Democratic Man
Section 6
He indulges - for a paragraph and disguised as hyperbole - the furious lie of right-wing propaganda that the lowest and poorest at no cost to themselves are shockingly coddled from cradle to grave in worthless and idle irresponsibility on the backs of others - in the America of 1927!
Section 8
"Justice, in fact, is always unpopular and in difficulties under democracy, save perhaps that false form of so-called social justice which is designed solely to get the laborer more than his fair hire."
A little further into the section he complains the masses resist compulsory inoculation against Smallpox and other public health measures.
Still further in he writes, "Learning survives among us largely because the mob has not got news of it."
That, at any rate, has always seemed to me indisputable.
The Democratic State
Section 1
Mencken condemns American participation in The Great War, as he had done at the time.
The charge has always been that he was pro-German, though I have seen no evidence of it.
Bertrand Russell, on the other hand, was so franky pro-German he went to prison for it, radical leftist though he was then and all his life.
Section 2
His equating the non-voting of disenfranchised Southern blacks and disinclined Northern whites is absurd.
His prediction of another Civil War the South would lose if blacks ever demanded their voting rights was not far wrong.
Throughout the book he everywhere denies the impact of anti-majoritarian, anti-democratic features of government and the power of obstacles to change.
He even firmly maintains in this section that in the US democracy "works, and the people are actually sovereign."
Elsewhere he calls America "a democratic plutocracy," and that is far closer to the truth.
And that America is a mass society ruled by competing, usually self-interested minorities, also closer to the truth.
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