Mencken – ILANA MERCER

How Democracy Made Us Dumb

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 05:06:35 +0000

From the riffs of outrage coming from the Democrats and their demos over “our democracy” betrayed, infiltrated, even destroyed—you’d never know that a rich vein of thinking in opposition to democracy runs through Western intellectual thought, and that those familiar with it would be tempted to say “good riddance.”

Voicing opposition to democracy is just not done in politically polite circles, conservative and liberal alike.

For this reason, the Mises Institute’s Circle in Seattle, an annual gathering, represented a break from the pack.

The Mises Institute is the foremost think tank working to advance free-market economics from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics. It is devoted to peace, prosperity, and private property, implicit in which is the demotion of raw democracy, the state, and its welfare-warfare machine.

This year, amid presentations that explained “Why American Democracy Fails,” it fell to me to speak to “How Democracy Made Us Dumb.” (Oh yes! Reality on the ground was not candy-coated.)

Some of the wide-ranging observations I made about the dumbing down inherent in democracy were drawn from the Founding Fathers and the ancients.

A tenet of the American democracy is to deify youth and diminish adults. To counter that, I’ll start with the ancients.

The Athenian philosophers disdained democracy. Deeply so. They held that democracy “distrusts ability and has a reverence for numbers over knowledge.” (Will Durant, “The Story of Philosophy,” New York, New York, 1961, p. 10.)

Certainly, among the ancients who mattered, there was a keen contempt for “a mob-led, passion-ridden democracy.” The complaint among Athenians who occupied themselves with thinking and debating was that “there would be chaos where there is no thought,” and that “it was a base superstition that numbers give wisdom. On the contrary, it is universally seen that men in crowds are more foolish, violent and cruel than men separate and alone.” (p. 11)

Underground already then, because so subversive—anti-democratic thinking was the aristocratic gospel in Athens. Socrates (born in 470 B.C.) was the intellectual leader against democracy and for the even-then hated aristocratic philosophy. Socrates’ acolytes, young and brilliant, questioned the “specious replacement of the old virtues by unsocial intelligence.”

The proof of the foolish, violent and cruel nature of the crowds is that the crowds, not the judges, insisted on making Socrates the first martyr of philosophy. He drank the poison at the behest of the people.

No wonder Plato, Socrates’ most gifted student, harbored such scorn for democracy and hatred for the mob—so extreme that it led this controversial genius to resolve that democracy must be destroyed, to be replaced by his planned society; “the rule of the wisest and the best, who would have to be discovered and enabled.”

Plato’s “Republic,” seconds the Economist, “is haunted by the fear that democracies eventually degenerate into tyrannies” (June 22, 2019). To libertarians, Plato of the planned society was wrong. However, the fear reverberating throughout his “Republic” is righteous.

A democratic utopia of freedom cannot come about because of the nature of man, thought Plato. Men “soon tire of what they have, pine for what they have not, and seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another.” (“The Story of Philosophy,” p. 19.)

Plato agreed, that “the diversity of democracy’s characters … make it look very attractive.” However, “these citizens are so consumed by pleasure-seeking that they beggar the economy”; so hostile to authority that they ignore the advice of sages, and so solipsistic and libertine that they lose any common purpose.

Most agreeable to libertarian thinking was Aristotle, who ventured that democracy is based on a false assumption of equality. It arises out of the notion that “those who are equal in one respect (under the law) are equal in all respects. Because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.” (P. 70)

Tocqueville, too, was not sold on the new American democracy. He conducted “his extensive investigation into American life, and was prepared to pronounce with authority [about what he termed the new democracy].” (Russell Kirk, “The Conservative Mind,” Washington D.C., 1985, 205-224)

The American elite, Tocqueville observed, does not form an aristocracy that cherishes individuality, but a bureaucratic elite which exacts rigid conformity, a monotonous equality, shared by the managers of society.” (p. 218) Remarking on “the standardization of character in America,” Tocqueville described it as “a sort of family likeness” that makes for monotony. (p. 210)

What menaces democratic society … a tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit and condition … The mass of people will not rest until the state is reorganized to furnish them with material gratification.”

