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.
Mencken blamed this excessive trust in government for:
the survival into our enlightened age of a concept hatched in the black days of absolutism – the concept, to wit, that government is something that is superior to and quite distinct from all other human institutions – that it is, in essence, not a mere organization of ordinary men, like the Ku Klux Klan, the United States Steel Corporation or Columbia University, but a transcendental organism composed of aloof and impersonal powers, devoid wholly of self-interest and not to be measured by merely human standards.
Even my late, great Nobel-laureate colleague, James Buchanan — a pioneering public-choice scholar — never said it as well.
Mencken recognized that, from time to time, truly honorable people manage to rise to the pinnacle of politics. These individuals, however, are rare:
After damning politicians up hill and down dale for many years, as rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels, I sometimes suspect that, like everyone else, I often expect too much of them. Though faith and confidence are surely more or less foreign to my nature, I not infrequently find myself looking to them to be able, diligent, candid and even honest. Plainly enough, that is too large an order, as anyone must realize who reflects upon the manner in which they reach public office. They seldom if ever get there by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged. It is a talent like any other, and when it is exercised by a radio crooner, a movie actor or a bishop, it even takes on a certain austere and sorry respectability. But it is obviously not identical with a capacity for the intricate problems of statecraft.
Among the few honorable politicians, in Mencken’s view, was Grover Cleveland, who he described as “a good man in a bad trade.” A bad trade, of course, attracts a disproportionately large number of bad people. I can think of a tiny handful of successful politicians today for whom Mencken would likely have the same respect he had for Cleveland. But not many.
Mencken’s suspicion of politicians wasn’t superficial; it was rooted deeply in his liberalism – a natural-rights liberalism that was closely akin to that which motivated the American founders. As Mencken said: “Every right that anyone has today is based on the doctrine that government is a creature of limited powers, and that the men constituting it become criminals if they venture to exceed those powers.” Although he was no anarchist, he well understood that government’s proper function is strictly limited:
Is government, then, useful and necessary? So is a doctor. But suppose that 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 toothbrushes, and execute the droit de seigneur upon the housemaid?
Unsurprisingly for a man who seemed incapable of allowing hope to cloud his view of reality, he did not overflow with optimism:
For people in the mass soon grow used to anything, including even being swindled. There comes a time when the patter of the quack becomes as natural and as indubitable to their ears as the texts of Holy Writ, and when that time comes it is a dreadful job debamboozling them.
I close with this insight – one that, were it more widely seen, would save humankind from all manner of mischief:
When we say that it [government] has decided to do this or that, that it proposes or aspires to do this or that – usually to the great cost and inconvenience of nine-tenths of us – we simply say that a definite man or group of men has decided to do it, or proposes or aspires to do it; and when we examine this group of men realistically we almost invariably find that it is composed of individuals who are not only not superior to the general, but plainly and depressingly inferior, both in common sense and in common decency.
Would that today we Americans possessed even a quarter-measure of such clarity of vision.