Was H.L. Mencken a fascist who would have supported Trump?

[Cervaise]

(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}:

@Alessan

@XOldiesJock

Mencken had a lot of observations about politics and elections. I’ve always liked this one, relevant as it was to the election results in 2016:

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

For the record, H.L. Mecken was a fascist who, if alive today, would have been a diehard Trump supporter.

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.

[Alessan]

@Cervaise

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.

That sounds exactly like Trump’s worldview, doesn’t it? I think there’s a good chance Mencken would have seen a lot of himself in Trump and like many other formerly intelligent men, willfully ignore his crassness and stupidity, instead seeing him as a 4-dimensional chess playing genius.

[Cervaise]

I don’t buy it.

Consider: Mencken was notoriously antagonistic to mainstream Christianity in his day, and made no secret of his fierce agnosticism, which was uncommon at the time. He would have taken one look at Trump’s purely opportunistic relationship to American Christianity — shamelessly waving the Bible every chance he gets, and cozying up to evangelicals to benefit from and exploit their characterization of him as some sort of modern Messiah — and seen through it immediately.

I am not trying to lionize Mencken here. As I made clear above, there are ample grounds on which he can be criticized.

But gullibility for cheap political stunts is absolutely not among them.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@Cervaise

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.

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.

Using some of the above as support, Mencken absolutely would have been pro-Trump. There can’t be any question of it. Of course, it wouldn’t have been straightforward hero worship, Mencken had too much self-awareness to be that sort of sheep. It would have been of the bitterly cynical mold like Glenn Greenwald – perennially insisting “both sides are corrupt”, occasionally needling the right, but unfailingly focusing his venom on the left. Like Tucker Carlson, he would privately despised commoners, and would have been glad to whip them up against “the elite”.

Like most conservatives, he loved women up to the point where they started getting ideas about having equal access to civil rights and power. He would have absolutely fucking loathed Hillary Clinton to his dying breath. In regards to race, as soon as he’d gotten his hands on modern “race science” and evolutionary psychology literature, he’d have become a diehard “race realist” who insisted he had nothing against black people as long as they’d stay in their biologically preordained place. He’d never let us forget that he can’t be racist because he has a Black Friend (who would turn out to be Clarence Thomas).

While we’re on the topic of pseudoscience, Mencken would have been fully vaccinated, and insisting the government shouldn’t be forcing anyone to get vaccinated, and strongly implying that Covid-19 had an origin that was other than animal-to-human (“not saying, but I’m just saying”).

Mencken would boost his “liberal credentials” by being golf buddies with Bill Maher.

He would have complained loudly that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq War. Not for starting it - he would argue the US should have allied with Iraq to to invade and subjugate Iran. He’d point to Nazis marching in front of Disney World and say “those are pretend Nazis, they’re nothing to worry about at all. They’re nothing like what we saw in Germany. Now that’s a country that really knew how to produce real Nazis (whom, may I stresss, I do not support).”

He’d claim that he was socially liberal and fiscally liberal. It would turn out that “socially liberal” meant that he supported people’s right to do what they wanted in private (such as being queer), while insisting that they never speak of it in public. “Fiscally liberal” would, of course, involve him describing himself as “neoliberal” or worse, “Classical Liberal.” He’d be fond of claiming “I didn’t leave the Left, they left me.” He’d be regularly a beloved guest on Tucker Carlson’s show to represent “the voice of the independents.”

In short he’d be the most dreary kind of predictable pseudo-intellectual on the alt-right, while furiously rejected any label at all, because at heart he’s neither right nor left, but another, purer third thing that always happens to argue for the conservative side.

[Cervaise]

I did not start this thread as a referendum on Mencken generally. I am interested solely in the question of whether he would or would not have supported Trump. However, I cannot let this pass:

@HMS_Irruncible

he would argue the US should have allied with Iraq to to invade and subjugate Iran

He absolutely, absolutely would not have argued this. He was a strict isolationist. He was consistently and fervently opposed to war as a mechanism for conducting foreign policy, because he was skeptical to his bones about professional politicians rattling sabers for self-aggrandizement and about entrenched moneyed interests using conquest for further enrichment. If you genuinely believe Mencken would have supported war in the Mideast, then you simply don’t know Mencken.