“Pure democracy makes libertarian democracy impossible,” posited Tocqueville. (p. 213) “In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within certain barriers, an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them … his political career is then over, since he has offended the only authority able to defend it. … Before making public his opinions, he thought he had sympathizers, now it seems to him he has none any more, since he revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize loudly, and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort, which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.” (p. 218)

Consider that Tocqueville was writing at a time so much smarter than our own.

Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans.

This column, now in its 20th year, can attest that writing in the Age of the Idiot is about striking the right balance of banality and mediocrity, both in style and thought, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines and positions, poorly.

Let us not forget Friendrich Nietzsche (admired by H. L. Mencken, whose genius would have remained unrecognized had he been plying his craft in 2019).

Born 39 years after Tocqueville, Nietzsche saw nothing good in democracy. “It means the worship of mediocrity, and the hatred of excellence. … What is hated by the people, as a wolf by the dogs, is the free spirit, the enemy of all fetters, the not-adorer, the man who is not a regular party-member. … How can a nation become great when its greatest men lie unused, discouraged, perhaps unknown … Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical—not the superior man but the majority man becomes the ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes approximate—the men become women and the women become men.” (“The Story of Philosophy,” p. 324.)

For their part, America’s founders had attempted to forestall raw democracy by devising a republic.

In his magisterial “Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government,” constitutional scholar James McClellan noted that universal suffrage and mass democracy were alien to the Founders: “They believed that a democracy would tend toward mediocrity and tyranny of the majority.” Writing about the first state constitutions (penned between 1776-1783), McClellan attests that, “A complete democracy on a wide scale was widely regarded throughout the colonies as a threat to law and order.”

Why, Pennsylvania became the laughingstock in the colonies when it “abolished all property qualifications for voting and holding office. This confirmed the suspicions of many colonial leaders that an unrestrained democracy could drive good men out of public office and turn the affairs of state over to pettifoggers, bunglers, and demagogues.” A conga-line of those you witnessed at the CNN/New York Times Democratic debate, the other day.

“The Founders wanted representation of brains, not bodies,” observed McClellan, noting that, at least “for a number of years, the best minds in the country dominated American politics.” No more.

Watch ilana mercer’s entire address, “How Democracy Made Us Dumb,” on YouTube.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
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Coughing Up Some Coulter Fur Balls

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

COULTER AND COMMUNAL GRIEF

Ann Coulter, I imagine, considers herself an individualist, not a collectivist. Which is why her views on grief perplex. About certain Sept.-11 widows, Coulter has written the following: “These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them.” (Emphasis added.)

Nations don’t grieve; individuals who incur loss do. The nation, following Sept. 11, can legitimately lay claim to the confusion that comes with a loss of a previous sense of security and to the sorrow that accompanies the deaths of compatriots. However, only the immediate relatives of the victims were in fact bereaved. The nation might be shocked, reeling, but only the families of the dead were utterly devastated. With every day that dawns, they alone face the kind of pain the rest of us cannot fathom.

The line, “letting the community grieve and get on with the healing process,” is standard in liberal locution (adopted, sadly, by many Crunchy Cons); it’s straight out of Oprah’s vernacular.

The idea that people not directly affected by a tragedy ought to perform the rites reserved for the bereaved conjures the image of a tribe in the paroxysmal throws of a grief ritual. It’s inspired by the equally primitive specter of Oprah’s televised group therapy sessions, in which every individual’s pain is equally weighted.

In the abstract, Sept. 11 was an attack on “our nation.” In reality, some felt it more than others.

ANNIE, GET ABU BERG, INSTEAD

A much worthier object for Coulter’s contempt is Michael Berg, the late Nicholas Berg’s father. Berg recently lost a friend: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He offered the following pious homilies for the man who personally sawed off his son’s head:

“I’m sorry whenever any human being dies. Zarqawi is a human being. He has a family who are reacting just as my family reacted when Nick was killed, and I feel bad for that… I have never indicated anything but forgiveness and peace [toward Zarqawi].” (Emphasis added.)

Berg, a pacifist who thinks Nick was “killed” by some cosmic force—not beheaded by a barbarian—went on to disgorge that pacifist’s plumb line about violence breeding only more violence.While it can include violent methods, reasonable punishment is not the same as violence. Following an unprovoked act of aggression with a proportional act of retribution, and punishing only the guilty—that’s justice, not violence.

