Politics & Power Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s politician isn’t a public servant so much as a zoological specimen: a creature evolved to survive by contradicting itself. The image is deliciously impossible. You can’t sit on a fence (the emblem of indecision, risk-avoidance, strategic vagueness) and also keep both ears to the ground (the pose of vigilance, humility, responsiveness). The joke lands because it describes a familiar kind of civic theater: leaders who perform attentiveness while refusing to commit to anything that might cost them.

The intent is not merely to sneer at politicians as cowards; it’s to mock the mechanics of democratic messaging. Mencken suggests that modern politics rewards a very specific skill: the ability to project motion without moving, to radiate empathy without taking a side. “Both ears” matters: not just listening, but listening to everyone, constantly, compulsively. That isn’t virtue here; it’s opportunism disguised as sensitivity.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Mencken wrote in an era when mass media and machine politics were tightening their grip, when “public opinion” was becoming a force to be managed rather than respected. His fence is the new middle-of-the-road as a career strategy; his ears are polling, headlines, donors, the crowd’s mood swings. The subtext is that ambiguity isn’t an accidental flaw in the system - it’s a successful adaptation. If politics becomes a market, the winning product is the candidate who can promise opposing customers what they want to hear, all while balancing on that fence with practiced, shameless grace.