H.L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy (1926) is a great liberal guilty pleasure for the Trump era—the sort of book to be tucked under the mattress so that no one knows one is reading it. To be sure, Mencken scourges and flogs no one so ruthlessly in the book as he does the starry-eyed capital-L "Liberals," as he calls us—"the only surviving honest believers in democracy," in Mencken's phrase (which, he would have us believe—perhaps not entirely convincingly—he does not intend as a compliment). And yet—there is a kind of Liberal Id to which this book appeals, in our political moment.
Nor is Mencken so far removed from the liberalism he derides as he at times pretends. Mencken's screed against popular government can read at times as a kind of dark liberalism—what he calls "libertarianism" in the book. But keep in mind that for him and his era, this term did not yet mean what it does today: i.e., a kind of unthinking worship of capitalism (indeed, Mencken is as contemptuous of the "plutocracy" as of any other American institution—and attributes to democracy the fault above all of being gulled too easily by monied interests and big capital concentrations).
Gore Vidal once suggested that Mencken's fulminations against democracy should not be taken too literally—that he was prone to "Swiftian hyperbole"—the pose of the cantankerous misanthrope—in order to make his point. This interpretation largely tracks with what's in the book—and if one were pressed to define Mencken's real politics, one would say that they resemble nothing so much as Vidal's own, in essays like his "Shredding the Bill of Rights." Both Mencken and Vidal adhere to the Justice Brandeis dictum: the most important right is the "right to be let alone."
Both authors dread the various ginned-up moral crusades—against alcohol in Mencken's time or drugs in Vidal's—that are used as so many excuses to expand the police power and interfere in the private liberties of citizens. Mencken's opposition to democracy, in the book, could well be boiled down to A.E. Housman's ever-resonant plea: "Let God and man decree/ Laws for themselves and not for me/ [...] But no, they will not; they must still/ Wrest their neighbor to their will." Mencken—much like the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi—is really just registering a protest against busybodies.
But is there something about democracy—about popular government—that makes it especially prone to busybodying? If so, this would be a great irony—since, throughout the modern era, the rights of the individual and the extension of the franchise have been believed to march in tandem. And indeed, Mencken at times comes close to admitting that what he really objects to is government itself—perhaps human nature itself—and that, for all his railing against the excesses and stupidities of American government, he is not actually aware of any system of rule that would be better.
If forced to choose his preferred system, Mencken would probably pick something like the Prussian "mixed" system of the Bismarck era. It's a preference that led Mencken into heroic and lonely opposition to the herd-stampede into war against Germany during World War I—and would lead to his less noble or defensible stance on the Axis Powers during the next great war after that. But—lest we end up sounding like the jingoes and philistines of Mencken's own era—who accused all who quoted German authors of "disloyalty"—let us add this:
Mencken himself expressly declines to name any one system of government as the correct one—and he rejects the type of forced choice I just proposed in the preceding paragraph. Indeed, he says that it is itself a characteristic absurdity of the democratic era that we believe someone loses the right to complain about a problem if they aren't immediately prepared to adduce a solution. We tend to think that if one points to an evil, and then admits that the evil is irremediable, then the evil cannot exist. Because we assume there is no such thing as an irremediable evil. But why—Mencken asks—should that be the case?
I say that all of this is gratifying—in a guilty way—for the secret recesses of the liberal mind in our era—the liberal Id as I have termed it—because such is the mood of black pessimism among most liberals ever since the events of November 2024. The outcome of that election cannot have left many of us persuaded of the ultimate and ineffable wisdom of the majority. It wasn't the same eight years previously—then, at least, we had the Electoral College to blame. But 2024 left no room for error—it is in fact quite possible, it turns out, for >50% of the public to do something utterly idiotic.
The specific blows that Mencken lands on the electoral majority also do not seem undeserved, in this context: the populace is constantly swayed by the rhetoric of demagogues, in his telling—their "heroes are always frauds,"—mounting absurd moral crusades against invented bugaboos and "heretical minorities" (the devious "Reds" in Mencken's age—the myth of the "criminal illegal alien" in ours—the latter being entirely a statistically-unsubstantiated construct of Trump's fervid demagogic imagination).
