HL Mencken’s Notes on Democracy, recently republished in a sterling new paperback edition by Dissident Books, was originally published in 1926. Mencken was then a respected columnist and was considered one of the most progressive voices speaking in f...more
HL Mencken’s Notes on Democracy, recently republished in a sterling new paperback edition by Dissident Books, was originally published in 1926. Mencken was then a respected columnist and was considered one of the most progressive voices speaking in favour of “liberty”. Though recent years have seen labels of “un-American” pelted against him, Mencken remains, on the evidence of Notes on Democracy, one of the most strident voices of opposition against the religious – specifically Christian – domination of so-called “democracy”, at least in its American form. Notes on Democracy was planned as the first volume in a trilogy of works in which he would state his political, religious and humanist views, its writing perhaps affected by Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes trial, in which Creationist Christians lobbied strongly to have the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution banned from schools. The evangelical opposition to scientific progress evidently struck Mencken and Notes on Democracy is riddled with ironic asides about the Christian control of morality and censorship within American democracy, observations which no doubt contributed to his alienation and the comparative unpopularity of the book in contrast to his other writings of the period, though those who did not attack and condemn it as shallow were wont to consider it as verging on the satiric.
Mencken divides the work into three sections, “Democratic Man”, “The Democratic State” and “Democracy and Liberty”. He is in no doubt that democracy is in essense little more than mob rule, spending much time on the delineation of the fight as he saw it between the Nietzschean “superior man” (of intellect and education) and the mob, being driven by the determinates of religion, especially the Creationist lobby observing and asserting early in the piece that the mob would compromise its liberty for its safety, sentiments that, ironically enough, would be echoed by a new generation some 80 years later as America faced the Bush government’s fear-mongering, Christian agenda. From the outset, Mencken is bitter, almost vitriolic, fully contemptuous of the idea that the will of the people is in any way a superior means of determining government agenda, sceptical even of the then much-vaunted ideals of the French Revolution. Indeed, he concludes of democracy in the early pages of his work that it is the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and seldom departs from that sentiment as he proceeds to mock much of the Christian morality by which the American proletariat as he saw it was defined, often against its own will. Of this, he offered the following rather astutely satirical barb:
“The central aim of all the Christian governments of today, in theory if not in fact, is to further their liberation, to augment their power, to drive even larger and larger pipes into the great reservoir of their natural wisdom. That government is called good which responds most quickly and accurately to their desires and ideas. That is called bad which conditions their omnipotence and puts a question mark after their omniscience.” (p. 32)
He went further in his vitriolic attack on the Christian agenda behind American democracy “(d)on’t they defend the rubbish of Genesis on the theory that rejecting it would leave the rabble without faith, and that without faith it would be one with the brutes, and very unhappy, and what is worse, immoral?” (p.33). And of the supposed morality of the Christian agenda, Mencken was furiously indignant, littering the first section, “Democratic Man” with example after example of what he considered the mind-numbing hypocritical idiocy of the moralistic (and inevitably ineffective) laws established by Christian politicians in the name of “democracy”, such as the Mann Act, all the while reminding the reader that such laws were enacted by people who still believed in the literal truth of the Genesis myth. With so many in America still believing in this Biblical nonsense today it is hardly surprising to learn that Mencken was increasingly labelled “un-American” following the original publication of Notes on Democracy. But that is not to say that Mencken’s vitriolic attacks lack substance, for they do not, just to reveal that they are barbed with the bitter ironic wit of one of America’s most iconoclastic columnists.
Mencken is critical too of psychology, particularly of behavioural, or “mob” psychology as he sees it, insisting on its subservience to the popularization of demagoguery, the mob driven into action in order to suppress that which its leaders determine to be its other. Seeing the power of the democratic government as being able to lead the mob into a panic in order to preserve its values – or rather, those values that are fed to it – Mencken is scathing of America’s foreign and war policy. After a brief discussion of the liberating nature of Freudian psychology, Mencken is led back to his condemnation of the “mob”, of the American people themselves, of whom he can conclude but “the yokel has room in his head for only one (thought)… that is the idea that God regards him fondly, and has a high respect for him – that all other men are out of favour in heaven and abandoned to the devil” (p. 47) leading him to label a subsequent section “envy as a philosophy” in a further assault on the American alliance between democratic “liberty” and the so-called will of God, which Mencken concludes is a construction of the few in order to manipulate the masses into accepting their moral agenda – finding democracy thus to be in effect the exact opposite of liberty (at least when run on Christian principles). Finding that liberty is “a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind” (p.53) Mencken increasingly goes beyond ironic humour into almost fearful horror at the hypocrisy of humankind manifest in the creation of American democracy and its mainly Christian adherents, concluding with inescapable irony that “the whole progress of the world, even in the direction of ameliorating the lot of the masses, is always opposed by the masses” (p.58). Mencken is eloquent in the defence of his stance, concluding of the effectiveness of the Christian stranglehold over morality and ideology that its origin in the Genesis myth was simple enough for the understanding of the average American dolt.
