Notes on Democracy

by H.L. Mencken

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!

There are minds which start out with a superior equipment, and proceed to high and arduous deeds; there are minds which never get any farther than a sort of insensate sweating, like that of a kidney.

In other words, men differ inside their heads as they differ outside. There are men who are naturally intelligent and can learn, and there are men who are naturally stupid and cannot.

An intelligent man is one who is capable of taking in knowledge until the natural limits of the species are reached. A stupid man is one whose progress is arrested at some specific time and place before then.

the concept of the unteachable. Some men can learn almost indefinitely; their capacity goes on increasing until their bodies begin to wear out. Others stop in childhood, even in infancy. They reach, say, the mental age of ten or twelve, and then they develop no more.

Democracy, alas! is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart.

Golf is easier; so is joining Rotary; so is Fundamentalism; so is osteopathy; so is Americanism.

What does the mob think? It thinks, obviously, what its individual members think. And what is that? It is, in brief, what somewhat sharp-nosed and unpleasant children think. The mob, being composed, in the overwhelming main, of men and women who have not got beyond the ideas and emotions of childhood, hovers, in mental age, around the time of puberty, and chiefly below it.

that the earliest and most profound of human emotions is fear. Man comes into the world weak and naked, and almost as devoid of intelligence as an oyster, but he brings with him a highly complex and sensitive susceptibility to fear.

The ideal educated man is simply one who has put away as foolish the immemorial fears of the race – of strange men and strange ideas, of the powers and principalities of the air. He is sure of himself in the world; no dread of the dark rides him; he is serene.

the vast majority of men are congenitally incapable of any such intellectual progress. They cannot take in new ideas, and they cannot get rid of old fears. They lack the logical sense; they are unable to reason from a set of facts before them, free from emotional distraction. But they also lack something more fundamental: they are incompetent to take in the bald facts themselves.

Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos.

It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something. The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favour of colourless mediocrities.

Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm. Its processes are most beautifully displayed at times when they stand most naked – for example, in war days.

Two other emotions are observed in the raw human being, fresh from God’s hands: one is rage, and the other is what, for want of a more accurate name, may be called love.

If you want to discover the content of that poetry go look at any movie, or listen to any popular song. At its loftiest, it is never far from the poetry of a rooster in a barnyard. Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus.

The yokel not only believes that all heretics are doomed to be roasted in hell through all eternity; he also holds that they should be harassed as much as possible on this earth.

The yokel has room in his head for only one. 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.

Drinking cider in the barn is so lonely as to be a sort of onanism. Where is the music? Where are the whirling spangles, the brilliant lights? Where is the swooning, suffocating scent of lilies-of-the-valley, Jockey Club? Where, above all, are the lost and fascinating females, so thrillingly described by the visiting evangelist?

that it is obviously against the will of God that a Chicago stockbroker should have five wives and fifty concubines, and an Iowa swineherd but one – and that one a strictly Christian woman, even at the purple moments when wits and principles tend naturally to scatter.

The seasick passenger on the ocean liner detests the ‘good sailor’ who stalks past him a hundred times a day, obscenely smoking large, greasy, gold-banded cigars. In precisely the same way democratic man hates the fellow who is having a better time of it in this world. Such, indeed, is the origin of democracy. And such is the origin of its twin, Puritanism.

All the revolutions in history have been started by hungry city mobs.

When the city mob fights, it is not for liberty but for ham and cabbage. When it wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to that end. And its second is to butcher all professional libertarians.

Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without.

‘The vast majority of persons of our race,’ said Sir Francis Galton, ‘have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing and acting alone.’

He not only doesn’t long for liberty, he is quite unable to stand it. What he longs for is something wholly different, to wit, security. He needs protection. He is afraid of getting hurt. All else is affectation, delusion, empty words.

The worst tyrant, even under democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit. The moment the majority decided to overthrow him he would be overthrown. But the majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine taking the risk. So it looks for leaders with the necessary courage, and when they appear it follows them slavishly, even after their courage is discovered to be mere bunkum and their altruism only a cloak for more and worse oppressions.

The whole progress of the world, even in the direction of ameliorating the lot of the masses, is always opposed by the masses.

‘Nothing in ancient alchemy,’ says Lecky, ‘was more irrational than the notion that increased ignorance in the elective body will be converted into increased capacity for good government in the representative body; that the best way to improve the world and secure rational progress is to place government more and more under the control of the least enlightened classes.’

Consider, for example, chemistry and biology. The whole life of the inferior man, including especially his so-called thinking, is purely a biochemical process, and exactly comparable to what goes on in a barrel of cider; yet he knows no more about chemistry than a cow and no more about biology than its calf.

The plain fact is that this bogus Christianity has no more relation to the system of Christ than it has to the system of Aristotle. It is the invention of Paul and his attendant rabble-rousers – a body of men exactly comparable to the corps of evangelical pastors of to-day, which is to say, a body devoid of sense and lamentably indifferent to common honesty.

The American people, true enough, are sheep. Worse, they are donkeys. Yet worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats. They are thus constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of their own number, by determined and ambitious individuals, and even by exterior groups. The business of victimizing them is a lucrative profession, an exact science, and a delicate and lofty art.

The majority of women, when they vote at all, seem to vote unwillingly and without clear purpose; they are, perhaps, relatively too intelligent to have any faith in purely political remedies for the sorrows of the world.

In most cases, perhaps, he is averse to selling his vote for cash in hand, but that is mainly because the price offered is usually too low. He will sell it very willingly for a good job or for some advantage in his business. Offering him such bribes, in fact, is the chief occupation of all political parties under democracy, and of all professional politicians.

Thus there is little appositeness in the saying of another German, the philosopher Hegel, that the masses are that part of the state which doesn’t know what it wants.

The politician, he says, is the courtier of democracy. A profound saying – perhaps more profound than the professor, himself a democrat, realizes. For it was of the essence of the courtier’s art and mystery that he flattered his employer in order to victimize him, yielded to him in order to rule him.

Life on the lower levels is life in a series of interlocking despotisms. The inferior man cannot imagine himself save as taking orders – if not from the boss, then from the priest, and if not from the priest, then from some fantastic drill-sergeant of his own creation.

The winds of the world are bitter to Homo vulgaris. He likes the warmth and safety of the herd, and he likes a bell-wether with a clarion bell.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. Every man who seeks elective office under democracy has to be either the one thing or the other, and most men have to be both.

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.

Such is the price that we pay for the great boon of democracy: the man of native integrity is either barred from the public service altogether or subjected to almost irresistible temptations after he gets in.

average American judge, in his days at the bar, was not a leader, but a trailer. The judicial office is not attractive, as a rule, to the better sort of lawyers. We have such a multiplicity of courts that it has become common, and 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.

Our laws are made, in the main, 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.

We are dependent for whatever good flows out of democracy upon men who do not believe in democracy.

All government, whatever its form, is carried on chiefly by men whose first concern is for their offices, not for their obligations.

To sum up: the essential objection to feudalism (the perfect antithesis to democracy) was that it imposed degrading acts and attitudes upon the vassal; 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.

Our laws are invented, in the main, by frauds and fanatics, and put upon the statute books by poltroons and scoundrels.

Under democracy, says Faguet, 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.

The truth is that the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary. As I have argued, 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.

The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.