Mencken even notes that the masses can always be stirred up against science and medicine—even when it serves no other purpose than the preservation of their lives. "It is axiomatic that all measures for safeguarding the public health are opposed by the majority," Mencken writes,—lines that seem all too pathetically apt in the wake of COVID-19 and the ongoing takeover of our public health institutions by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his band of "potent quacks" (to borrow George Crabbe's phrase).
What happened in Los Angeles when a vaccination ordinance was submitted to a popular referendum [Mencken continues,] is typical of what would happen anywhere under the same circumstances. The ordinance was rejected, and smallpox spread in the town. The proletariat, alarmed, then proceeded against it by going to Christian Scientists, osteopaths, and chiropractors.
Do you see what I mean about this being a guilty pleasure? I don't say I defend what Mencken says. But I do say that a lot of it rings depressingly true—particularly as a measles outbreak now ravages the country—one that could easily be prevented or contained by ordinary childhood vaccines known for decades—but which has instead been exacerbated by RFK Jr. and his ranks of pseudoscientific frauds—who have recommended that the people try home remedies like "cod liver oil" instead of the well-tested and clinically-proven discoveries of medical science.
Liberal democracy has always posited that the twin goals of popular government and individual liberty will always go together. Why? Perhaps because many of us are still beholden to the quintessential progressive dogma—namely, as Albert O. Hirschman put it—that "all good things go together." Hirschman encouraged us to reflect that this belief—however attractive—might not necessarily be true, merely because it was attractive. And if all good things do not necessarily go together—if liberty and democracy in fact sometimes conflict—then Mencken was simply saying that his choice would be to opt for liberty.
This is all he meant by his "libertarianism"—a preference for liberty, if the two principles really must be at odds. This is the sense in which I would say he was writing in the same spirit as Housman: let the majority make laws for themselves, and not for him. And this is the sense as well in which I say that Mencken is not actually anti-liberal—but rather belongs to a stream of liberal thought that has been present from the beginning—the pessimistic liberalism, the "leave me alone" liberalism, the "classical liberalism," or, if you are partial to paradox, the "conservative liberalism" of writers like Tocqueville.
Was it not Tocqueville, after all, who once observed that—for all Americans' vaunted talk of "liberty"—the individual in our country was actually the most cowed by the majority—the most fearful of independence of thought—the least likely to stand on his own in the face of collective opinion—of any of the citizens of any other nations Tocqueville knew?
Of course, there have been plenty of Liberals in our time to step forward and explain the 2024 election as the result of something other than the stupidity and susceptibility of the majority. Mencken was familiar with this dynamic too. No matter how patently ridiculous the actions of the mass—a means must always be found to show how they really embodied a deeper wisdom—how they were "sending a message," etc. And so, we have had endless thought-pieces suggesting that Democrats failed to win the last election because they didn't present a "positive vision"—they campaigned only on what they were against, rather than inspiring people with what they were for, etc.
To which Mencken would reply: just the opposite was their mistake. Every election that has ever been won in America, he says, was won by people who invented some bugaboo to campaign against. "The whole history of the country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary," he writes. He then observes that William Jennings Bryan's only mistake in his various campaigns for office was to eventually present a "constructive program"; if he had refrained from doing so, and had stuck only to fulminating against various demonic adversaries of his own rhetorical invention (in Mencken's telling)—he would have succeeded.
One cannot help but think (and again, let me reiterate—all of this is only my liberal Id talking—not my liberal superego)—of the confident assertions one hears today from various liberal pundits that if we can only settle on a positive vision—such as Ezra Klein's "Abundance"—then we would start to win elections again. On the theory that the same people who voted for Trump's plans to carry out "mass deportations" of "criminal illegal aliens"—his imaginary "horrendous monster" of choice—would get just as excited for zoning reform and NEPA permitting changes and high-speed rail, if only Democrats would talk about them.
