Book: Notes on Democracy

Overview
H. L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy is a scathing, aphoristic diagnosis of popular government as it operated in early 20th-century America. Mencken argues that democracy rests on romantic myths about the wisdom of the average voter and the moral purity of majority rule. In practice, he says, it elevates mediocrity, punishes distinction, and rewards the arts of flattery and fearmongering. The democratic creed, preaching equality and sovereignty of the people, becomes a machinery for enthroning what he calls the “booboisie” and for disciplining anyone who stands apart, artists, innovators, heretics, and the merely competent.

The Masses and the Booboisie
Mencken’s central premise is anthropological: most people are motivated less by reason than by herd instinct, envy, and a craving for safety. Democracy sentimentalizes this fact, transforming it into a civic virtue. The average man, he insists, does not truly desire freedom, which is risky and burdensome; he desires security and reassurance. Hence democratic politics, if honest, must cater to timidity and resentment. Education and mass culture do not elevate taste or judgment; they standardize them, smoothing the peaks and entrenching the middle. In such a climate, excellence appears as menace, eccentricity as treason, and egalitarian rhetoric as a convenient moral cover for suspicion of the exceptional.

Politicians, Demagogues, and the Press
From these premises Mencken derives a bleak portrait of democratic leadership. The successful politician is a salesman of comforts, a broker of hate, and a conjuror of splendid illusions. He pronounces feel-good platitudes about the people’s virtue, promises to protect them from phantoms, and dispenses material favors to cement loyalty. Campaigns become spectacles of affirmation and alarm; platforms are inventories of plausible falsehoods. The press, chasing circulation and anxious to flatter its audience, amplifies this theater, manufacturing opinion as much as reporting it. Elections and jury trials provide rituals that sanctify outcomes with the aura of popular sovereignty while concealing how little reason or expertise guides them.

Liberty, Equality, and the Fate of the Exceptional
Mencken sets liberty and equality in tragic tension. Equality, pursued as a social and moral absolute, entails leveling, restraining the gifted to comfort the many. Liberty, understood as the right to be different, to offend, and to excel, requires tolerating hierarchy in outcomes and the unsettlement that originality brings. Democratic majorities, he argues, routinely legislate their anxieties into law: moral crusades, censorship, blue-nosed regulation, and bureaucratic tutelage. The first casualties are the unorthodox and the superior, who become subjects of suspicion, then targets for purification and conformity. The more the democratic state promises uplift, the more it polices variance.

Elites, Aristocracy, and Alternatives
Mencken does not idealize kings or oligarchs. He grants that all regimes harbor rogues and fools. Yet he contends that a natural aristocracy of talent is inevitable in any society that produces art, science, and enterprise. Democracy, by denouncing such aristocracy in principle, cannot abolish it; it merely replaces it with an artificial political aristocracy of party professionals, moral entrepreneurs, and sentiment peddlers. He prefers systems that limit power, prize competence, and leave a wide berth for private eccentricity, arrangements that keep the superior few from ruling by force while protecting them from the envy of the many.

Style, Scope, and Continuing Relevance
The book proceeds by epigram and provocation rather than by scholastic proof, mixing satire with sociological assertion. Mencken’s hyperbole is deliberate: caricature is his instrument for exposing the gap between democratic myths and democratic operations. Written amid Prohibition-era moralism and after the disillusionments of the First World War, it anticipates later critiques of mass society, public-choice analyses of political incentives, and anxieties about media-driven politics. What endures is not a program but a challenge: to measure democratic practice against its rhetoric, to admit the costs it imposes on distinction, and to ask whether a free civilization can survive when it flatters the herd and mistrusts the exceptional.