This presidential campaign was made for the “incandescent invective” of the Sage of Baltimore says Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, editor of Mencken’s Notes on Democracy.
A few examples: Voters, said Mencken, “want heroes to worship” and “rough entertainment suitable to their simple minds.” As for the average voting man: “What is worth knowing, he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true. The cardinal articles of his credo are the inventions of mountebanks; his heroes are mainly scoundrels.”
Voters are “constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of their own number by determined and ambitious individuals.” Such bamboozling is “a delicate and lofty art.”
Your typical politician will “embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes and . . . sacrifice any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him.”
The “superior man” is “a man of honor,” which is why “any political candidate who embraces the same characteristics is rare, and is invariably shouldered out of public life.”
With elections, Mencken said, “we are thus left with two choices: the demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends that he believes it himself.”
Does any of this ring a bell?
3:13 pm on November 8, 2016 Email Thomas DiLorenzo
