Is Democracy DOOMED?

H. L. Mencken, the American whose uncompromising hostility to democracy marks him as one of the few intellectuals to assay courageously the prodigious task of breaking down the notion that the “human herd” Should attain to the summit of social, Industrial and economic supremacy, has just published what “The Triad” (Sydney) calls a “terrific polemic" in his “Notes on Democracy.” For a necessarily brief outline of the work we are indebted to “The Triad,” a fearless Australian periodical perennially unafraid to apply the tests of truth and reason to questions which are usually cold-shouldered by the more craven of the journalistic craft. As a forceful dogmatist, Mencken is hardly on plan with “Ragnar Redbeard,” for whose anti-mob treatise, “Might is Right,” is claimed the distinction of having stirred the war-fever in the Kaiser, W. M. Hughes and others; but Mencken is more thorough than Redbeard. Though not yet on sale in Australia “Notes on Democracy” is evidently something in the nature of mental dynamite, calculated to remove the altruistic cob-webs from the brains of well-intentioned, but sorely misguided “reformers,” who fondly imagine that they are endowed with power to talk in the new era. The world has been over-fed on paternalistic pap during the latter part of this century, with the people as scapegoats for socialistic and communistic nostrums, which in the final analysis mean nothing more than a transfer of power from the mythical “master” to the clamoring “slave”; or, more correctly, from the lords of the "settled order” to those who aspire to lead the slave class towards Emancipation, Its so-called historic mission. Redbeard sought to shatter a whole system of idealistic philosophy; Mencken not only follows on those lines, but “goes on to advocate autocracies and oligarchies, and backs up his advocacy with a wall of reasoning as tightly cemented with facts as is a theorem in Euclid.” Mencken's logic seems unanswerable. He begins by asserting that “democracy pre-supposes a mysterious merit in the masses, an illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom.” What baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people “instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition.” According to Mencken all the known facts are against such reasoning. Mencken has swung over to a profound belief in the efficacy of the Binet-Simeon intelligence tests—which he formerly pooh-poohed because, forsooth, the pedagogues advocated them—probably because they support his assertion that the vast majority of mankind belongs to the variety dubbed Homo Stultus by Charles Richet. And “Homo Stultus, the backbone of Democracy, quickly reaches the limit of his capacity for taking in actual knowledge, but remains capable for many years thereafter of absorbing delusions.” The effort to sustain the struggle is too much for him. Thus “Golf is easier; so is joining Rotary, so is Fundamentalism, so is osteopathy, so is Americanism.” So, it might be added, is the smellful game of politics. Says Mencken: “The plain people under Democracy never vote for anything, but always against something. Politics consequently becomes the trade of playing upon the mob’s Inherent poltroonery—of scaring it half to death and then pretending to save it.” Besides Fear, Rage and Love sway the mob-mind. Those things are the chief emotions upon which Democracy Is founded. “The mob imagines it wants Liberty. The mob wants not Liberty, but Security. Liberty is not for inferior people; it is for freemen. A freeman is he who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend. He can hope for little help from men of his kind, for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made himself a sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god and the dreadful loneliness.” One can understand the “dreadful loneliness” of the man who sets himself apart from his fellows, but the idea that “all round him are enemies” is a delusion from which even Redbeard suffered. To Mencken an autocracy or an oligarchy is the cure for Democracy. “What the human race owes to the old autocracies, and how little in these democratic days. Their service, perhaps, was a by-product of a purpose far afield, but it was a service none the less; they hold the green fury of the mob in check, and so set free the spirit of superior men. Their collapse under Flavius Honorius left Europe in chaos for four hundred years. Their revival under Charlemange made the Renaissance possible, and the modern age. What the thing was that they kept from the throat of civilization has been shown more than once in these later days, by the failure of their enfeebled successors. To point to the only too obvious examples of the French and Russian Revolutions. The instant such a catastrophe liberates the mob it begins a war to the death upon superiority of every kind—not only upon the kind that naturally attaches to autocracy but even upon the hind that stands in opposition to it. The day after a successful revolution is a blue day for the late autocrat, but is also a blue day for every other superior man.” Mencken does not lay down any hard and fast rule as to the method by which a dictator or dictators shall be appointed, although he leaves one to assume that the superior or super-man would, by the force of his genius, atomically arrive at the top. One thing is certain, however; the world is sure to lose faith in so-called “representative” Government, which is nothing more and nothing less than government by those who stand for vested interests, the permanent “power” behind the throne. As productive capital concentrates into fewer and fewer hands, the inevitable tendency will be to concentrate or centralize government; but whether it be by the elective system of Parliamentary representation or through an autocracy or an oligarchy matters little, except that under the Parliamentary system the mob units will continue to cherish the delusion that they are “great and sovereign,” a “self-reliant and self-governing people.”