Introduction. H.L. Mencken published 10 million+ words and was called the American Nietzsche. He was a critic of our time and our prevailing values. In this Memo, discover Mencken’s insights on the nature of democracy, the traits of aristocrats, the French revolution, and more👇

Early democrats didn’t care for “the democratic ideal” at all. They had “highly materialistic” demands instead: “more to eat, less work, higher wages, lower taxes.” The masses didn’t wish to “exterminate the baron” but only to make him fulfill his “barronial” duties.

Mencken on the French Revolution: “The Paris proletariat, having been misled into killing its King in 1793, devoted the next two years to killing those who had misled it - by the middle of 1796 it had another King…with an attendant herd of barons, counts, marquises, dukes.”

Today democracy presumes that the masses possess a “deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness & wisdom” as they’re “unpolluted by the corruption of privilege.” Somehow “what baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people, instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition.”

Mencken believed that over the long-term, democracy might cancel itself out: “For all I know, democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be. There are thumping paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack.”

Democracy INTENSIFIES groupthink and group identity: “Democratic man is quite unable to think of himself as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear and loneliness—and the group, of course, must have its leaders.” More groups = more leaders.

Democracies have the aristocracy of money - Mencken calls them “plutocrats.” But the plutocracy “lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honor, courage—above all, courage. It is transient and lacks a goal.”

The plutocrats lack “an aristocratic disinterestedness born of aristocratic security.” Democracies birth their intellectual apologists - Mencken calls them “pedagogues.” These are not genuine thinkers; they’re “men chiefly marked by their haunting fear of losing their jobs.”

The pedagogue's job is to ensure adherence to the latest law dreamt up by the mob or the plutocrats. Mencken: “The pedagogue, in the long run, shows the virtues of the Congressman, the newspaper editorial writer or the butler, not those of the aristocrat.”

Freud said we repress our sex drive as it’s frowned upon, but there’s nothing that democracy frowns upon more than a CLEAR proof of superiority. Democracy says “the most worthy & laudable citizen is that one who is most like all the rest.” Hence we repress our urge to excel.