If you’ve ever felt a peculiar sense of déjà vu watching the nightly news—a nagging feeling that the political hysteria, the moral panics, and the parade of grinning mountebanks all seem strangely familiar—then you’re ready to rediscover H.L. Mencken.
Mencken’s Notes on Democracy was published in 1926, but open it to any page and you might think the old sage from Baltimore had a secret viewing port into our present-day madness. The names have changed, but the game hasn’t. The demagogues, the fearful mobs, the cynical exploitation of public stupidity—it’s all there, described with a wit so sharp it could slice through the reinforced concrete of modern propaganda.
Mencken understood that democracy, in practice, is less about reasoned self-governance and more about the management of mass emotion. He saw the common man not as a noble sovereign, but as a frightened, envious, and easily led creature, whose deepest desire is not for liberty, but for safety and the thrill of seeing his betters brought low.
Consider his diagnosis of the political process, which reads like a direct commentary on our last two decades:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Swap out his hobgoblins—the “Hessians,” the “Slave Power,” the “Kaiser”—for ours. COVID. Russia. “White Supremacy.” “Climate Catastrophe.” The names are updated, but the technique is pristine. The goal is always the same: to keep the populace in a state of perpetual fear, forever clamoring for a savior who promises safety in exchange for their liberties.
Mencken saw the modern politician not as a leader, but as a performer in a grim comedy, a “courtier of democracy” whose sole purpose is to flatter the mob to exploit it.
“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”
Sound familiar? It’s the entire operating manual for the 24-hour news cycle and the social media outrage machine. The political class no longer even bothers to hide its contempt for the intelligence of the average person. They feed us narratives they know are simplistic, contradictory, or outright false, counting on our inability or unwillingness to think critically.
And what of the citizen’s cherished liberty? Mencken delivers a devastating verdict that stings with modern relevance:
“The truth is that the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary… He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd.”
We see this every day. People eagerly surrender their rights to travel, to assemble, to speak freely, even control over their own bodies, for the illusion of security. They demand censorship of “misinformation,” never realizing they are begging for their own muzzles. They cheer as their neighbors are deplatformed or jailed for wrongthink, fulfilling Mencken’s prophecy that “the only sort of liberty that is real under democracy is the liberty of the have-nots to destroy the liberty of the haves.”
Perhaps his most prescient observation was on the rise of a new moralistic puritanism, a secular religion that operates with all the fervor and intolerance of the old ones.
“The Puritan’s actual motives are (a) to punish the other fellow for having a better time in the world, and (b) to bring the other fellow down to his own unhappy level.”
This is the engine behind our modern “social justice” crusades, climate alarmism, and the therapeutic state. It’s not about health, equity, or saving the planet; it’s about envy dressed up as virtue. It is the joyless, meddlesome impulse to regulate what others eat, drink, drive, say, and think, justified by a manufactured moral emergency.
So, has nothing changed? Only the tools. Mencken’s demagogues had newspapers and stump speeches. Ours have algorithmically curated social media feeds and 24/7 cable news propaganda channels. The mob’s “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy” is now amplified to a global scale.
The only thing that has perhaps gotten worse is our general education. Mencken feared the mob was unteachable. Our institutions now seem hell-bent on ensuring they remain that way, replacing history with grievance studies, science with dogma, and literature with ideological conformity.
The joke, ultimately, is on us. But as Mencken advises, we might as well enjoy the show.
“I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.”
The carnival never closes. The clowns are eternal. Mencken simply gave us the program, and it’s a thrill to see the same old acts performing with such frantic, predictable regularity. The question he leaves us with is not how to stop the show, but whether we have the wit to laugh at it, and the will to refuse to join the procession.
For those who wish to read the program for themselves, Mencken’s masterwork, Notes on Democracy, is available here.
Feeling inspired to wear your philosophical disdain on your sleeve? The eternal spectacle of democracy, long recognized by great minds, is perfectly captured in this design, which borrows a line from the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine:
A perfect, wearable reminder that the political circus is not a new phenomenon but a grimly predictable, recurring show.
