"Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven"
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Mencken doesn’t reject democracy with a philosopher’s sigh; he clubs it with a satirist’s grin. Calling it “only a dream” isn’t a neutral diagnosis of imperfection. It’s an accusation that the whole project runs on comforting make-believe, the kind adults pretend not to need but keep buying anyway. By shelving democracy alongside Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven, he turns political faith into children’s lore and pastoral fantasy, then dares readers to admit they’re still believers.
The line works because it’s less about voting systems than about American self-flattery. Mencken’s target is the civic religion that insists “the people” are wise, that majority rule reliably produces competence, that public opinion tends toward truth. He suggests the opposite: mass politics rewards the loud, the sentimental, the easily marketed. Democracy becomes not a mechanism for justice but a storytelling machine that converts messy power struggles into a reassuring myth of popular sovereignty.
Context sharpens the blade. Mencken wrote in the churn of early 20th-century U.S. politics: booming media, rising propaganda, moral panics, and the humiliations of Prohibition-era crusading. He watched demagogues thrive and reformers sanctify themselves, and he treated both as evidence that the electorate’s virtues were largely ceremonial. The sneer is deliberate: by mocking democracy’s halo, he forces a harder question beneath the joke - not whether democracy is “real,” but whether we prefer comforting legends to the uncomfortable work of making it function.
The line works because it’s less about voting systems than about American self-flattery. Mencken’s target is the civic religion that insists “the people” are wise, that majority rule reliably produces competence, that public opinion tends toward truth. He suggests the opposite: mass politics rewards the loud, the sentimental, the easily marketed. Democracy becomes not a mechanism for justice but a storytelling machine that converts messy power struggles into a reassuring myth of popular sovereignty.
Context sharpens the blade. Mencken wrote in the churn of early 20th-century U.S. politics: booming media, rising propaganda, moral panics, and the humiliations of Prohibition-era crusading. He watched demagogues thrive and reformers sanctify themselves, and he treated both as evidence that the electorate’s virtues were largely ceremonial. The sneer is deliberate: by mocking democracy’s halo, he forces a harder question beneath the joke - not whether democracy is “real,” but whether we prefer comforting legends to the uncomfortable work of making it function.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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