Last Words: A Short Essay on Democracy H.
L. Mencken
1926
You do not know and will never know who the
Remnant are, or where they are, or how many
of them there are, or what they are doing
or will do. Two things you know, and no more:
first, that they exist; second, that they
will find you. (Albert Jay Nock)
I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits
of democracy. One of them is quite obvious:
it is, perhaps, the most charming form of
government ever devised by man. The reason
is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions
that are palpably not true and what is not
true, as everyone knows, is always immensely
more fascinating and satisfying to the vast
majority of men than what is true. Truth
has a harshness that alarms them, and an
air of finality that collides with their
incurable romanticism. They turn, in all
the great emergencies of life, to the ancient
promises, transparently false but immensely
comforting, and of all those ancient promises
there is none more comforting than the one
to the effect that the lowly shall inherit
the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant
religious system of the modern world, and
it is at the bottom of the dominant political
system.
The latter, which is democracy, gives it
an even higher credit and authority than
the former, which is Christianity. More,
democracy gives it a certain appearance of
objective and demonstrable truth. The mob
man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling
that he is really important to the world
that he is genuinely running things. Out
of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks
there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious
power which is what makes archbishops, police
sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux
and other such magnificoes happy. And out
of it there comes, too, a conviction that
he is somehow wise, that his views are taken
seriously by his betters—which is what makes
United States Senators, fortune tellers and
Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there
comes out of it a glowing consciousness of
a high duty triumphantly done which is what
makes hangmen and husbands happy.
All these forms of happiness, of course,
are illusory. They don't last. The democrat,
leaping into the air to flap his wings and
praise God, is for ever coming down with
a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I
have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he
can never get rid of the naive delusion—so
beautifully Christian!—that happiness is
something to be got by taking it away from
the other fellow. But there are seeds, too,
in the very nature of things: a promise,
after all, is only a promise, even when it
is supported by divine revelation, and the
chances against its fulfillment may be put
into a depressing mathematical formula. Here
the irony that lies under all human aspiration
shows itself: the quest for happiness, as
always, brings only unhappiness in the end.
But saying that is merely saying that the
true charm of democracy is not for the democrat
but for the spectator. That spectator, it
seems to me, is favoured with a show of the
first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything
more heroically absurd! What grotesque false
pretenses! What a parade of obvious imbecilities!
What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing?
Then I retire forthwith as a psychologist.
The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more
amusing than any other—more amusing even,
and by miles, than the fraud of religion.
Go into your praying-chamber and give sober
thought to any of the more characteristic
democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement.
Or to any of the typical democratic prophets:
say, the late Archangel Bryan. If you don't
come out paled and palsied by mirth then
you will not laugh on the Last Day itself,
when Presbyterians step out of the grave
like chicks from the egg, and wings blossom
from their scapulae, and they leap into interstellar
space with roars of joy.
I have spoken hitherto of the possibility
that democracy may be a self-limiting disease,
like measles. It is, perhaps, something more:
it is self-devouring. One cannot observe
it objectively without being impressed by
its curious distrust of itself—its apparently
ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole
philosophy at the first sign of strain. I
need not point to what happens invariably
in democratic states when the national safety
is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy,
on such occasions, convert themselves, by
a process as simple as taking a deep breath,
into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity.
Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly
to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the
background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is
this process confined to times of alarm and
terror: it is going on day in and day out.
Democracy always seems bent upon killing
the thing it theoretically loves. I have
rehearsed some of its operations against
liberty, the very cornerstone of its political
metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing
itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy
of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans
jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as
perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed
in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy
jailing subjects for maintaining the divine
right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a
believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was
the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been
done: anything is possible in that direction.
But under democracy the remotest and most
fantastic possibility is a common. place
of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves
into thundering paradoxes, many amounting
to downright contradictions in terms. The
mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but
it must be rigorously policed itself. There
is a government, not of men, but of laws—but
men are set upon benches to decide finally
what the law is and may be. The highest function
of the citizen is to serve the state—but
the first assumption that meets him, when
he essays to discharge it, is an assumption
of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is
that assumption commonly sound? Then the
farce only grows the more glorious.
I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights
me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably
idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers,
frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them
go up is balanced and obliterated by the
joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately
wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so
is every other form of government: all alike
are enemies to laborious and virtuous men.
Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well,
we have borne that rascality since 1776,
and continue to survive. In the long run,
it may turn out that rascality is necessary
to human government, and even to civilization
itself—that civilization, at bottom, is nothing
but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I
report only that when the suckers are running
well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating.
But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious
man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers,
tend to be coy. What I can't make out is
how any man can believe in democracy who
feels for and with them, and is pained when
they are debauched and made a show of. How
can any man be a democrat who is sincerely
a democrat?
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