosperity of the United States. Theoretically, the American people should be happier than any other; actually, they are probably the least happy in Christendom. The trouble with them is that they do not trust one another — and without mutual trust there can be no ease, and no genuine happiness.” [Multiculturalism and multiracialism, both of which the Yankee has forced on the country, cause much of this distrust and the resulting unhappiness. As European countries have become more multicultural and multiracial, they too are suffering from distrust and the resulting unhappiness and uneasiness. People in monoracial and monocultural countries are more trusting of one another and, therefore, happier.] Mencken concludes, “The thing that makes life charming is not money, but the society of our fellow-men, and the thing that draws us toward our fellow-men is not admiration for their inner virtues, their hard striving to live according to the light that is in them, but admiration for their outer graces and decencies — in brief, confidence that they will always act generously and understandingly in their intercourse with us. We must trust men before we may enjoy them.” Then he remarks that “it is impossible to put any such trust in a Puritan. With the best intentions in the world he cannot rid himself of the delusion that his duty to save us from our sins — i.e., from the non-Puritanical acts that we delight in — is paramount to his duty to let us be happy in our own way. Thus he is unable to be tolerant, and with tolerance goes magnanimity. A Puritan cannot be magnanimous. He is constitutionally unable to grasp the notion that it is better to be decent than to be steadfast, or even than to be just.” Furthermore, the democrat “is simply a Puritan doubly damned.” [Mencken seems not to realize that “Puritan” and “Yankee” are synonymous. That is, a Puritan is a Yankee and a Yankee is a Puritan. Hillary Clinton is an excellent contemporary example of a Puritan Yankee.]

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 Lame Ducks

Mencken on Lame Ducks

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes the lame ducks, pages 148-154. Below is an overview of his discussion on the lame ducks; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken considers one of the “unpleasant by-products of democracy . . . [to be the] professional politicians who, in the eternal struggle for office and its rewards, have suffered crushing defeats, and are full of rage and bitterness.”
    Under democracy, all politics resolve “into a series of dynastic questions: the objective is always the job, not the principle.” Usually, the defeated candidate “takes his failure very badly, for it leaves him stripped bare. In most cases his fellow professionals take pity on him and put him into some more or less gaudy appointive office, to preserve his livelihood and save his face.” [Hillary Clinton illustrates excellently the abjection of the defeated candidate. Unfortunately for her, but fortunately for the country, no one has pitied her enough to appoint her to some office. However, no appointive position will alleviate her pain.]
    However, for some defeat is so painful that an appointed position will not assuage the pain. “This majestic victim not infrequently seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what remains of his influence with the mob into a weapon against the nation as a whole, and becomes a chronic maker of trouble.” He discusses six examples: Clay, Calhoun, Burr, Blaine, Theodore Roosevelt, and Bryan. [Hillary Clinton is a recent example.]
    Mencken remarks that countries under “despotism escape such lamentable exhibitions of human frailty” of the unsuccessful aspirants for office under democracy. “Unsuccessful aspirants for the crown are either butchered out of hand or exiled to Paris, where tertiary lues quickly disposes of them.” Continuing, he writes, “The Crown Prince, of course, has his secret thoughts, and no doubt they are sometimes homicidal, but he is forced by etiquette to keep them to himself, and so the people are not annoyed and injured by them. He cannot go about praying publicly that the King, his father, come down with endocarditis, nor can he denounce the old gentleman as an idiot and advocate his confinement in a maison de santi.” [Nevertheless, dictators of communist countries have ordered the extermination of millions of their countrymen.] Although everyone “knows what his hopes and yearnings are, but no one has to listen to them.” However, “[u]nder democracy, they are bellowed from every stump.”

