Politics & Power Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s joke lands with the clean snap of a guillotine: he opens on a note of near-sermon consolation, then uses the language of gratitude to deliver partisan contempt. “Sin and sorrow” is deliberately biblical, a grand staging that sets you up for piety. The turn - “as for me” - is the trapdoor. What follows isn’t gratitude so much as moral self-congratulation disguised as humility. He’s not arguing policy; he’s treating party identity as a stain you either do or don’t have.

That’s the specific intent: to mock the solemnity with which Americans wrap their politics in righteousness while also making his own allegiance (or anti-allegiance) feel like a kind of salvation. Mencken loved puncturing bourgeois respectability, and here he repurposes the cadence of a Thanksgiving homily to suggest that the only reliable blessing in a busted world is not being like those people. It’s contempt with a grin, weaponized as style.

The subtext is sharper: Republicanism stands in for the provincial, the churchy, the censorious - the coalition Mencken associated with prohibitionists, moral crusaders, and small-town prudery. By calling it something to “rejoice” over, he implies politics is less about governance than about temperament and taste.

Context matters because Mencken was writing through the high tide of early 20th-century American moral regulation and boosterish nationalism. His persona thrives on being the heretic at the civic picnic, turning gratitude into an insult that doubles as a social sorting mechanism.