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Mencken saw clearly the great danger of blithely assuming
that the public weal motivates politicians:
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These men, in point of fact, are seldom if ever
moved by anything rationally describable as public
spirit; there is actually no more public spirit
among them than among so many burglars or street-walkers.
Their purpose, first, last and all the time, is to
promote their private advantage, and to that end,
and that end alone, they exercise all the vast
powers that are in their hands … Whatever it is they
seek, whether security, greater ease, more money or
more power, it has to come out of the common stock,
and so it diminishes the shares of all other men.
Putting a new job-holder to work decreases the wages
of every wage-earner in the land … Giving a job-holder
more power takes something away from the liberty of
all of us … |
One of the major reasons that the words “government” and
“tyranny” are virtually synonyms, Mencken showed, was the
gullibility of the ruled: “The State is not force alone. It
depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his
docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also
to make him want to obey.” Is government sometimes useful?
You must be joking! “So is a doctor. But suppose the dear
fellow claimed the right, every time he was called in to
prescribe for a bellyache or a ringing in the ears, to raid
the family silver, use the family tooth-brushes, and execute
the droit de seigneur upon the housemaid?”
Finally, Mencken did not
reserve any greater affection for the “military caste” than
he did for the civilian bureaucracy:
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The military caste did not originate as a party of
patriots, but as a party of bandits. The primeval
bandit chiefs eventually became kings. Something of
the bandit character still attaches to the military
professional. He may fight bravely and unselfishly,
but so do gamecocks. He may seek no material rewards,
but neither do hunting dogs. His general attitude of
mind is stupid and anti-social. It was a sound
instinct in the Founding Fathers that made them
subordinate the military establishment to the civil
power. To be sure, the civil power consists largely
of political scoundrels, but they at least differ in
outlook and purpose from the military … |
Mencken denounced the conjoined twins, socialism and
democracy; he ridiculed the pretensions and idiocies of
politicians (civilian and military); and he mourned the
death of the American Republic. He therefore opposed
America’s entry into both the First and Second World Wars,
and reserved special contempt for the execrable Franklin
Roosevelt and his catastrophic New
Deal.
Mencken has been buried,
it seems, because the principles he (and many others)
defended in the 1920s are the ones he (virtually alone)
continued to extol until he died in 1956. Evil Franklin, on
the other hand, has been lionised precisely because the
promises he made in 1932 – namely to uphold the gold
standard, balance the budget and reduce the government’s
payrolls – were abandoned in 1933; and his repeated vow in
1940 (“your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign
wars”) was swiftly repudiated in 1941. Today, most Americans
would dismiss Mencken’s principles as “radical,” “extreme”
and even “heretical.” Not a few would denounce them as
“un-American,” and neoconservatives would revile him as a
“defeatist” and a “traitor.” How might Mencken answer these
epithets? In a letter to Upton Sinclair (14 October 1917) he
fired this fusillade:
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his
country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more
likely, one who likes his country more than the rest
of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of
us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad
citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen
driven to despair.
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the young: “[The] erroneous assumption is
to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill
the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their
intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties
of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public
education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is
simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same
safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to
put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the
United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians,
pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim
everywhere else.” 
