I stumbled on this 1926 H.L. Mencken essay tonight, and it's last paragraph contained a word characterizing democratic politics that struck a nerve with the cynic in me. "Rascality." Still apt nearly eighty years later, I suppose.
I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself - that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?
I appreciate Mencken's amused scorn for the "dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, and cads" that are (still) drawn to politics. There is much on which we disagree, but his absolutism on free speech and his libertarian streak appeal to me. And how true it is that if we can't make fun of or criticize our politicians, we aren't really (small 'd') democrats at all. Both of our political parties, along with campaign finance "reformers", should keep that in mind.
Posted by dan at September 7, 2004 11:26 PM