Webnesia MCR

blog

pensées

poems

2020s

2010s

2000s

1990s

1980s

1970s

publications

dreams

recordings

verse

books

reading list

wishlist

blog
archives

But it is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Mencken on democracy (Mencken)

I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves.
H.L. Mencken, from A Mencken Chrestomathy

Labels:

© 1996 - 2025
All rights reserved.
Michael C. Rush (aka M. C. Rush)
Direct inquires to:  rushmc @ webnesia.com

(Site was originally called @ Wit's End, then
The Shattered Mirror, before becoming Webnesia.)

Defender of Truth & Justice since (approx.) 1973!