Notes on democracy

by H. L. Mencken

I find myself quoting yet a third German: he is Professor Robert Michels, the economist. 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. The politician under democracy does precisely the same thing. His business is never what it pretends to be. Ostensibly he is an altruist devoted whole-heartedly to the service of his fellow-men, and so abjectly public-spirited that his private interest is nothing to him. Actually he is a sturdy rogue whose principal, and often sole aim in life is to butter his parsnips. His technical equipment consists simply of an armamentarium of deceits. It is his business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground. If he is an adept he can hear the first murmurs of popular clamour before even the people themselves are conscious of them. If he is a master he detects and whoops up to-day the delusions that the mob will cherish next year. There is in him, in his professional aspect, no shadow of principle or honour. It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences, as the late Dr. Wilson did in 1916. It is moral to change convictions overnight, as multitudes of American politicians did when the Prohibition avalanche came down upon them. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough. That place is one of public honour, and public honour is the thing that caresses him and makes him happy. It is also one of power, and power is the commodity that he has for sale.

I speak here, of course, of the democratic politician in his rôle of statesman—that is, in his best and noblest aspect. He flourishes also on lower levels, partly subterranean. Down there public honour would be an inconvenience, so he hawks it to lesser men, and contents himself with power. What are the sources of that power? They lie, obviously, in the gross weaknesses and knaveries of the common people—in their inability to grasp any issues save the simplest and most banal, in their incurable tendency to fly into preposterous alarms, in their petty self-seeking and venality, in their instinctive envy and hatred of their superiors—in brief, in their congenital incapacity for the elemental duties of citizens in a civilized state. The boss owns them simply because they can be bought for a job on the street or a load of coal. He holds them, even when they pass beyond any need of jobs or coal, by his shrewd understanding of their immemorial sentimentalities. Looking at Thersites, they see Ulysses. He is the state as they apprehend it; around him clusters all the romance that used to hang about a king. He is the fount of honour and the mould of form. His barbaric code, framed to fit their gullibility, becomes an example to their young. The boss is the eternal reductio ad absurdum of the whole democratic process. He exemplifies its reduction of all ideas to a few elemental wants. And he reflects and makes manifest the inferior man’s congenital fear of liberty—his incapacity for even the most trivial sort of independent action. 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. For years the reformers who flourished in the United States concentrated their whole animus upon the boss: it was apparently their notion that he had imposed himself upon his victims from without, and that they could be delivered by destroying him. But time threw a brilliant light upon that error. When, as and if he was overthrown there appeared in his place the prehensile Methodist parson, bawling for Prohibition and its easy jobs, and behind the parson loomed the grand goblin, natural heir to a long line of imperial worthy potentates of the Sons of Azrael and sublime chancellors of the Order of Patriarchs Militant. 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 art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. 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. The whole process is one of false pretences and ignoble concealments. No educated man, stating plainly the elementary notions that every educated man holds about the matters that principally concern government, could be elected to office in a democratic state, save perhaps by a miracle. His frankness would arouse fears, and those fears would run against him; it is his business to arouse fears that will run in favour of him. Worse, he must not only consider the weaknesses of the mob, but also the prejudices of the minorities that prey upon it. Some of these minorities have developed a highly efficient technique of intimidation. They not only know how to arouse the fears of the mob; they also know how to awaken its envy, its dislike of privilege, its hatred of its betters. How formidable they may become is shown by the example of the Anti-Saloon League in the United States—a minority body in the strictest sense, however skillful its mustering of popular support, for it nowhere includes a majority of the voters among its subscribing members, and its leaders are nowhere chosen by democratic methods. And how such minorities may intimidate the whole class of place-seeking politicians has been demonstrated brilliantly and obscenely by the same corrupt and unconscionable organization. It has filled all the law-making bodies of the nation with men who have got into office by submitting cravenly to its dictation, and it has filled thousands of administrative posts, and not a few judicial posts, with vermin of the same sort.

Such men, indeed, enjoy vast advantages under democracy. The mob, insensitive to their dishonour, is edified and exhilarated by their success. The competition they offer to men of a decenter habit is too powerful to be met, so they tend, gradually, to monopolize all the public offices. Out of the muck of their swinishness the typical American law-maker emerges. He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretences. He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy. He may be, on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State Legislature by grace of the local mortgage-sharks and evangelical clergy, or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States. It is almost an axiom that no man may make a career in politics in the Republic without stooping to such ignobility: it is as necessary as a loud voice. Now and then, to be sure, a man of sounder self-respect may make a beginning, but he seldom gets very far. Those who survive are nearly all tarred, soon or late, with the same stick. They are men who, at some time or other, have compromised with their honour, either by swallowing their convictions or by whooping for what they believe to be untrue. They are in the position of the chorus girl who, in order to get her humble job, has had to admit the manager to her person. And the old birds among them, like chorus girls of long experience, come to regard the business resignedly and even complacently. It is the price that a man who loves the clapper-clawing of the vulgar must pay for it under the democratic system. He becomes a coward and a trimmer ex officio. Where his dignity was in the days of his innocence there is now only a vacuum in the wastes of his subconscious. Vanity remains to him, but not pride.

5.