Shades here of Bryan's "constructive program"? The constructive program failed, Mencken said—because it was too complicated to understand. And if free silver was too complicated for the electorate—one hardly holds out a lot of hope for the bromides of "Abundance" and its paradoxical two-step dance of "supply-side progressivism."
Perhaps Democrats didn't fail, then, because they didn't present a "positive vision"—Maybe they failed because they did present a "positive vision." Maybe they failed because they did everything the pundits told them to—they talked about prices and health care instead of Trump. They talked about sensible but boring "kitchen table" issues. And in so doing, they failed to appeal to the one emotion that—in Mencken's telling—has ever really won elections: fear. Trump was not so short-sighted. He knew what emotion to gin up—and he worked it like a maestro.
And if there were no real fears to be used, he did what the "leaders of the crowd" have always done (to borrow Yeats's term)—he made them up—"as though / the abounding gutter had been Helicon / Or calumny a song." (Yeats.)
And so, even as we speak—for all that a few lonely enlightened liberals still occasionally speak of "Abundance" and the "constructive program"—in practice the knowing practitioners in Congress are increasingly taking a leaf from the MAGA playbook. They are appointing themselves witch-hunters and conspiracy-sniffers as well, in the Trumpian mode—concentrating all their attention this week on the Epstein scandal, rather than on any real-world issue.
Of course, in a sane world, it would be bad politics to focus on a lurid conspiracy theory that cannot possibly affect people's daily lives in substance, rather than—say—the disastrous budget bill the Republicans just passed that will gut programs for poor people while increasing tax bonuses to the rich—but we do not live in such a world. And so, the Democrats in Congress have decided to make hay of the same sort of grist the Republicans used against them just a few months ago. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
So says my liberal Id, at any rate. But what about my liberal superego? Does it see a way around Mencken? Even in the wake of November 2024, is there a way to resurrect the old faith in the ultimate and ineffable wisdom of the electoral majority?
No—but in truth, I never believed in it. I do in fact believe that democracy and liberty are necessary adjuncts of one another—in this sense, indeed, I still believe that "all good things go together." But this is not because I believe the majority is always right or will always safeguard liberty. Indeed, I think the majority will almost always default to trying to invade liberty, in just the way Mencken describes.
No, the correlation between democracy and liberty is logical, rather than empirical. It is a deductive and a priori truth, rather than an inductive and a posteriori one. Democracy and liberty go together because they are the necessary logical consequences of the same starting assumption. This assumption is that no human clay is better than any other human clay. And this is where I part ways with Mencken, because I still believe that. If the majority is often fear-based and imbecilic, as Mencken describes—then that is because human clay is fear-based and imbecilic—regardless of whether it claims to belong to some self-appointed "élite" or other.
And since all human clay is roughly the same in intellectual endowment and moral entitlement—then no piece of clay has any natural right to rule over any other. Thus, both democracy and liberty are implied in our first axiom of human moral and spiritual equality. We need liberty because no one should rule over anyone else. We need democracy because some system of rule is necessary—in order to engage in the complex cooperative enterprises that the blessings of human society demand—and so, the only fair one—given our starting assumption—is that every piece of clay should get an equal say in what that system is, and in how it rules.
Note what this deductive argument does not show: it doesn't demonstrate that the majority will be wise. In fact, it's quite possible that it won't be. It also doesn't show that the majority will not transgress against the liberty of the individual—it often will. All it shows is that—every time the majority does transgress against the rights of the individual—it undermines the logical foundations of its own right to rule. It is committing a logical contradiction. But who ever said human clay is incapable of self-contradiction?
And so my own view of democracy—and my own ultimate defense of it—comes down to the same paradox that the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick attributes in a memoir to her contrarian father (an idiosyncratic Australian radical and civil libertarian): "As my father taught me about democracy [...] he simultaneously taught me the paradox: we are democrats, and that means accepting the will of the people, despite the fact (said with a triumphant grin) that 'the majority is always wrong.'"
Aye. And if it be paradox—again, I say—who ever said that human clay would not be paradoxical?
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