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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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 Maker of Law

Mencken on the Maker of Law

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 maker of law, pages 131-139. Below is an overview of his discussion on the maker of law; my comments are in brackets.
    “In the United States, the general democratic tendency to crowd competent and self-respecting men out of the public service is exaggerated by a curious constitutional rule, unknown in any other country.” Although its “aim is to preserve for every electoral unit a direct and continuous voice in the government; its actual effect is to fill all the legislative bodies of the land with puerile local politicians, many of them so stupid that they are quite unable to grasp the problems with which government has to deal.” [For example, the Representative from Georgia who thought that islands floated like boats and would sink or capsize if too many people were on the island.]
    Often no competent man is available in a district to represent it. [Many competent men live in most districts; however, they do not want to degrade themselves to the level of a democratic politician described by Mencken.] According to Mencken, the competent man “is usually so enmeshed in operations against the resident imbeciles and their leaders, and hence so unpopular, that his candidature is out of the question.”
    [Mencken seems convinced that if Congress and State legislatures were filled with competent men the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol would not have been adopted.] “[P]liant and unconscionable jackasses” in Congress allying with members from “all the more backward States” forced the Prohibition Amendment through Congress. “[T]he votes of even more degraded noodles, assembled from the backwoods in the State Legislatures, that put the amendment into the Constitution.”
    Mencken believes that “[i]f it were possible for a congressional district to choose any man to represent it, as is the case in all other civilized countries, there would be more breaks in the monotony of legislative venality and stupidity, for even the rustic mob, in the absence of strong local antipathies, well fanned by demagogues, might succumb occasionally to the magic of a great name.”
    Because a representative must reside in the district that he represents, “a depressing gang of incompetents, mainly petty lawyers and small-town bankers” become the predominant representatives. Moreover, “in intelligence, information and integrity,” the House of Representatives “is comparable to a gang of bootleggers — a House so deficient in competent leaders that it can scarcely carry on its business.” [This is an excellent description of the Congress that President Trump faces.] Another result “is the immense power of . . . corrupt and sinister agencies [lobbyists].”
    Mencken has a low opinion of the average Southerner in the House of Representatives. According to him, the average Southern Representative “got his early education in a hedge school, he proceeded to some preposterous Methodist or Baptist college, and then he served for a time as a school teacher in his native swamps, finally reaching the dignity of county superintendent of schools and meanwhile reading law. Admitted to the bar, and having got a taste of county politics as superintendent, he became district attorney, and perhaps, after a while, county judge.” After running for Congress three or four times, he is finally elected. Such a man is unfit “for the responsibilities of a law-maker. . . . He is an ignoramus, and he is quite without the common decencies. Having to choose  between sense and nonsense, he chooses nonsense almost instinctively.” Before he went to Washington and began meeting “lobbyists, bootleggers and the correspondents of the newspapers, he had perhaps never met a single intelligent human being.” Moreover, officialdom disdains him. “His dream is to be chosen to go on a congressional junket, i.e., on a drunken holiday at government expense. His daily toil is getting jobs for relatives and retainers.” He is “a knavish and preposterous nonentity, half-way between a kleagle of the Ku Klux and a grand worthy bow-wow of the Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin who make the laws of the United States.” [Mencken’s description of the typical Southern Representative is less accurate today. However, it is still accurate if applied to Representatives from across the country by changing the names of some organizations. For example, the Klan is irrelevant today, except in the minds of those who believe the Southern Poverty Law Center. Today, all Klan organizations of more than two or three members are governmental fronts.]
    As for Senators, they “are measurably better, if only because they serve for longer terms.” Having a two-year term, a Representative “is constantly running for re-election. Scarcely has he got to Washington before he must hurry home and resume his bootlicking of the local bosses.” However, a Senator “may safely forget them for two or three years, and so, if there is no insuperable impediment in his character, he may show a certain independence, and yet survive.” Occasionally, some Senators may attain “a laudable mastery of the public business, particularly such as lies within the range of their private interest.” Moreover, they may “show the intellectual dignity and vigour of genuine statesmen.” Nevertheless, the average Senator “is simply a party hack, without ideas and without anything rationally describable as self-respect. His backbone has a sweet resiliency.” Moreover, “it is quite impossible to forecast his action, even on a matter of the highest principle, without knowing what rewards are offered by the rival sides.” These Senators prefer “their jobs to their dignity.”
    [Mencken gives an accurate, but unfortunately, description of the people who govern the United States and make their laws. Nothing has changed for the better since he wrote.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on Government

