Politics & Power Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s jab lands because it refuses the comforting civic fairy tale: that a mechanism can launder human nature. The line pairs two nearly sacred American promises - the ballot and Christianity - and treats them as parallel technologies of moral upgrade. The insult isn’t aimed only at religion or only at democracy; it’s aimed at the naïve faith that institutions automatically produce virtue.

The phrasing is calibrated for maximum deflation. “Giving every man a vote” reduces suffrage to a procedural handout, not a triumph of self-rule. “No more… than” is a comedian’s setup dressed as logic, a comparative sneer that makes both targets look equally sentimental. Mencken’s real subject is the gap between ideals and outcomes: people do not become “wise and free” just because they participate, any more than they become “good” because they inherit a creed. He’s mocking the American habit of confusing membership with transformation.

Context matters: Mencken wrote in an era of mass politics, booming newspapers, evangelical power, Prohibition moralism, and the churn of demagoguery and machine rule. To him, expanded democracy often meant expanded susceptibility - to propaganda, to pulpit certainty, to the lowest-common-denominator appeal. The subtext is almost bleakly modern: progress narratives sell us the idea that more access equals more enlightenment, when the harder truth is that access also scales up our prejudices, our appetites, our tribal loyalties.

Mencken doesn’t offer a better system here; he offers a vaccine against civic piety. The sting is the point.