Utopia

Thus the ideal of democracy is reached at last: it has become a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union, save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness even of God. The fact has been rammed home by a constitutional amendment: every office-holder, when he takes oath to support the Constitution, must swear on his honour that, summoned to the death-bed of his grandmother, he will not take the old lady a bottle of wine. He may say so and do it, which makes him a liar, or he may say so and not do it, which makes him a pig. But despite that grim dilemma there are still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is the duty of a gentleman to go into politics—that there is a way out of the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdy-houses with virgins. My impression is that this last device would accomplish very little: either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease to be virgins. The same alternatives confront the political aspirant who is what is regarded in America as a gentleman—that is, who is one not susceptible to open bribery in cash. The moment his leg goes over the political fence, he finds the mob confronting him, and if he would stay within he must adapt himself to its tastes and prejudices. In other words, he must learn all the tricks of the regular mountebanks. When the mob pricks up its ears and begins to whinny, he must soothe it with balderdash. He must allay its resentment of the fact that he is washed behind the ears. He must anticipate its crazes, and join in them vociferously. He must regard its sensitiveness on points of morals, and get what advantage he can out of his anæsthesia on points of honour. More, he must make terms with the mob-masters already performing upon its spines, chiefly agents of prehensile minorities. If he neglects these devices he is swiftly heaved over the fence, and his career in statecraft is at an end.

Here I do not theorize; there are examples innumerable. 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. Has the United States ever seen a more violent and shameless demagogue than Theodore Roosevelt? Yet Roosevelt came into politics as a sword drawn against demagogy. The list of such recusants might be run to great lengths: I point to the late Mitchel of New York and the late Lodge of Massachusetts and pass on. Lodge lived long enough to become a magnificent reductio ad absurdum of the gentleman turned democratic messiah. It was a sheer impossibility, during the last ten years of his life, to disentangle his private convictions from the fabric of his political dodges. He was the perfect model of the party hack, and if he performed before the actual mob less unchastely than Roosevelt it was only because his somewhat absurd façade unfitted him for that science. He dealt in jobs in a wholesale manner, and with the hearty devotion of a Penrose or a Henry Lincoln Johnson. Popularly regarded as an unflinching and even adamantine fellow, he was actually as limber as an eel. He knew how to jump. He knew when to whisper and when to yell. As I say, I could print a long roster of similar apostates; the name of Penrose himself should not be forgotten. I do not say that a gentleman may not thrust himself into politics under democracy; I simply say that it is almost impossible for him to stay there and remain a gentleman. The haughty amateur, at the start, may actually make what seems to be a brilliant success, for he is commonly full of indignation, and so strikes out valiantly, and the mob crowds up because it likes a brutal show. But that first battle is almost always his last. If he retains his rectitude he loses his office, and if he retains his office he has to dilute his rectitude with the cologne spirits of the trade.

Such is the pride 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. The competition of less honourable man is more than he can bear. He must stand against them before the mob, and the sempiternal prejudices of the mob run their way. 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-officeholding 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. But that eagerness for contacts outside the bounds of professional politics is certainly not a common mark of American Presidents, nor, of American public officials of any sort. When the lamented Harding sat in Lincoln’s chair his hours of ease were spent with bootleggers, not with metaphysicians; his notion of a good time was to refresh himself in the manner of a small-town Elk, at golf, poker, and guzzling. The tastes of his successor are even narrower: the loftiest guests he entertains upon the Mayflower are the editors of party newspapers, and there is no evidence that he is acquainted with a single intelligent man. The average American Governor is of the same kidney. He comes into contact with the local Gelehrte only when a bill is up to prohibit the teaching of the elements of biology in the State university.

The judiciary, under the American system, sinks quite as low. Save when, by some miscarriage of politics, a Brandeis, a Holmes, a Cardozo or a George W. Anderson is elevated to the bench, it carries on its dull and preposterous duties quite outside the stream of civilized thought, and even outside the stream of enlightened juridic thought. Very few American judges ever contribute anything of value to legal theory. One seldom hears of them protesting, either ex cathedra or as citizens, against the extravagances and absurdities that fast reduce the whole legal system of the country to imbecility; they seem to be quite content to enforce any sort of law that is provided for their use by ignorant and corrupt legislators, regardless of its conflict with fundamental human rights. The Constitution apparently has no more meaning to them than it has to a Prohibition agent. They have acquiesced almost unanimously in the destruction of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and supinely connived at the invasion of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth. The reason is not far to seek. The 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. The English bench, as everyone knows, is immensely better: the fact is often noted with lamentation by American lawyers. And why? Simply because the governing oligarchy in England, lingering on in spite of the democratic upheaval, keeps jealous guard over the judiciary in the interest of its own class, and thereby prevents the elevation of the preposterous shysters who so frequently attain to the ermine in America. Even when, under the pressure of parlous times, it admits an F. E. Smith to the bench, it at least makes sure that he is a competent lawyer. The way is thus blocked to downright ignoramuses, and English jurisprudence, so much more fluent and reasonable than our own, is protected against their dull stupidities. Genuine talent, however humble its origin, may get in, but not imbecility, however pretentious. In the United States the thing runs the other way. In the States, where judges are commonly elected by popular vote, the shyster has every advantage over the reputable lawyer, including that of yearning for the judicial salary with a vast and undivided passion. And when it comes to the Federal courts, once so honourable, he has every advantage again, including the formidable one of knowing how to crook his knee gracefully to the local dispenser of Federal patronage (in the South, often a worthless Negro) and to the Methodist wowsers of the Anti-Saloon League.