The Eternal Carnival
Why Mencken’s 1926 Roar Still Echoes in Our Farcical 2025
If you’ve ever felt a peculiar sense of déjà vu watching the nightly news—a nagging feeling that the political hysteria, the moral panics, and the parade of grinning mountebanks all seem strangely familiar—then you’re ready to rediscover H.L. Mencken.
Mencken’s Notes on Democracy was published in 1926, but open it to any page and you might think the old sage from Baltimore had a secret viewing port into our present-day madness. The names have changed, but the game hasn’t. The demagogues, the fearful mobs, the cynical exploitation of public stupidity—it’s all there, described with a wit so sharp it could slice through the reinforced concrete of modern propaganda.
Mencken understood that democracy, in practice, is less about reasoned self-governance and more about the management of mass emotion. He saw the common man not as a noble sovereign, but as a frightened, envious, and easily led creature, whose deepest desire is not for liberty, but for safety and the thrill of seeing his betters brought low.
Consider his diagnosis of the political process, which reads like a direct commentary on our last two decades:
Swap out his hobgoblins—the “Hessians,” the “Slave Power,” the “Kaiser”—for ours. COVID. Russia. “White Supremacy.” “Climate Catastrophe.” The names are updated, but the technique is pristine. The goal is always the same: to keep the populace in a state of perpetual fear, forever clamoring for a savior who promises safety in exchange for their liberties.
Mencken saw the modern politician not as a leader, but as a performer in a grim comedy, a “courtier of democracy” whose sole purpose is to flatter the mob to exploit it.
Sound familiar? It’s the entire operating manual for the 24-hour news cycle and the social media outrage machine. The political class no longer even bothers to hide its contempt for the intelligence of the average person. They feed us narratives they know are simplistic, contradictory, or outright false, counting on our inability or unwillingness to think critically.
And what of the citizen’s cherished liberty? Mencken delivers a devastating verdict that stings with modern relevance:
We see this every day. People eagerly surrender their rights to travel, to assemble, to speak freely, even control over their own bodies, for the illusion of security. They demand censorship of “misinformation,” never realizing they are begging for their own muzzles. They cheer as their neighbors are deplatformed or jailed for wrongthink, fulfilling Mencken’s prophecy that “the only sort of liberty that is real under democracy is the liberty of the have-nots to destroy the liberty of the haves.”
Perhaps his most prescient observation was on the rise of a new moralistic puritanism, a secular religion that operates with all the fervor and intolerance of the old ones.
This is the engine behind our modern “social justice” crusades, climate alarmism, and the therapeutic state. It’s not about health, equity, or saving the planet; it’s about envy dressed up as virtue. It is the joyless, meddlesome impulse to regulate what others eat, drink, drive, say, and think, justified by a manufactured moral emergency.
So, has nothing changed? Only the tools. Mencken’s demagogues had newspapers and stump speeches. Ours have algorithmically curated social media feeds and 24/7 cable news propaganda channels. The mob’s “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy” is now amplified to a global scale.
The paradox of the love mystery
The only thing that has perhaps gotten worse is our general education. Mencken feared the mob was unteachable. Our institutions now seem hell-bent on ensuring they remain that way, replacing history with grievance studies, science with dogma, and literature with ideological conformity.
The joke, ultimately, is on us. But as Mencken advises, we might as well enjoy the show.
The carnival never closes. The clowns are eternal. Mencken simply gave us the program, and it’s a thrill to see the same old acts performing with such frantic, predictable regularity. The question he leaves us with is not how to stop the show, but whether we have the wit to laugh at it, and the will to refuse to join the procession.
For those who wish to read the program for themselves, Mencken’s masterwork, Notes on Democracy, is available here.
Feeling inspired to wear your philosophical disdain on your sleeve? The eternal spectacle of democracy, long recognized by great minds, is perfectly captured in this design, which borrows a line from the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heine:
A perfect, wearable reminder that the political circus is not a new phenomenon but a grimly predictable, recurring show.