Notes on democracy

by H. L. Mencken

All this, of course, is simply rhetoric. Every time anything of the kind is tried it fails ingloriously. Nor is there any evidence that it has ever succeeded elsewhere, to-day or in the past. Certainly no competent historian believes that the citizens assembled in a New England town-meeting actually formulated en masse the transcendental and immortal measures that they adopted, nor even that they contributed anything of value to the discussion thereof. The notion is as absurd as the parallel notion, long held by philologues of defective powers of observation, that the popular ballads surviving from earlier ages were actually composed by the folk. The ballads, in point of fact, were all written by concrete poets, most of them not of the folk; the folk, when they had any hand in the business at all, simply acted as referees, choosing which should survive. In exactly the same way the New England town-meeting was led and dominated by a few men of unusual initiative and determination, some of them genuinely superior, but most of them simply demagogues and fanatics. The citizens in general heard the discussion of rival ideas, and went through the motions of deciding between them, but there is no evidence that they ever had all the relevant facts before them or made any effort to unearth them, or that appeals to their reason always, or even usually, prevailed over appeals to their mere prejudice and superstition. Their appetite for logic, I venture, seldom got the better of their fear of hell, and the Beatitudes moved them far less powerfully than blood. Some of the most idiotic decisions ever come to by mortal man were made by the New England town-meetings, and under the leadership of monomaniacs who are still looked upon as ineffable blossoms of the contemporary Kultur.

The truth is that the difference between representative democracy and direct democracy is a great deal less marked than political sentimentalists assume. Under both forms the sovereign mob must employ agents to execute its will, and in either case the agents may have ideas of their own, based upon interests of their own, and the means at hand to do and get what they will. Moreover, their very position gives them a power of influencing the electors that is far above that of any ordinary citizen: they become politicians ex officio, and usually end by selling such influence as remains after they have used all they need for their own ends. Worse, both forms of democracy encounter the difficulty that the generality of citizens, no matter how assiduously they may be instructed, remain congenitally unable to comprehend many of the problems before them, or to consider all of those they do comprehend in an unbiased and intelligent manner. Thus it is often impossible to ascertain their views in advance of action, or even, in many cases, to determine their conclusions post hoc. The voters gathered in a typical New England town-meeting were all ardent amateurs of theology, and hence quite competent, in theory, to decide the theological questions that principally engaged them; nevertheless, history shows that they were led facilely by professional theologians, most of them quacks with something to sell. In the same way, the great masses of Americans of to-day, though they are theoretically competent to decide all the larger matters of national policy, and have certain immutable principles, of almost religious authority, to guide them, actually look for leading to professional politicians, who are influenced in turn by small but competent and determined minorities, with special knowledge and special interests. It was thus that the plain people were shoved into the late war, and it is thus that they will be shoved into the next one. They were, in overwhelming majority, against going in, and if they had had any sense and resolution they would have stayed out. But these things they lacked.

2.

The Popular Will

Thus there is no need to differentiate too pedantically between the two forms of democratic government, for their unlikeness is far more apparent than real. Nor is there any need to set up any distinction between the sort of democracy that is met with in practice, with its constant conflicts between what is assumed to be the popular will and the self-interest of small but articulate and efficient groups, and that theoretical variety which would liberate and energize the popular will completely. The latter must remain purely theoretical for all time; there are insuperable impediments, solidly grounded in the common mind, to its realization. Moreover, there is no reason for believing that its realization, if it should ever be attained by miracle, would materially change the main outlines of the democratic process. What is genuinely important is not that the will of mankind in the mass should be formulated and made effective at all times and in every case, but simply that means should be provided for ascertaining and executing it in capital cases—that there shall be no immovable impediment to its execution when, by some prodigy of nature, it takes a coherent and apposite form. If, over and beyond that, a sufficient sense of its immanent and imminent potency remains to make politicians walk a bit warily, if the threat always hangs in the air that under x circumstances and on y day it may be heard from suddenly and devastatingly, then democracy is actually in being. This is the case, it seems to me, in the United States. And it is the case, too, in every European country west of Vienna and north of the Alps.

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. It has its masters and it has its quacks. Its lowest reward is a seat in Congress or a job as a Prohibition agent, i. e., a licensed blackleg; its highest reward is immortality. The adept practitioner is not only rewarded; he is also thanked. The victims delight in his ministrations, as an hypochondriacal woman delights in the flayings of the surgeon. But all the while they have the means in their hands to halt the obscenity whenever it becomes intolerable, and now and then, raised transiently to a sort of intelligence, they do put a stop to it. There are no legal or other bars to the free functioning of their will, once it emerges into consciousness, save only such bars as they themselves have erected, and these they may remove whenever they so desire. No external or super-legal power stands beyond their reach, exercising pressure upon them; they recognize no personal sovereign with inalienable rights and no class with privileges above the common law; they are even kept free, by a tradition as old as the Republic itself, of foreign alliances which would condition their autonomy. Thus their sovereignty, though it is limited in its everyday exercise by self-imposed constitutional checks and still more by restraints which lie in the very nature of government, whatever its form, is probably just as complete in essence as that of the most absolute monarch who ever hanged a peasant or defied the Pope.

