NOTES ON DEMOCRACY By H. L. MENCKEN “DEMOCRATIC MAN: HIS APPEARANCE IN THE WORLD” Published in 1926 –
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 enamoured 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! ….
Early democratic man seems to have given little thought to 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 its 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, and men out of the mob began to take on baronial airs, the mob itself quickly showed its opinion of them by butchering them deliberately and in earnest. Etc.
…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. …
In most other countries of a democratic tendency — for example, England – this outlawry and corruption of the best is checked by an aristocratic tradition – an anachronism, true enough, but still extremely powerful, and yielding to the times only under immense pressure. The English aristocracy (aided, in part, by the plutocracy, which admires and envies it) not only keeps a large share of the principal offices in its own hands, regardless of popular rages and party fortunes; it also preserves an influence, and hence a function, for its non-office-holding members. The scholarship of Oxford and Cambridge, for example, can still make itself felt at Westminster, despite the fact that the vast majority of the actual members of the Commons are ignoramuses.
But in the United States there is no aristocracy, whether intellectual or otherwise, and so the scholarship of Harvard, such as it is, is felt no more on Capitol Hill than it is at Westerville, Ohio. The class of politicians, indeed, tends to separate itself sharply from all other classes. There is none of that interpenetration on the higher levels which marks older and more secure societies.
Roosevelt, an imitation aristocrat, was the first and only American President since Washington to make any effort to break down the barriers. A man of saucy and even impertinent curiosities, and very eager to appear to the vulgar as an Admirable Crichton, he made his table the resort of all sorts and conditions of men. Among them were some who actually knew something about this or that, and from them he probably got useful news and advice. Beethoven, if he had been alive, would have been invited to the White House, and Goethe would have come with him.
