(Starting a new thread so as not to hijack the other.)
Continuing the discussion from The Impending Attempt to Oust Speaker McCarthy {10/1/2023}; Patrick McHenry is now Speaker Pro Tempore {2023-10-03}:
I don’t think it’s that simple. Yes, Mencken expressed racist and anti-semitic views that we find repulsive today. More troubling, he opposed American intervention in WWII, which has been interpreted as support for the Nazis. But in fact he was more of a strict isolationist, and wrote extensively about the Nazis and American white supremacists as being “morons” unworthy of respect or support (see his column in the Baltimore Sun reacting to the Nazi rally in New York in February 1939). And he consistently favored leaders who reflected his personal views on honor and courage.
I think he would have been conflicted on Trump — susceptible to his undeniable skill at projecting an aura of strength and charisma (yeah, I know) and attracted by the notion that Trump could be the nucleus around which a powerful movement could coalesce, while simultaneously repelled by Trump’s evident stupidity, classlessness, and transparently ham-handed attempts at manipulation.
Mencken was a misanthrope who basically hated everybody (cf. his famous quote about there being so few people in the world worth knowing), with the ability to express his contempt in entertaining language. His modern fans tend to pick and choose from his writings, favoring excerpts which usefully reinforce their own negative opinions about ideological enemies, while ignoring the passages where he went after their own beliefs. For his own part, his politics were a weird mix of authoritarian and libertarian: the population at large were idiot sheep who needed a strong guiding hand, but he also highly valued his own personal freedoms. Probably the best word to describe him is not fascist but elitist. (Which also helps to explain his enduring popularity; by cherry-picking supportive quotes, fans can imagine themselves as part of said favored elite.)
He is not a hero, by any means. He was a bitter man with a venomous pen, whose acid outlook regularly helped him identify and diagnose the stupidities of his time. Yes, many of the things he went after deserved to be knocked down, but his apparently implicit wish to replace everything with an ivory-tower model concentrating power in the hands of The Right People is also far from admirable.
In the end, I think he would have taken a hard look at Trump, and decided that he was an empty shell of greed and ambition, and dismissed him accordingly. I can’t see him falling under Trump’s spell.
But I am willing to be convinced otherwise. Hence, I have spun off this thread to address the subject.