I won’t argue the other points in detail, because he did indeed have beliefs in a number of areas that are murky at best and repellent at worst, as I have acknowledged. For example, I agree that he frequently espoused (and lived by) very sexist principles; and yet he also argued that birth control was nobody’s business but the woman who chose to use it, because a woman should not be regarded as “a sow.” He’s right on the latter point, but he’s far from admirable in general. I do not contest this.

Nevertheless, I continue to be unconvinced that Mencken would overlook all the ways Trump fails Mencken’s tests of honor and honesty and sign up for Trumpism specifically. Consider — in the leadup to the Scopes trial, Mencken argued to Clarence Darrow and other ACLU attorneys planning the defense that acquitting Scopes was small potatoes, and it was better to view this as an opportunity to attack and destroy William Jennings Bryan as a grandstanding blowhard. He said that the Scopes verdict would be quickly forgotten (“worth a day’s headlines in the newspapers”), but puncturing Bryan’s persona and limiting his voice in the wider discourse would represent a lasting victory. And when Bryan died of a heart attack five days after the verdict, Mencken labeled this “a job of public sanitation.” If Mencken could clearly perceive Bryan as a blowhard, then Trump would have been even more easily identified as such.

I am receptive to the notion that Mencken would have been sympathetic to the defanging of democracy, of which he was very distrustful, and the narrowing of leadership that a powerful ideologue might bring about. But I reject the proposition that Mencken would have supported Trump himself in that role.

[LSLGuy]

Great thread. Thank you.

I cannot claim any real expertise on Mencken’s collective output, nor how that mapped to whatever was really in his head. As we’ve discussed about e.g. Tucker Carlson today, journalists, politicians, and now celebs in general, who develop a larger-than-life public persona as a deliberate act seem to eventually lose their actual personality into that act. The actor turns into the character they started portraying.

@Cervaise

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.

That cognitive dissonance is at the center of a LOT of, as you say, elitist thinking. Whether of the left, the right, or the libertarian whichever direction that is (down maybe?). It’s simply the nature of the “strong” in the guiding hand and in which direction it should guide the sheep that the sides differ.

The other major difference is that the rightist side has the easy downhill track. Like a car with bad alignment, raw human nature in the bulk pulls to the right and can be steered to the left only by dint of continuous education, nurturing, and wide exposure to the rest of humanity not similar to yourself. It only takes one generation of neglect to allow the crude know-nothing right-leaning state of nature to be renewed.

Whenever we discuss a historical figure their racism, sexism, and (usually) antisemitism comes up. ISTM that always needs to be graded on the curve. Someone who was mainstream in their time but outré in our own time would of course be outré if magically teleported to our era intact. But IMO a better question is if that person had been born into our era, say in the 1950s or 1960s as most of us here were, how would their views have developed?

As to my actual opinion of Mencken’s reaction to trump …
I think he totally would have started out as the OP says, repelled by the obviously stupid and venal carnival barker on reality TV.

But, like many Republicans in 2015-2016, Mencken would come to the belief that trump could be usefully ridden into the presidency where “the adults in the room” (and more importantly those in all the back rooms) could stage-manage the carnie barker into doing actual elitist “good” as seen by those elitists. He might well have endorsed and voted for trump in 2016. As did a legion of traditional Rs, both ordinary schlubs like us and prominent pols, celebs, and pundits. For just those same reasons / reasonings.

By 2019 I think Mencken’d be totally appalled as he (and lots of other R-leaning elitists and 2016 trump voters) came to realize they had a loose cannon captaining the ship of state (to badly mix metaphors). For sure post- Jan 6th he’d be in the thundering denunciation camp. Net of course of whether his continued employment and access to a bully pulpit depended on which view he espoused. Always an issue for journalists for hire.