Justice must be done not only for the purpose of vindicating the dead, but because justice, like liberty, is the foundation of a peaceful and orderly society. By rejecting proportional retribution—in Zarqawi’s case, two 500-pound bombs sounds about right to me—Berg has rejected justice.

About the carnage we’ve created in Iraq, H. L Mencken, always impeccably savoir-faire, would have agreed: there is no justice to be had in that orgy of blood and destruction. Nevertheless, as a reader deliciously described Zarqawi’s demise, “That so and so needed killing.”

And that enabler of evil, Abu Berg—he is a worthy object for Coulter’s contempt, not the Sept.-11 widows.

COULTER VS. MENCKEN

Speaking of Mencken, on Lou Dobbs’ “Today” show, Coulter anointed herself as the Right’s H. L. Mencken. Coulter is certainly sui generis, but she’s no Mencken.

First, while not-quite “Godless,” Mencken held “that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind—that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.” “In America,” he contended, “[religion] is used as a club and a cloak by both politicians and moralists, all of them lusting for power and most of them palpable frauds.”

More material, Mencken was a libertarian. He hated government with all his bolshy being, and was deeply suspicious of power—all power, not only liberal power. To Mencken, all government was evil, and “all government must necessarily make war upon liberty.” Therefore, the only good politician was “one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s goodbye to the Bill of Rights.”

Mencken certainly would have had few kind words for dirigiste Dubya, the ultimate statist. Coulter, conversely, has shown Bush (who isn’t even conservative) almost unquestioning loyalty, other than to protest his Harriet Miers indiscretion and, of late, his infarct over illegal immigration. Such singular devotion would have been alien to Mencken. Nor would the very brilliant elitist have found this president’s manifest, all-round ignorance forgivable or endearing—Bush’s penchant for logical and linguistic infelicities would have repulsed Mencken.

About foreign forays, Mencken stated acerbically that “the United States should mind its own business. If it is actually commissioned by God to put down totalitarianism, let it start in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Santo Domingo and Mississippi.” Mencken believed that “waging a war for a purely moral reason [was] as absurd as ravishing a woman for a purely moral reason.” Not in a million years would he have endorsed Bush’s Iraq misadventure.

Since he was not a party animal, but a man of principle, conformity to the clan would not have seen Mencken fall into contradiction as Coulter has: she rightly condemned Madeleine Albright’s “preemptive attack” on Slobodan Milosevic, as having been “solely for purposes of regime change based on false information presented to the American people.” But has adopted a different—decidedly double—standard regarding Bush’s Iraq excursion.

To repeat: Coulter is sui generis, but a Mencken she is not.

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LANCING THE LOTT

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 25 Dec 2002 00:00:00 +0000

But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.—Genesis 19:25-27

It’s all over now: Senator Trent Lott fleetingly looked back in time and turned to salt, much like the wife of the biblical Lot, who gazed behind her at Sodom and Gomorrah as “the Lord rained down burning sulfur” on the sinful cities, and was terminated for her disobedience.

For his disobedience, albeit to a different Ministry, Trent Lott was also terminated.

Only seasoned and cynical opportunists could suggest that it was for segregation that Lott was pining, when he praised Strom Thurmond’s 1948 party platform at the octogenarian’s 100th birthday bash. That the cries of “racism” from the nation’s professional pointy-heads are so successful demonstrates the power of the race card. Leveled at innocent white Americans, race is like stigmata. The custodians of consensus have only to say the word and most whites obediently welt and bleed.

Or so Trent Lott discovered.

To express a yearning for barbaric lynchings and segregation is by any standard tacky and tasteless. Southerners, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, may have been drained of their best blood by the War of Northern Aggression, but vestiges of good breeding, charm, and civility remain in many a Southern man. As a Gallup poll duly confirmed, most Americans believe Lott’s praise for Thurmond did not indicate that he endorsed segregationist policies, “but rather that he made a poor choice of words.”

A courageous individual might have summoned the strength to state openly what exactly he was praising. Instead, Lott dissolved into an apologetic puddle.

Admittedly the Many Ministries of Truth make truth telling a difficult task. In fiction, the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is a reified entity. In reality, there isn’t one concrete ministry that decides how the nation thinks—there are many such entities. They’ve evolved over time, and they issue countless subliminal edicts.

