Time & Perspective Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken needles democracy at its most self-serious moment: the campaign. The line lands because it refuses the comforting myth that elections are high-minded debates over principle. Instead, politics is depicted as a frantic black-market economy of belief, where parties "steal" articles of faith the way rival newspapers swipe headlines. Ideology, in his telling, is less a conviction than a wardrobe change - whatever fits the season, whatever polls.

The wicked fun is in the mechanics. "Candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches" turns opposition into ventriloquism: the politician as impersonator, the platform as a recycled script. Mencken isn't arguing that parties are identical in a policy spreadsheet sense; he's mocking the incentives that make them converge rhetorically. When every election is a chase for the median voter, difference becomes a marketing problem. You borrow the other side's moral language, launder it, then sell it back as your own.

Then comes the punchline: politics as pest control. If all you can realistically do is "turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in", civic participation shrinks to rotation, not reform. Mencken's cynicism is strategic, not lazy: it weaponizes disgust to puncture sanctimony. Written in the early 20th century, amid booming mass media and professionalized campaigning, it anticipates the modern sense that the spectacle is the system. The subtext is bleakly American: we keep mistaking a change of management for a change of direction, and calling the ritual virtue.