What is too often forgotten, in discussing the matter, is the fact that no such monarch was ever actually free, at all times and under all conditions. In the midst of his most charming tyrannies he had still to bear it in mind that his people, oppressed too much, could always rise against him, and that he himself, though a king von Gottes Gnaden, was yet biologically only a man, with but one gullet to slit; and if the people were feeble or too craven to be dangerous, then there was always His Holiness of Rome to fear or other agents of the King of Kings; and if these ghostly mentors, too, were silent, then he had to reckon with his ministers, his courtiers, his soldiers, his doctors, and his women. The Merovingian kings were certainly absolute, if absolutism has ever existed outside the dreams of historians; nevertheless, as every schoolboy knows, their sovereignty was gradually undermined by the mayors of the palace, and finally taken from them altogether. So with the emperors of Japan, who succumbed to the shoguns, who succumbed in their turn to a combination of territorial nobles and city capitalists, not unlike that which brought King John to bay at Runnymede. It seems to me that the common people, under such a democracy as that which now prevails in the United States, are more completely sovereign, in fact as well as in law, than any of these ancient despots. They may be seduced and enchained by a great variety of prehensile soothsayers, just as Henry VIII was seduced and enchained by his wives, but, like Henry again, they are quite free to throw off their chains whenever they please, and to chop off the heads of their seducers. They could hang Dr. Coolidge to-morrow if they really wanted to do it, or even Bishop Manning. They could do it by the simple device of intimidating Congress, which never fails to leap when their growl is palpably in earnest. And if Congress stood out against them, they could do it anyhow, under protection of the jury system. The executioners, once acquitted, could not be molested more, save by illegal processes. Similar executioners walk the land to-day, especially in the South, and no one dares to challenge them. They are visible symbols of the powers that lie in the mob, once it makes up its mind.

Nor is there much force or relevancy in the contention that democracy is incomplete in the United States (as in England, France, Germany and all other democratic countries) because certain classes of persons are barred from full citizenship, sometimes for reasons that appear to be unsound. To argue thus is to argue against democracy itself, for if the majority has not the right to decide what qualifications shall be necessary to participate in its sovereignty, then it has no sovereignty at all. What one usually finds, on examining any given case of class disfranchisement, is that the class disfranchised is not actively eager, as a whole, for the ballot, and that its lack of interest in the matter is at least presumptive evidence of its general political incompetence. The three-class system of voting survived so long in Belgium and Prussia, not because the masses victimized had no means at hand to put an end to it, but simply because they were so inept at politics, and so indifferent to the rights involved, that they made no genuine effort to do so. The agitation against the system was carried on mainly by a small minority, and many of its leaders were not even members of the class transgressed. Here we have a reminder of the process whereby democracy itself came in: it was forced upon its beneficiaries by a small group of visionaries, all of them standing outside the class benefited. So again, in our own time, with the extension of the franchise to women. The great masses of women in all countries were indifferent to the boon, and there was a considerable body that was cynically hostile. Perhaps a majority of the more ardent suffragists belonged biologically to neither sex.

Since the abolition of the three-class system in Prussia there has been absolutely no improvement in the government of that country; on the contrary, there has been a vast falling off in its honesty and efficiency, and it has even slackened energy in what was formerly one of its most laudable specialties: the development of legislation for the protection of the working class, i. e., the very class that benefited politically by the change. Giving women the ballot, as everyone knows, has brought in none of the great reforms promised by the suffragists. It has substituted adultery for drunkenness as the principal divertissement at political conventions, but it has accomplished little else. 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. The minorities that show partisan keenness are chiefly made up of fat women with inattentive husbands; they are victimized easily by the male politicians, especially those who dress well, and are thus swallowed up by the great parties, and lose all separate effectiveness. Certainly it is usually difficult to discover, in the election returns, any division along anatomical lines. Now and then, true enough, a sentimentality appealing especially to the more stupid sort of women causes a transient differentiation, as when, for example, thousands of newly-enfranchised farm-wives in the United States voted against Cox, the Democratic presidential candidate, in 1920, on the double ground (a) that he was a divorcé and hence an antinomian, and (b) that the titular chief of his party, Dr. Wilson, had married again too soon after the death of his first wife. But such fantastic sentimentalities, after all, rarely enter into practical politics. When they are lacking the women voters simply succumb to the sentimentalities that happen to be engaging their lords and masters. The extension of the franchise has not changed the general nature of the political clown-show in the slightest. Campaigns are still made upon the same old issues, and offices go to the same old mountebanks, with a few Jezebels added to the corps to give it refinement.

There is little reason for believing that the extension of the franchise to the classes that still remain in the dark would make government more delicately responsive to the general will. Such classes, as a matter of fact, are now so few and so small in numbers in all of the Western nations that they may be very conveniently disregarded. It is as if doctors of philosophy, members of the Society of the Cincinnati or men who could move their ears were disfranchised. In the United States, true enough, there is one disfranchised group that is much larger, to wit, that group of Americans whose African descent is visible to the naked eye and at a glance. But even in this case, the reality falls much below the appearance. The more intelligent American Negroes vote in spite of the opposition of the poor whites, their theological brothers and economic rivals, and not a few of them actually make their livings as professional politicians, even in the South. At the Republican National Convention at Chicago, in 1920, such a swart statesman gave an inspiring exhibition of his powers, and in the presence of a vast multitude. His name was Henry Lincoln Johnson, and he has since gone to that bourn where black is white. When he died Dr. Coolidge sent a long and flirtatious telegram of condolence to his widow. The widow of Jacques Loeb got no such telegram. This Johnson was chairman of the Georgia delegation, and his colleagues were all of the Nordic race. But though they came from the very citadel of the Ku Klux Klan, he herded them in a public and lordly manner, and voted them as if they had been stuffed chemises. As Nordics, no doubt, they viewed him with a bitter loathing, but as politicians yearning for jobs they had to be polite to him, and even fawning. He has his peers and successors in all the American States. In many a proud city, North and South, the Aframericans hold the balance of power, and know it.