BOOK REVIEW The rise of the 'booboisie' Notes on Democracy by H L Mencken
Reviewed by Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - In the wake of a historic presidential election that has restored
much of the world's faith in American democracy, there could there no better
time to resurrect America's most acerbic critic of the 20th century, H L
Mencken, who would be singularly unimpressed by Barack Obama's triumph over
John McCain.
So kudos to newly founded publisher Dissident Books for this fresh, annotated
edition of Menken's politically incorrect Notes on Democracy, first
published in 1926 but still arrestingly relevant today. It is the publisher's
debut release and, as the post-mortem analysis of this particularly nasty
battle for the White House
continues, none of the sting of Mencken's exuberant attack on the democratic
process has been lost.
Indeed, the Democratic president-elect and his defeated Republican rival should
be thankful that a critic as incisive as Mencken, known as the "Sage of
Baltimore", long ago passed from the scene. But the American public could
certainly benefit from Mencken's presence these days - although, even more so
than in his own time, they would love to hate him.
Relentlessly provocative, doggedly elitist and decidedly cynical about
America's most sacred institutions, Mencken's Notes on Democracy will be
considered even more offensive by readers today than it was in his own time.
And that would undoubtedly delight the great satirist, who routinely
characterized American democracy as a comic sham and referred to the middle
class as the "booboisie".
While reading Mencken's manifold excoriations and stingy praise for the America
of his time, it is interesting to speculate about what might attract his ire
and favor today. It is a safe bet that he would enjoy Saturday Night Live,
the weekly, late-night satirical comedy show that found new life during the
presidential campaign.
And, while he would surely have heaped scorn on the vacuity of Republican vice
presidential candidate Sarah Palin, he would also have reveled in the sheer
absurdity of selecting such a brash incompetent for the second highest office
in the land. After all, it would confirm his cynical view that democracy itself
is an absurd form of government, the chief bulwarks of which are the enduring
ignorance of the hoi polloi and the mind-numbing mediocrity of the candidates
who win their vote.
But Mencken, who died in 1956, was a nonpartisan critic who would not have
stopped with criticisms of the Republican campaign. Obama would have been
equally savaged. It is easy to imagine the Sage wielding his merciless wit to
deflate Obama's soaring rhetoric and to ridicule as mindless mobs the huge,
adoring audiences he commands. To Mencken, an unabashed elitist, public opinion
was nothing more than a "complex of prejudices" and democracy "government by
orgy and orgasm".
What if one of today's leading American newspaper columnists or television
commentators were to compare democratic leaders unfavorably to despots of the
past and America's vote-seeking pols to "the chorus girl who, in order to get
her humble job, has to admit the manager to her person"? The outrage would be
such that the unfortunate pundit would almost certainly lose his or her job.
Mencken's words, polemical in his own time, are even more shocking today. But,
in many cases, they are no less true. Chilling, in fact, after the last eight
years of the George W Bush administration, is his description of the average
citizen's empty embrace of liberty until a threat, real or imagined, arises:
"He not only doesn't long for liberty; he is quite unable to stand it. What he
longs for is something wholly different, to wit, security. He needs protection.
He is afraid of getting hurt. All else is affectation, delusion, empty words."
Here Mencken is referring to the virtual jettisoning of the Bill of Rights
during World War I to stamp out dissent at home and to the persecution of
leftists in the United States after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. But his
words are also an apt description of post-9/11 America.
If there was one thing Mencken loved about American democracy, it was the Bill
of Rights - but, unfortunately, he saw it as flouted more often than honored.
In the end, for Mencken, democracy was a source not of liberation and
inspiration but of entertainment and amusement:
"... the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the spectator.
The spectator, it seems to me, is favored with a show of the first cut and
caliber. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false
pretences! 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."
As for this latter form of fraud, Mencken saw no greater example in his own
time than William Jennings Bryan, the preeminent populist of the late 19th and
early 20th century who three times ran for president (and lost) and also
championed the cause of biblical literalism against the onslaught of Darwinism
in the famous Scopes trial of 1925. For Mencken, Bryan was the embodiment of
the idiocy embraced by the common man. And, if the incorrigible iconoclast were
still with us today, he would make a gleeful point of singling out for contempt
Byran's burgeoning spiritual and intellectual progeny. Television evangelists
would be thoroughly hanged, drawn and quartered.
One of the recurring themes of Notes on Democracy is that the democratic
system is based on little more than a mob psychology that promotes
"mountebanks" and "charlatans" to its highest positions of leadership. Most
people with intellect and integrity see the folly of running for elective
office in a democracy, Mencken maintains, and those of substance who are
quixotic enough to try the system are rejected by the mob.
Only 130 pages long, Notes on Democracy is hardly Mencken's most
important work. His multi-volume study of American English, which he churlishly
argued was far superior to the English spoken in the motherland, made a bigger
splash, as did his regular column in the Baltimore Sun. He was also a literary
critic who hailed Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the
greatest American novel - a judgment that many critics still think rings true.
Mencken has been denounced as a racist and an anti-Semite, and a robust
scholarly debate continues about these charges. Meanwhile, however, it is worth
noting that, while Mencken stands guilty of many disparaging and insulting
remarks against blacks and Jews, he was equally contemptuous of every other
ethnic group in America. This misanthrope's contempt was vast enough to cover
all humankind - that should be the real subject of debate.
Notes on Democracy remains valuable not just for its rhetorical agility
but also for its naked elitism, which would be impossible to express today
without provoking the anger of the "mob" but which nevertheless remains a
significant (if largely unspoken) aspect of American life.
Today's America, however, is a lot better educated than the country Mencken was
writing about in 1926, at which time Britain's celebrated prime minister during
World War II, Winston Churchill, had not yet described democracy as "the worst
form of government except for all those others that have been tried".
In her introduction to this new edition, Mencken biographer Marion Elizabeth
Rodgers helps to put his excesses in a post-modern context and, in his
afterward, former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis mounts an attack on
the last eight years under George Bush of which Mencken would be proud.
The world's financial system is melting down, and two badly managed wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan remain unresolved. Reading Mencken - whether for the first
time or as a matter of habit - it is hard to argue that we, the mob, have not
once again been duped by “mountebanks” and “charlatans.”
From the grave, Mencken can still claim his place as a powerful critic of
American life.
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
Notes on Democracy by H L Mencken. Dissident Books (October 15, 2008).
ISBN-10: 0977378810. Price US$14.95, 208 pages.
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Relentlessly provocative, doggedly elitist and decidedly cynical about
America's most sacred institutions, Mencken's Notes on Democracy will be
considered even more offensive by readers today than it was in his own time.
And that would undoubtedly delight the great satirist, who routinely
characterized American democracy as a comic sham and referred to the middle
class as the "booboisie".
