Politics & Power Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s line lands like a sneer you can hear. “Nobody ever went broke” is the language of commerce, not culture, and that’s the point: he frames public taste as a market fact, not a moral debate. If you want to make money, he implies, stop pretending the audience is secretly refined and start feeding the lowest common denominator. The joke is that it’s not really a joke; it’s a business model dressed up as a punchline.

The intent is double-edged. On one side, Mencken is attacking purveyors of mass entertainment, the salesmen of schlock who treat attention as a resource to be strip-mined. On the other, he’s indicting the public itself, a crowd willing to reward what flatters, simplifies, or titillates. “Underestimating” is the key verb: it suggests not just ignorance but strategic contempt. The cynical operator wins by assuming the audience wants less than it could.

Subtextually, it’s also a jab at American democracy’s cultural story about itself. The United States loves to imagine its public as practical, independent-minded, impossible to fool. Mencken, the great anti-booster, flips that myth: the public isn’t hard to fool, it’s profitable to do so. Context matters here. Writing amid the rise of mass newspapers, advertising, and popular entertainment, Mencken watched culture become scalable. His wit is a warning about incentives: when mediocrity pays reliably, it doesn’t just survive - it dominates.