Politics & Power Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t describe American politics; he stages it. The line is a little vaudeville knife: “better than the best circus” flatters the audience’s appetite for spectacle while quietly indicting it. Campaigns, in his telling, aren’t civic deliberations gone slightly off-track; they’re the country’s premier entertainment product, a traveling show that converts voters into paying customers, not decision-makers.

The genius of the phrasing is the escalation. A circus is harmless fun, then Mencken spikes the punch: “a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.” That jump yokes two primal American urges - redemption and punishment - to the same political machinery. The baptism isn’t spiritual renewal so much as crowd psychology, the cleansing thrill of joining a cause and washing away doubt with the group. The hangings are the darker twin: the need for villains, scapegoats, the public satisfaction of seeing someone “get what’s coming.” He’s pointing at the campaign’s moral theater: candidates are sanctified, enemies are damned, and the crowd gets both the ecstasy of conversion and the relief of retribution.

Context matters: Mencken is writing in an era of roaring mass media, barnstorming candidates, Prohibition-era moral crusades, and the increasingly professional craft of manufacturing consent. His cynicism isn’t free-floating; it’s diagnostic. Democracy, he implies, doesn’t fail only because elites manipulate it. It also buckles because the public keeps demanding the circus - and then acts surprised when it gets the ropes and the dunk tank along with the policy.