One type of aversion treatment is to call the unhappy victim a racist. It’s the contemporary version of fingering a witch during the Salem witchcraft trials. This treatment awaits any and all who fail to conform to the correct thinking, transmitted by the education system, the churches, and the intellectuals.

When the Many Ministries of Truth—the media, G.W. Bush, and phalanxes of politicians, stakeholders, and activists—say that Trent Lott’s remarks were emblematic of the eternal Mark of Cain whites must bear, most accept culpability. After all, older folks excepted, not many remember what Strom Thurmond voters were voting for.

Again, Gallup to the rescue: A 1948 poll exposes the issue the Ministries labor to conceal. It was not race that was on the minds of Thurmond voters and the average American voter for that matter, but increasing federal involvement in states and, by extension, in individual affairs.

In 1948, Americans didn’t want the government to be involved in general, Frank Newport of the Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing told an unreceptive Jerry Nachman of MSNBC. When asked, the majority polled insisted, for instance, that issues revolving around employer “discrimination” be left to employers and the states. The same goes for the adjudication of lynching. Nothing in the poll suggests an approval of the crime. Rather, Americans were emphatic about keeping the federal government out of state affairs.

When Strom Thurmond went up against Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, it was about states’ rights. Dixiecrats was the derogatory name the Media Ministry gave to what was really the States Rights Democratic Party. Considering that the Constitution consigns law enforcement to state and local governments, the position the Dixiecrats took was hardly subversive.

The issue of segregation or racism, moreover, is intellectually independent of states’ rights. The reason for the mistaken conflation of states’ rights and segregation resides with the same propagandists who successfully equate, for the purposes of discrediting, the right of secession with an alleged support for slavery.

States’ rights are an obstacle to ridding the nation of racism only in as much as the First Amendment is such a barrier. So long as property rights and free speech are respected, individuals are bound to exhibit preferences or express tastes that others will find displeasing. At best, one can make the case that a support for states’ rights correlates with an appreciation or love of freedom, perhaps even with a belief that otherwise peaceable people with unpopular beliefs should be left unmolested, at least on their own property. Abolish states’ rights and one does away with a measure of freedom and property rights, not racism.

The point, of course, is moot— states’ rights no longer exist in any meaningful way. The drive behind discrediting so much as a nostalgic yen for rights that existed for almost a hundred and fifty years before the Constitution has more to do with an aversion to freedom than to racism. For the doctrine of states’ rights is synonymous with decentralization, devolution of power, and local sovereignty—it’s antithetical to concentration of power in the central government.

A fact that was not lost on Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler; both were great centralizers. Lincoln hagiographers would protest to the contrary, but it isn’t incendiary to point out that he and Hitler shared very similar views on states’ rights—Lincoln’s unfavorable views of such rights are seconded by Hitler in Mein Kampf.* Both invented a constitutional theory which flew in the face of the natural law, and according to which pre-existing states were to be forcibly subordinated to Union. Both led violent political revolutions aimed at consolidation. The one got away with murder, at least in the historical sense; the other didn’t.

Reinvigorating states’ rights would require the federal government to cede much of its power, becoming no more than a night watchman in its inconspicuousness. Consider this and it becomes clear why a great deal is staked on blotting-out such rights. How willing, after all, would an empire be to downgrade to the status of a foreign ministry and a defense department?

Steeped as they were in the Lockean tradition of natural rights and individual liberty, the founders felt the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property were best preserved within a federal system of divided sovereignty, where the central government was weak and where most powers devolved to the states, or to the people, respectively, as stated in the 10th Amendment. If a state became tyrannical, competition from other states, and the individual’s ability to exit the political arrangement and switch loyalties, would create something of a free market in government. This was the framers’ genius.

If anything, the racism and slavery-related libels are belated excuses for sundering states’ rights and secession. And if anything, our poll reflects the views of a more enlightened population in whom, as recently as 1948, the flames of federalism—and freedom—still flickered.

* See Felix Morley’s Freedom and Federalism (Indianapolis: LibertyPress, 1981), pp. 142-147, as well as Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s “Jaffa’s Hitlerian Defense of Lincoln.”

*Image Credit https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DlGrO

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