Rare is the day that passes during which I don’t, at least once (and usually more than once), say to myself, “Omigosh, I do wish that HL Mencken were still alive and active; he’d have a field day commenting on this particular politician or that tempest du jour.” There’s no question that if I could bring one American back to life for an evening of good food, stiff drink, and sterling conversation, that person would unquestionably be Mencken (1880-1956).
Mencken was a Baltimore newspaper reporter, magazine editor, literary critic and expert on what he called “the American language.” But he was and remains, in my view, above all, this country’s unmatched observer and recorder of politics. So sit back and feast on this small sampling of intellectually nutritious and tasty tidbits of Mencken’s political wisdom.
As Mencken observed him, the typical politician is a “merchant of delusions,” a “pumper-up of popular fears and rages.”
The politician is seldom to be trusted:
What is a political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better? The former assumption, I believe, is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. His very existence, indeed, is a standing subversion of the public good in every rational sense. He is not one who serves the common weal; he is simply one who preys upon the commonwealth. It is to the interest of all the rest of us to hold down his powers to an irreducible minimum and to reduce his compensation to nothing; it is to his interest to augment his powers at all hazards, and to make his compensation all the traffic will bear.
But ours is a democratic republic where We the People choose our leaders freely in fair elections. Doesn’t the need to secure a majority of votes ensure the victory of candidates, most of whom are honorable?
No:
The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob. A candidate for office, even the highest, must either adopt its current manias en bloc or convince it hypocritically that he has done so while cherishing reservations in petto. The result is that only two sorts of men stand any chance whatever of getting into actual control of affairs – first, glorified mob-men who genuinely believe what the mob believes, and secondly, shrewd fellows who are willing to make any sacrifice of conviction and self-respect in order to hold their jobs.
But some politicians are reformers or “change agents.” And many others are professional policy wonks, devoted to the dull yet important detailed chore of steering the ship of state. Surely these office-seekers are more nobly motivated than is the run-of-the-mill office-seeker.
Nope, says Mencken:
Reformers and professionals are alike politicians in search of jobs; both are trying to bilk the taxpayers. Neither ever has any other motive. If any genuinely honest and altruistic politician had come to the surface in America in my time I’d have heard of him, for I have always frequented newspaper offices, and in a newspaper office the news of such a marvel would cause a dreadful tumult. I can recall no such tumult.
We must come to grips with the fact that “politics, as hopeful men practice it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.”
Alas, though, we continue — despite mountains of evidence that should scare us off – to entrust ever more of our lives and riches to politicians.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