Mencken on Government

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 government, pages 126-128 and 130-131. Below is an overview of his discussion on government; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken notes, “All government, whatever its form, is carried on chiefly by men whose first concern is for their offices, not for their obligations.” Government is essentially “a conspiracy of a small group against the masses of men, and especially against the masses of diligent and useful men. Its primary aim is to keep this group in jobs that are measurably more comfortable and exhilarating than the jobs its members could get in free competition.” To accomplish this goal, political leaders are “always willing to make certain sacrifices of integrity and self-respect in order to hold these jobs, and the fact is just as plain under a despot as it is under the mob.” [Mencken gives a good argument for term limitation and for limiting the number of years anyone can be employed by the government in the civil service, armed forces, and appointed positions.]
    As the “mob has its flatterers and bosh-mongers; the king has his courtiers.” However, the two have an important difference. “The courtier, at his worst, at least performs his genuflections before one who is theoretically his superior, and is surely not less than his equal. He does not have to abase himself before swine, with whom, ordinarily, he would disdain to have any traffic. He is not compelled to pretend that he is a worse man than he really is. He needn’t hold his nose in order to approach his benefactor. Thus he may go into office without having dealt his honour a fatal wound, and once he is in, he is under no pressure to sacrifice it further, and may nurse it back to health and vigour.” Moreover, "[h]is sovereign, at worst, has a certain respect for it, and hesitates to strain it unduly.” Furthermore, “[t]he courtier’s sovereign . . . is apt to be a man of honour himself.”
    On the other hand, “the mob has no sensitiveness [for honor] . . . and, indeed, no knowledge that it exists. . . . To the democrats of the world this attitude was puzzling, and on reflection it began to seem contemptible and offensive.” (“Once Frederick the Great was asked why he gave commissions in his army only to Junker. Because, he answered, they will not lie and they cannot be bought. That answer explains sufficiently the general democratic theory that the Junker are not only scoundrels but also half-wits.”)
    Mencken summaries the difference between feudalism and democracy. “[T]he  the essential objection to democracy is that, with few exceptions, it imposes degrading acts and attitudes upon the men responsible for the welfare and dignity of the state. The former was compelled to do homage to his suzerain, who was very apt to be a brute and an ignoramus. The latter are compelled to do homage to their constituents, who in overwhelming majority are certain to be both.”
    [Throughout his book, Mencken blames most of America’s problems on demagogues and the mob that they manipulate. Although he occasionally looks behind the demagogues, he seldom goes further than a glance. If he were to remove a few layers, he would find what he seems to consider the betters and superiors manipulating from behind the scene their puppets like Roosevelt, Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge — all of whom Mencken considers to be men of the mob. These betters or superiors are the plutocrats and intellectuals, people of high intelligence, most of whom would have been aristocrats, Catholic clergymen, and international merchants of the olden days. {Later in his book, he does go to the heart and identifies the real power behind the government.}]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on the Occasional Exception

