Put It to a Vote
Mencken's thoughts on the public's choice (and, yes, it was negative).
By Morgan Meis


Democracy, as we all know, is a Greek word. Literally, it means "rule of the people." To a proponent of democracy, then, it is not unfair to ask, “How have the people been ruling themselves?" In these days of election fever (or exhaustion), it is amusing, if not illustrative to remember that one prominent American openly proclaimed that the people stink and that democracy is a joke. I’m thinking, of course, of H.L. Mencken. Surveying the teeming hordes of American citizens, Mencken called them the “booboisie.” The booboisie is composed of idiots and mental children. “Ideas,” Mencken noted, “leave them unscathed; they are responsive only to emotions, and their emotions are all elemental — the emotions, indeed, of tabby-cats rather than of men.”
Mencken wrote these thoughts down in 1926’s Notes on Democracy (recently published in a new edition through Dissident Books with an introduction by Mencken biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers). Fear, Mencken thought, is the essential force driving human beings. The vast majority of us look simply to quell the terror in our hearts with basic comforts. Give us sweet things to eat and some light pornography and we crawl back to our domiciles awaiting further instruction. Rarely, a human being will be able to conquer that basic fear and take a stab at truth or beauty. Rarely.

It follows that, for Mencken, a democratic politics that must pander for the votes of the booboisie will inevitably be a politics that exploits fear. “Politics under democracy,” Mencken writes, “consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting ‘Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum’!”

Notes on Democracy sustains itself, as Mencken sustained himself in life, with the hard sustenance of such ideas. Some hit harder than others. But Mencken never claimed that his arguments were airtight. He was more interested in ripping his way through the American psyche in search of illusions to tarnish. He does his damage with a sawed-off shotgun, leaving the sniper’s rifle to the college boys.

The real pleasure of Notes on Democracy comes in the ride, the trip that Mencken takes through all the lies and the scams, and the infinite patience by which the general populace allows itself to be exploited. The conclusion is not long in coming: “The American people, true enough, are sheep. Worse, they are donkeys. Yet worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats.”

Near its crescendo, Mencken's spirited tirade turns to his central philosophical inspiration, Nietzsche. There are reasons to think (namely, the wrongheaded book Mencken wrote on Nietzsche) that Mencken lacked some of the necessary tools to fully understand Nietzsche's philosophy. But he sure had the gist of it, and he ran with Nietzsche's idea that Christianity is a religion for resentful slaves as if he was out to win a rhetorical marathon. Mencken wanted to do Nietzsche one better in outright disgust for the common man. At the beginning of the "Democracy and Liberty" section of the book, Mencken goes so far as to accuse Nietzsche of being a little soft. He thinks Nietzsche was wrong to posit a universal "will to power." More universal than that, Mencken thinks, is a will to peace, a cowardly longing for "the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace—the peace of a trust in a well-managed penitentiary." I have to think Mencken was rather proud of himself there. Few have dared to take Nietzsche on for his meekness in the face of the herd.

more at: http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article10310801.aspx