This morning, my mother forwarded to me an email that seems to be making the rounds. It contains a purported 1920 quote from H. L. Mencken. The quote so perfectly described the result of the recent presidential election that I had to go in search of the original to make sure it is unadulterated, and to see the context. The brief quote has been provided in two recent DKos diaries [1, 2]. These, and my Mother’s email version are, in fact, nearly identical to the original. But the rest of the essay also seems to have been written as Mencken magically peered into the future.
On July 26, 1920, the Baltimore Sun published Mencken’s essay “BAYARD vs LIONHEART” in which he discusses two candidates for public office (Mssrs. Harding and Cox). The entire essay is well worth reading, and I will give you here only a few teasers. Recall that this was written 96 years ago (and at a time when it was inconceivable that a candidate would be anything but a man, and that voters were surely men as well).
“It is not often, in these later days of the democratic enlightenment, that positive merit lands a man in elective office in the United States; much more often it is a negative merit that gets him there. That negative merit is simply disvulnerability. Of the two candidates, that one wins who least arouses the suspicions and distrusts of the great masses of simple men.”
Perhaps he is saying that people often vote for the candidate with lower negatives?
“… the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes. There is room for two sorts of them—first, the blank cartridge who has no convictions at all and is willing to accept anything to make votes, and, secondly, the mountebank who is willing to conceal and disguise what he actually believes, according as the wind blows hot or cold.”
Which did we just elect? Or did the successful candidate embody both of these types at various times?
“But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.”
Yes, “they are drug dealers and rapists”, “we must take our country back” {from those brown people].
“…all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.”
All he needed to do was disperse that notion for about 24% of the US voting-eligible population.
And finally the closing quotation that is going mini-viral [note that it often contains — erroneously, but accurately — the modifier narcissistic as the penultimate word]:
“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Welcome to January 20, 2017.