Mencken on the Occasional Exception

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 occasional exception, pages 124-126 and 128-130. Below is an overview of his discussion on the occasional exception; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken acknowledges that “a man of unquestionable integrity and ability occasionally gets to the bench, even of the State courts. In the same way a man of unquestionable integrity and ability sometimes finds himself in high executive or legislative office; there are even a few cases of such men getting into the White House.” When such a man does get elected, it happens because of “a failure of the rule.” However, “[t]he self-respecting candidate obviously cannot count on that failure: the odds are heavily against him from the start, and every effort he makes to diminish them involves some compromise with complete candour. He may take refuge in cynicism, and pursue the cozening of the populace as a sort of intellectual exercise, cruel but not unamusing, or he may accept the conditions of the game resignedly, and charge up the necessary dodges and false pretences to spiritual profit and loss, as a chorus girl charges up her favours to the manager and his backer; but in either case he has parted with something that must be tremendously valuable to a self-respecting man, and is even more valuable to the country he serves than it is to himself.”
    Most members of the U.S. House of Representatives have compromised their honor [if they began with any honor]. “They have been broken . . . [and] have learned how to leap through the hoops of professional job-mongers.” Furthermore, they keep quiet about good causes and speak on causes known to be evil. “The higher they rise, the farther they fall.” [Senator Jesse Helms is an example of such a man. He entered the Senate as an honorable man of integrity. The longer he served, the lower he fell. By his last term, he was little more than a puppet of the Israeli-Zionist lobby.]
    “The occasional mavericks . . . last a session, and then disappear. The old Congressman, the veteran of genuine influence and power, is either one who is so stupid that the ideas of the mob are his own ideas, or one so far gone in charlatanry that he is unconscious of his shame.” [Most speakers of the House and Senate presidents pro tempore are examples of the former. Senator John McCain is an extreme example of the latter.]
    Unfortunately, the laws are made mostly “by men who have sold their honour for their jobs, and they are executed by men who put their jobs above justice and common sense.” Mencken concludes, “We are dependent for whatever good flows out of democracy upon men who do not believe in democracy.”
    “The democratic politician . . . tries to save his amour propre [self-esteem] in a characteristically human way; that is to say, he denies them. . . . The democratic politician, confronted by the dishonesty and stupidity of his master, the mob, tries to convince himself and all the rest of us that it is really full of rectitude and wisdom.” Mencken adds, “This notion that the mob is wise . . . is not to be taken seriously: it was invented by mob-masters to save their faces.”
    Then Mencken remarks, “The best democratic statesmanship, like the best non-democratic statesmanship, tends to safeguard the honour of the higher officers of state by relieving them of that degrading necessity [of going to the mob for support].” Consequently, the president of the United States is not elected by popular vote.
    He adds that when an “office becomes steeped in intolerable corruption, . . . [it should be taken] out of the gift of the mob and make . . . appointive.” Nevertheless, “[t]he aspirant, of course, still has to seek it, for under democracy it is very rare that office seeks the man, but seeking it of the President, or even of the Governor of a State, is felt to be appreciably less humiliating and debasing than seeking it of the mob.”