Now in 2023 Mencken, like some commentators here, would be proclaiming the game lost, the frothing inmates so outnumbering the guards that the asylum will inevitably be taken over and quite soon. So the least bad course forward is to accept that reality, hunker down, and let the cleansing fire of raging know-nothing extremism burn itself out over a half-century or more, then try to rebuild a nice civilization upon the ashes. He might well argue that 1950s Germany was a pretty nice place, but they could not have gotten there from 1930s Germany without their own time in the cleansing fire.

[Jackmannii]

I have no doubt that Mencken would’ve disdained Trump as a classic example of a lying, manipulative politician. Any sympathies toward his positions would have been drowned in a flood of contempt for his eager, credulous followers.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@Cervaise

Nevertheless, I continue to be unconvinced that Mencken would overlook all the ways Trump fails Mencken’s tests of honor and honesty and sign up for Trumpism specifically.

Many such statements were made about prominent Republicans in 2016, and it’s shocking how wrong we were about them.

I’m not saying Mencken would put on the MAGA hat and hang out at Mar-A-Lago set. Maybe not. But he absolutely would have been the NRO staff writer who reliably supported Trump with their typical performance of “tut-tut, what a shame that the conservative movement must lower itself to supporting Trump. But support him we must, because the alternatives are simply unthinkable.”

If you can’t imagine Mencken being that same way, it’s because we couldn’t really witness the evolution of a man who died in 1956 living through Civil Rights, Sexual Revolution, Gay Rights, etc. Mencken would have lost his entire mind in the Obama presidency.

@Cervaise

He absolutely, absolutely would not have argued this. He was a strict isolationist. He was consistently and fervently opposed to war as a mechanism for conducting foreign policy, because he was skeptical to his bones about professional politicians rattling sabers for self-aggrandizement

Mencken would say exactly what you said above, and he’d be lying through his teeth. This is exactly why I compare him to a Glenn Greenwald or a Tucker Carson (or a Henry Ford) for that matter. They gesture at isolationism or neutrality not out of a distaste for war, but because they support the aggressors, cloaking it in the same sort of pedestrian, midwit anti-government skepticism that we see from Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, hell even celebrities like Woody Harrelson doing today. Mencken sold it better in a different age with a different literary style, but he’s that same guy.

Or… I mean…, kind of the same guy? At least Glenn Greenwald pretends to oppose war as a concept. Mencken didn’t bother with that:
cite

War is a good thing," he wrote, "because it is honest; it admits the central fact of human nature… A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid.

During the course of the war he was censored by the Sunpapers, but wrote three revealing articles for the Atlantic . The first, “The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet,” celebrated Nietzsche as the inspiration for the new Germany, which was “contemptuous of weakness.” Germany, as he admired it, was a “hard” nation with no patience for politics because it was governed by the superior men of its “superbly efficient ruling caste.” “Germany,” he concluded, “becomes Nietzsche; Nietzsche becomes Germany.” Mencken approvingly quotes Nietzsche to the effect that “the weak and the botched must perish. . . . I tell you that a good war hallows every cause.”

I, too, like the leaders of Germany, had grave doubts about democracy. . . . It suddenly dawned on me, somewhat to my surprise, that the whole body of doctrine that I had been preaching was fundamentally anti-Anglo Saxon, and that if I had any spiritual home at all it must be in the land of my ancestors. When World War I actually started I began forthwith to whoop for the Kaiser, and I kept up that whooping so long as there was any free speech left.

That’s your anti-war guy. Anytime someone is described as “just mainly elitist, not a reactionary”, you’re going to find some ugly beliefs under that elitism, and they’ll translate to ugly alignments when push comes to shove.

[TriPolar]

@Cervaise

Consider: Mencken was notoriously antagonistic to mainstream Christianity in his day, and made no secret of his fierce agnosticism, which was uncommon at the time. He would have taken one look at Trump’s purely opportunistic relationship to American Christianity — shamelessly waving the Bible every chance he gets, and cozying up to evangelicals to benefit from and exploit their characterization of him as some sort of modern Messiah — and seen through it immediately.

