Most of us are talking and thinking about our democracy these days, and uncharacteristically, so am I.

I was a political writer for some years, and have not generally missed it.

I’m not interested in arguing about politics – you have a lot of places to go for that – but in understanding politics this year, something in which we all have a stake. I hope I can be helpful to you, but I am eager to be helpful to me, politics have become more important to me, more relevant.

In my search for understanding,  I’ve decided to pair up with the iconoclastic critic, political analyst and writer H.L.Mencken. I am sorry he is not alive to see this political year, it is, in many ways, the culmination of so many of his ideas, dreams and observations. And his nightmares.

I’ll share the journey.

Mencken was harsh sometimes, but also prescient,  brilliant and piercing. He was merciless in his skewing of feckless citizens and politicians, he had little faith in either.

I am quite in awe, re-reading his famous “Notes On Democracy,” of how little things have changed in American politics, or put more gently, how much they are the same.  Historians tell us that nothing is really new. Reading Mencken, you see that they are correct, for all of the hype and hysteria of the pundit class. The commentators telling us what to think don’t see to care much for history, every utterance is a revelation, never before spoken or thought.

Political journalism has become punditry, not reporting. The reason we are all so stunned by what is happening, is that commentators talk mostly to one another, not the people. Nobody ever broke a big story sitting at an anchor desk in Washington or New York. And there are hardly any reporters anywhere any longer who go out and talk to ordinary people. It’s no longer in the budget.

That’s why we didn’t begin to grasp or foresee the rage building among white working class people in America, their lives trampled, discarded and abandoned by the political parties supposed to be representing them. Someone is finally speaking to them.

Everything that happens seems to stun the people responsible for telling us about it. If you read Mencken, nothing that is happening is even surprising.

Mencken is going to help me get through this election year. You are welcome to come along. Mencken did not write about democracy so much as he wrote about The Democratic Man. He defined our society as a never-ending conflict between the superior – or civilized – man and the mob.

The  Political Mob Man was a monster, governed only by emotion and ambition:

“Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not., he chooses, almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history, he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race..In two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching party…What is worth knowing he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true…”

This inferior political man absorbs delusions, Mencken argued.

His mind is stocked mostly with fear and rage, which he ruthlessly exploits.  “The demagogues, ie., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the cornerstone of their exact and pussiant science.” Politics in a democracy, he wrote, consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of hysterias and bugaboos, most false or exaggerated.

Many of the sound elements that exist in a stable democracy – equal rights under the law, free speech limitations of government – are abandoned in times of war and fear and danger, real or perceived. Mencken saw this first hand in 1917 when anti-German hysteria peaked in American on such an epic scale that pacifists were silenced and jailed, sometimes killed; newspapers were censored and shut down, citizens joined private militias to spy on their friends and neighbors.

These terrors are episodic, they date back to the Salem Witch Trials, they move forward with history –  African-Americans, Native-Americans, Bolsheviks,Communists, Japanese-Americans, Terrorists, Muslims, Mexicans, sometimes the Irish, on a smaller social scales, gays and transgender people.  There is nothing new about them.

It is not a new story. It is not even a different story. In Mencken’s view the wise and noble democratic citizen is a myth, some Americans have always been ready to join mobs eager to trample the underpinnings of democracy. when they are frightened. And there are also always political leaders eager to grab a torch and lead the way.

Mencken sometimes seems bitter in his writing. Instead of a  democracy as laid out by the Founding Fathers, he saw a country  bent on blindly following leaders eager to hound their critics and enemies. They waste public money, persecute opponents and critics of war, openly bribe labor leaders, (and now, corporate leaders) spread hysteria and false information and often abandoned decency, decorum and  self-respect. And Mencken did not even live to see the Corporate Nation, hard at work buying the political process with billions of dollars.

What saves democracy?

Mencken believed in the Civilized Man, the Superior Man. This was a man (or woman in our time) of honor, regardless of race or social background. The savior of democracy is an independent, enlightened citizen, disposed towards liberty and the protection of people’s rights, on guard to keep freedom from being eroded by self-styled patriots or ambitious politicians who play upon the fears of people.

The Superior Citizen is beset on all sides, their troubles grow and grow.

Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner also had a concept of this noble creature, he called it “The Forgotten Man,” the man who fought to keep the mob in check, “the normal,  educated, well-disposed, unfrenzied, enlightened citizen of the of the middle minority, whose virtues include initiative, enterprise, self-reliance, courage and hard work. And honor, a commitment to doing the right thing for the greater good.”

These are the people who stand up to the mob, keep it at bay. I don’t see any of them on the news.

I am touched by Mencken’s writing, however cynical it sometimes is. But I want to be that kind of citizen, with those kinds of values. It is exciting for someone who doesn’t care to be in the left or right to see another path that is comfortable and inspiring.

At heart, Mencken loved the ideals of the democratic system, a nation of equal justice under the law.In his own way, he was fighting for them.

He was not always optimistic about the future of democracy, much as he loved it. He thought the only way it could ultimately survive was by developing and cherishing a class of men and women honest and independent enough to challenge the political class. Mostly, he thought, this responsibility lay with the press, their clearest mission was “to keep a wary eye on the gentlemen who operate the nation, “and only too often slip into the assumption that they own it.”

When the press fails to do its duty, the quack would rise up and take control, he predicted.

In our time, no such class has emerged in any great numbers, and the press is a shambles.

No one is keeping a wary eye on those gentlemen.

Mencken warned that leaders keep the mob at bay, real trouble comes when the mob becomes the leaders. Instead of uplifting the people or steering the passions in a positive direction – think Churchill or Gandhi – Mob Men in politics fuel the fears and exploit them to gain power.

But I know what I want to do. I am looking to find that Civilized Man or Woman, the Superior Citizen, the person, he or she, of honor and courage,  I want to follow him or her and support him or her. I’d like to be him in my life as a citizen.  I can be normal, educated, unfrenzied, an enlightened citizen of the middle way.

I am grateful to Mencken for guiding me, I am more hopeful than he was.