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on Utopia

Mencken on Utopia

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 utopia, pages 115-124. Below is an overview of his discussion of utopia; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken notes that in the United States, “every office-holder, when he takes oath to support the Constitution, must swear on his honour that, summoned to the death-bed of his grandmother, he will not take the old lady a bottle of wine. He may say so and do it, which makes him a liar, or he may say so and not do it, which makes him a pig.” [When Mencken wrote, the Constitution contained an amendment that prohibited the sale of alcohol — the Prohibition amendment. Much of Mencken’s hostility toward democracy and, to a slightly lesser degree, toward religion, seems to result from Prohibition. At least, Prohibition is often his prime example of democracy run amuck.]
    In spite of this dilemma, “idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, . . . argue that it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics.” To which, Mencken replies that this remedy “is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it, they simply argue . . . that the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdy-houses with virgins. . . . [This] device would accomplish very little: either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease to be virgins.” Then he adds, “The same alternatives confront the political aspirant who is what is regarded in America as a gentleman — that is, one who is not susceptible to open bribery in cash. The moment his leg goes over the political fence he finds the mob confronting him, and if he would stay within he must adapt himself to its tastes and prejudices. In other words, he must learn all the tricks of the regular mountebanks.” That is, he must either respond to the mob and serve it or lose his job.
    Mencken supports his argument with some examples. He notes, “It is an axiom of practical politics, indeed, that the worst enemies of political decency are the tired reformers — and the worst of the worst are those whose primary thirst to make the corruptible put on incorruption was accompanied by a somewhat sniffish class consciousness.” One example is Theodore Roosevelt entering “politics as a sword drawn against demagogy.” Yet he became a “violent and shameless demagogue.” [We may be seeing the same happening with Donald Trump. He entered the political arena as an outsider who was going to “drain the swamp,” end American foreign entanglements and wars, rebuild America, and control and limit immigration. Yet he has expanded America’s wars and filled his administration with swamp monsters. Most of the real outsiders that he appointed, he has since removed. He continues America’s Israeli-first foreign policy instead of adopting an America-first foreign policy. He is beginning to soften on immigration and give into the establishment on that issue and others. He is acting ever more like the typical establishment politician.]
    Mencken admits that a gentleman may enter politics under democracy. However, “it is almost impossible for him to stay there and remain a gentleman.” He continues, “The haughty amateur, at the start, may actually make what seems to be a brilliant success, for he is commonly full of indignation, and so strikes out valiantly, and the mob crowds up because it likes a brutal show. . . . If he retains his rectitude he loses his office, and if he retains his office he has to dilute his rectitude with the cologne spirits of the trade.” [Much of what Mencken is describing can be written about Donald Trump, a gentleman by Mencken’s definition and an amateur politician. Will he remain a gentleman or will he become another sleazy politician catering to the mob, or, more correctly, the minority that manipulates the mob? This minority resides in the old news media, the leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties, the military-industrial complex, most big businesses and big banks, the globalists, and a host of their demagogues.]
    In a democracy, “the man of native integrity is either barred from the public service altogether or subjected to almost irresistible temptations after he gets in. The competition of less honourable men is more than he can bear. He must stand against them before the mob, and the sempiternal prejudices of the mob run their way.”
    Democracy in the United States is worse than it is in Great Britain because the United States have no aristocracy to check the mob. For the most part, American Presidents were not intellectuals, and most avoid intelligent men. Likewise, has been the average American governor.
    Moreover, “[t]he judiciary, under the American system, sinks quite as low.” The U.S. Supreme Court “carries on its dull and preposterous duties quite outside the stream of civilized thought, and even outside the stream of enlightened juridical thought.” Furthermore, “few American judges ever contribute anything of value to legal theory. . . . The Constitution apparently has no more meaning to them than it has to a Prohibition agent. They have acquiesced almost unanimously in the destruction of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and supinely connived at the invasion of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth.” [What would Mencken think about what the Supreme Court has done to the Bill of Rights in recent decades with the War on Drugs and the War or Terrorism?] America’s mediocre judiciary results from the average judge being a trailer instead of a leader when he was a practicing lawyer. [When the judiciary does lead with its activist judges, the results are usually worse than when it restricts itself to being a follower.] “The judicial office is not attractive, as a rule, to the better sort of lawyers.” Moreover, “judges are so often chosen for purely political reasons, even for the Supreme Court of the United States, that the lawyer of professional dignity and self-respect hesitates to enter into the competition. Thus the bench tends to be filled with duffers, and many of them are also scoundrels, as the frequent complaints against their extortions and tyrannies testify.” [An example of such a Supreme Court judge was Earl Warren, whom President Eisenhower appointed to pay Warren for delivering California's convention delegation to Eisenhower. Warren’s court was notorious for tyrannical, despotic rulings that are still destroying the country.] Mencken notes, “In the States, where judges are commonly elected by popular vote, the shyster has every advantage over the reputable lawyer, including that of yearning for the judicial salary with a vast and undivided passion. And when it comes to the Federal courts, once so honourable, he has every advantage again, including the formidable one of knowing how to crook his knee gracefully to the local dispenser of Federal patronage (in the South often a worthless Negro) and to the Methodist wowsers of the Anti-Saloon League.” [America’s judiciary, especially the federal courts, has deteriorated even more since Mencken wrote.]
    Mencken admits that the shyster does not always prevail. “[A] man of unquestionable integrity and ability occasionally gets to the bench, even of the State courts.” [Today, many State courts, especially the higher courts, have a larger percentage of competent judges of integrity than the federal courts.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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