The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Its Origins,” by H.L. Mencken

Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

Part of Mencken’s “Notes on Democracy” (1926), this essay looks at the origins of democracy seen through Mencken’s jaundiced cynical eyes. To put it plainly, Mencken was not a fan of democracy. He was not a fan of equality. He thought the lower classes had a tendency to drag everything down to their level, and he flat out refused to cooperate. He thinks the Greeks were totally over-rated (there’s a very funny essay devoted entirely to debunking the Greeks). His feelings on politicians are well-known, and he felt that the democratic system was an exercise in absurdity as well as a gigantic watering-down process of any idea that might have some relevance. Writing at a time when the world was increasingly threatened by non-democratic political systems, Mencken questions his own system, questions democracy, and finds it sorely lacking as a political theory or as a Way of Life. The cream does not rise to the top in a democratic society: on the contrary, the “cream” will always be looked on with suspicion by those NOT endowed so favorably.

All of this is so super-offensive to Americans’ ears that even to discuss it becomes an exercise in combat. Anti-intellectual rhetoric has been with us since our nation began. And yet, of course, the Founders were all part of at least the financial elite of the colonies, and rightly so (they would say). The common man needed to be protected from his own ignorant impulses towards safety, ignorance, and pitchfork-wielding mob-behavior. But the Founders were smart in also realizing that the elite needed to be protected from their own worst impulses (like seizing power and lording it over everyone). So we have checks and balances, and Distrust is built into our political system. But still: the worst thing you can call anyone in America, outside of being a racist, is an elitist. That is supposed to be the killing blow from which no one can recover. Mencken can’t stand that attitude, and protects his elitism from those operating from envy and hostility. He does so through language: his language creates an almost impenetrable loop of logic. You really have to be on your toes to take him on at all. It’s not that he’s so much more “right” than anyone else. It’s that he writes about it better than anyone else, and does not leave a “way in” for his opponents. Very effective rhetoric.

Interesting dovetail: I recently finished Victor Serge’s brilliant novel The Case of Comrade Tuleyev (an amazing analysis of the Soviet Terror in the 1930s, launched in the wake of the murder of Kirov in 1934.) Victor Serge had a front-row seat for those events, working, as he did in Russia in the 20s and 30s. The Case of Comrade Tuleyev shows what happens when men who are uneducated, brutalized by being held down by society, unfamiliar with rigorous critical thinking, are given power. (Or, take power.) The thought that “common man” has more wisdom than the “privileged few” was one of the deep appeals of the Russian Revolution (and other revolutions – the French Revolution being a case in point). Victor Serge is brutal in his assessment that some people SHOULD have power, and others should NOT.

I don’t blame people, of course, for wanting to argue with Mencken. I argue with him myself, especially when his barbs hit a personal point (like his obnoxious column on women who don’t have children. I find myself going, “Well, fuck YOU, Henry!! You shut your dirty mouth, meanie!” Which is a clear example of how Mencken can dis-combobble his opponents. If I want to argue with him, I need to get my act together.) His arguments are often obnoxious, and phrases like “stale Christian bilge” exacerbate the matter. And, of course, that was his goal. He wasn’t flailing about in outrage. He was sharpening his rhetoric as a spear, going after the things that were the enemies of what he held dear (like enlightenment, culture, critical thinking, artistic appreciation, freedom).

I adore him.

Here is an excerpt from Mencken’s piece on the origins of Democracy.

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Its Origins,” by H.L. Mencken

What we now call democracy came into the Western World to the tune of sweet, soft music. There was, at the start, no harsh bawling from below; there was only a dulcet twittering from above. Democratic man thus began as an ideal being, full of ineffable virtues and romantic wrongs – in brief, as Rousseau’s noble savage in smock and jerkin, brought out of the tropical wilds to shame the lords and masters of the civilized lands. The fact continues to have important consequences to this day. It remains impossible, as it was in the Eighteenth Century, to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical merit, an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of the scale – that inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes a sort of superiority – nay, the superiority of superiorities. Everywhere on earth, save where the enlightenment of the modern age is confessedly in transient eclipse, the movement is toward the completer and more enamored enfranchisement of the lower orders. Down there, one hears, lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom, unpolluted by the corruption of privilege. What baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people, instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition. Their yearnings are pure; they alone are capable of a perfect patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness on this lugubrious ball. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

This notion, as I hint, originated in the poetic fancy of gentlemen on the upper levels – sentimentalists who, observing to their distress that the ass was overladen, proposed to reform transport by putting him into the cart. A stale Christian bilge ran through their veins. They were the direct ancestors of the more saccharine Liberals of today, who yet mouth their tattered phrases and dream their preposterous dreams. I can find no record that these phrases, in the beginning, made much impression upon the actual objects of their rhetoric. Early democratic man seems to have given little thought to the democratic ideal, and less veneration. What he wanted was something concrete and highly materialistic – more to eat, less work, higher wages, lower taxes. He had no apparent belief in the acroamatic virtue of his own class, and certainly none in his capacity to rule. His aim was not to exterminate the baron, but simply to bring the baron back to a proper discharge of baronial business. When, by the wild shooting that naturally accompanies all mob movements, the former end was accidentally accomplished, as in France, and men out of the mob began to take on baronial airs, the mob itself quickly showed its opinion of them by bothering them deliberately and in earnest. Once the pikes were out, indeed, it was a great deal more dangerous to be a tribune of the people than to be an ornament of the old order. The more copiously the blood gushed, the nearer that old order came to resurrection. The Paris proletariat, having been misled into killing its King in 1793, devoted the next two years to killing those who had misled it, and by the middle of 1796 it had another King in fact, and in three years more he was King de jure, with an attendant herd of barons, counts, marquises and dukes, some of them new but most of them old, to guard, symbolize and execute his sovereignty. And he and they were immensely popular – so popular that half France leaped to suicide that their glory might blind the world.