In The Democratic State Mencken asserted that no politician could remain a politician and be an honourable man, no matter what qualities of wisdom were bestowed on him by the mob. With legislation determined by election results, Mencken was sceptical that any truly democratic progress could be made, arguing even against America’s electoral college system as enabling merely a system of disproportional representation. It is in this section that Mencken expands his theory of the Christian mass to contemporize why the religion should exert such force over the leaders of so-called “democracy”, essaying here the difference between representative and direct democracy. Though Mencken feels that the hallmark of both is the will of the mob to “employ agents to execute its will” (p. 73) the mob remain unable to fully comprehend the magnitude of the issues before them, concluding that “the popular will” is in effect the self-interest of a small but determined minority (religious) to sway the mob into accepting its decrees. Thus, he concludes, using Christian terminology, that the American people are simply “sheep”, led and “bamboozled” by those they believe they have elected to act in their own best interests. It is here that Mencken’s attack on democracy extends into satiric vitriol and one is never sure of how much is heartfelt intention and how much is the constructed rhetoric of a most ironic wit. No matter perhaps, for the thread throughout remains the critique of the Christian underpinnings and control of so-called democracy in America.
Many of his arguments in this chapter conclude with Mencken’s observance that the victories of so-called democracy have always constituted an infringement of individual liberty in the name of improving personal safety which in turn is thought to make the workings of the democratic process smoother and more representative. Mencken sees such attainments as purely at the whim of the mob mentality at a given epoch and spends much time exposing, as he sees it, the corrupt nature of the politicians claiming to represent democracy but in practice favouring such as the law of property over individual freedom. Mencken’s rhetorical flourish is here reserved for the notion of the politician, or democrat, as statesman who holds such power not by any individual nobility of intention or democratic virtue but solely “in their inability to grasp any issues save the simplest and most banal, in their incurable tendency to fly into preposterous alarms, in their petty self-seeking and venality, in their instinctive envy and hatred of their superiors – in brief, in their congenital incapacity for the elemental duties of citizens in a civilized state” (p. 88). By the time he then asserts that the bosses own the mob “simply because they can be bought for a job on the street or a load of coal” Mencken has viciously, and with alarming, shrew vitriol, eroded any possible faith in American democracy as a superior political system.
Concluding with Democracy and Liberty, Mencken asserts little hope for the future of American Democracy, consumed as he has endeavoured to show it in the preceding sections, by Christian more so than secular belief – at least on the level of policy application and the inherent morally bankrupt hypocrisy of the politicians who espouse it. Here, Mencken is so bitter as to risk alienating those who have so far been appreciative of his wit or thrilled by the acumen of his satire, beginning his condemnation of American democracy as having any role in liberty that:
“the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary… he is not actually 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. He cannot enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it in others only as something to be taken away from them… the average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.” (p117)
Mencken indeed argues that throughout Notes on Democracy and by the time he reasserts it here has been overcome with his own despairing irony, from the wry to the wretched. In this, Mencken is led full circle to return to Nietzsche and the idea of the “will-to-power” as behind all political systems, including – despite all protestations to the contrary – American democracy, the rule of the mob by the moral interests of the religious few. In this, law is charlatanry in support of the deceit of the common man, his appropriation into religious determinism, thus rooting democracy in the development of American Puritanism in which morality is reduced to irony and contempt. It is a stern conclusion to the preceding satiric indictment, finding opposition between democracy and even such a concept as decency. Indeed, Mencken by this point seems driven to heap upon democracy every single snide association he can and it is little surprise that this work fated as poorly with the American populace as it did and that he developed the reputation of being “un-American” that would dog his later reputation.
With his ultimate conclusion of corruption running rife throughout American democracy in theory and practice, the vigilance of the observer and writer was the best defence as he saw it – the duty to admonish those in power when they have done wrong or have acquiesced to the religious agenda of the mob. But as to Mencken’s real view of democracy – in the useful introduction to the superb Dissident Books edition, Mary Elizabeth Rodgers offers the following admission from Mencken late in his life – “I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.” And perhaps that is the ultimate triumph of Mencken’s Notes on Democracy – the wry, vitriolic humour with which he consistently undermines America’s belief in itself as the bastion of liberty. Just as Mencken exposed the religious moral agenda behind so called American democracy so Notes on Democracy makes informed retrospective reading for a generation whose views have been qualified not just by the War on Terror but by the writings of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris: American Democracy from a deconstructive atheist wit. Satiric perhaps, but with added relevance for an America responding to a Born-Again Christian War on Terror that has seen increasing calls for war criminal prosecution for those who claimed that their democracy was in fact doing God’s will.(less)
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published
2009
Robert Cettl said:
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