Mencken on Democracy

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

H.L. Mencken
(1880 - 1956)

http://www.cjonline.com/stories/111304/opi_letters.shtml

My husbands LTTE. 2nd letter. We did not think they would print it. The staff actually was enthusiastic about it. Go figure, Red State paper owned by another Red State run by closet Democrats? We are awaiting the inevitable phone calls that always come after one of his letters gets in.

what's the word... prescient?

Only from Mencken.

BTW, where did you find this quote?

You can't be any more right than that.

Probably because he hated FDR and smoked cigars. I think that's about as far as they went.

A number of RW sites that prominently display their love for HLM also display quotations from his works. On more that one occasion, I've found that a quote from a satire was heralded as straight, undiluted Mencken.

Mencken was an atheist, a proponant of the rights of women and minorities, and while he was strongly anti-Socialist, he was likewise strongly against the rapacious slash-and-burn system we have come to call "Capitalism". He had an awesome contempt for the "plain spoken" man who was a snake in rubes' clothing. And in distinction to the "har-de-har" anti-European bigotry now in fashion among the Right, Mencken was fluent in at least three European languages -- French, Italian, and German -- and German to the point where his translation of Nietzche's Man and Superman into English is considered to be unrivaled.

If in fact Mencken resolved his dispute with God, I can only imagine him sitting on a cloud (perhaps of cigar smoke), looking down on the modern state of politics (conservative AND liberal alike) in America, and laughing himself hoarse.

--bkl