Comments on y-intercept blog: Regulating Conservatives

Mencken made many keen, excessively barbed, observ...

2009-01-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

Mencken made many keen, excessively barbed, observations about human behavior, particularly in the political realm. Rogue is probably a pretty apt description of him, but he had enough useful observations that he cannot be simply dismissed in total due to his roguishness.

The first Mencken quote was actually only a part of the full quote. Perhaps the way I quoted it took Mencken out of context. Here is a fuller version of the quote:

"[Blind trust in government can be attributed to] the survival into our enlightened age of a concept hatched in the black days of absolutism -- the concept, to wit, that government is something that is superior to and quite distinct from all other human institutions -- that it is, in essence, not a mere organization of ordinary men, like the Ku Klux Klan, the United States Steel Corporation or Columbia University, but a transcendental organism composed of aloof and impersonal powers, devoid wholly of self-interest and not to be measured by merely human standards."

I agree that it is difficult to look into the hearts of others, except in moments where they expose such. Even then it is hard to judge the sincerity of such an exposition.

I'm not sure whether politicians are any more or less altruistic than the public at large. However, they operate in an arena where a tremendous amount of mischief can (and often does) result from even the best of intentions. While politicians can be judged by the outcomes of their actions rather than by their intentions, they are often long gone by the time the undesirable effects of their actions are felt. Moreover, due to the way academics (history), journalism, and politics work, the nasty side effects of political actions are rarely traced to their true source.

For these reasons, it is important to hold politicians — even the most righteous ones — on an extremely short leash.

Menkhen ... let's see ... oh yeah. He is filed und...

2009-01-05T13:05:00.000-07:00

Menkhen ... let's see ... oh yeah. He is filed under "R" for rogue.

When quoting folk like Mencken (1880 – 1956), it is important to note that his generation of thinkers produced some of the greatest atrocities in the history of mankind.

In the first paragraph you give, Mencken mocks classical liberals for an absolute that they never held.

This is pure second rate thinking. Let's ridicule the strawman for being made of straw.

The intellectual tradition Mencken is mocking was better at avoiding absolutist thinking and in finding balance than Mencken's group of dialecticians. Go Figure?

Like Nietsche and Marx, Mencken pretends to have a super human power to see other's motives, then judges people for these motives. I can't see other people's motives. I suspect that the vast majority of people in American politics have sincere hopes of improving the lot of mankind.

I would be as foolish to assume altruistic motives of political actions. I would be equally foolish to decide that politicians are inherently evil people.

I suspect that it is only a very small number of people who are doing the mischief. Mencken comes off as a paid apologist for that group.

BTW, What Mencken says is likely more true of the intellectual class than the political class. Intellectuals tend to have an elitist attitude. It seems especially true of the tenured professoriat who hold the political class in contempt.

The professoriat trains our leaders, so their ideas have enormous impact.

This is a dangerous mix. The contempt the professoriat has for the political class creates a contemptuous political class.

It is comforting that Mencken's second quote came back to the same conclusion of a need for limited government as was held by the classical liberal tradition.

The path he took to get there seems rife with peril.

Almost everyone in the political class believes in...

2009-01-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone in the political class believes in the command and control approach to government, party affiliation and labels notwithstanding. Politics, after all, is simply the art/science of gaining and maintaining control over people. (At least, that's how Webster defines it.)

Despite the myth that our political system is, as H.L. Mencken wrote, "a transcendental organism composed of aloof and impersonal powers, devoid wholly of self-interest and not to be measured by merely human standards," the reality is that the actions of politicians are guided by personal and systemic incentives.

The overriding incentive for the political actor is gaining and wielding power. They way this is done in a democratic society is to appeal to the sentiments of the mob, whatever those might be at any given moment. This provides the illusion that desirable political actions are undertaken by the choice of the governed.

Mencken also opined that "a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. His very existence, indeed, is a standing subversion of the public good in every rational sense. He is not one who serves the common weal; he is simply one who preys upon the commonwealth. It is to the interest of all the rest of us to hold down his powers to an irreducible minimum and to reduce his compensation to nothing; it is to his interest to augment his powers at all hazards, and to make his compensation all the traffic will bear."