@HMS_Irruncible

Using some of the above as support, Mencken absolutely would have been pro-Trump. There can’t be any question of it. Of course, it wouldn’t have been straightforward hero worship, Mencken had too much self-awareness to be that sort of sheep. It would have been of the bitterly cynical mold like Glenn Greenwald – perennially insisting “both sides are corrupt”, occasionally needling the right, but unfailingly focusing his venom on the left. Like Tucker Carlson, he would privately despised commoners, and would have been glad to whip them up against “the elite”.

These statements illustrate why we can be certain that Mencken would have definitely been pro-Trump or anti-Trump. Not wishy-washy about it, he would have taken a side early on and stuck to it like hyenas feasting on a wildebeest carcass.

I think he would have been well aware of Trump’s character and the fraudulent nature of his success and been anti-Trump. I think Mencken despised populists, if for no other reason than he didn’t like the competition. But no one seemed to know Mencken well enough in his own time to tell us his underlying nature and I don’t think we know any better now even with more information to work with.

[slicedalone]

Who do you suppose were the "downright moron"s of Mencken’s day that inspired the quote in the OP? That might give you some hints of his Trumpiness or lack thereof. I’m thinking “Maybe Warren G. Harding?”

[HMS_Irruncible]

@TriPolar

But no one seemed to know Mencken well enough in his own time to tell us his underlying nature and I don’t think we know any better now even with more information to work with.

Of course counterfactuals are hard, but Mencken quite obviously saw himself as part of the elite, and indeed as better and smarter than some of the elite, and was quite intellectually dishonest in offering his positions.

We know that type very well, and most of them decisively aligned to Trump in 2016 (even if they wouldn’t have been caught dead within a hundred mile radius of a MAGA rally or a Trump voter). They know he’s a fake and a fraud, but they hate the hoi polloi even worse, and/or they’ve been corrupted by other interests.

There are many Trump supporters who fucking hate Trump supporters. I’m certain Mencken would have been one.

[DrDeth]

@Cervaise

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.

His politics were simply weird-
As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of organized religion, theism, and representative democracy, the last of which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.[2] Mencken was a supporter of scientific progress and was critical of osteopathy and chiropractic. He was also an open critic of economics.

@Cervaise

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.

And trumps pandering to organized religion.

@Cervaise

Consider: Mencken was notoriously antagonistic to mainstream Christianity in his day, and made no secret of his fierce agnosticism, which was uncommon at the time. He would have taken one look at Trump’s purely opportunistic relationship to American Christianity — shamelessly waving the Bible every chance he gets, and cozying up to evangelicals to benefit from and exploit their characterization of him as some sort of modern Messiah — and seen through it immediately.

Right.

But he was a nutcase in some ways.

He might have been an adherent of Rand Paul.

[suranyi]

@HMS_Irruncible

We know that type very well, and most of them decisively aligned to Trump in 2016 (even if they wouldn’t have been caught dead within a hundred mile radius of a MAGA rally or a Trump voter).

This seems very weird to me. All the intellectual elitists that I know are definitely not Trump supporters. They think both Trump and his supporters are stupid.

[Kent_Clark]

Mencken likely would have supported no one, least of all Trump. He was the one who coined the term “booboisie” and he would have considered Trump as the head boob.

[Chingon]

He would have been a proud member of the Dark Enlightenment/IDW crew.

He and Moldbug would be besties.

[TriPolar]

This was Mencken’s pervasive attitude, which is why I think he would be loudly anti-Trump. The problem we face is that this is not then, and he wasn’t alive now. He was not one dimensional either, everyone can pick the Mencken they think would appear in regard to Trump.

[suranyi]

This. Fundamentally it’s really silly to decide what a person who died over 60 years ago would think about current issues.

[slicedalone]

So like I said, who were the principal morons of Mencken’s day? Did he despise Taft? TR? Harding? Coolidge? Wilson? I’ve got Manchester’s biography around here somewhere, but I haven’t cracked it open in decades.

[Chronos]

Whenever there’s a thread about whether such-and-such fictional or historical character would support Trump, I think we always need to remember: Approximately half of the politically-active population of the US does, in fact, support Trump. So, at a baseline, if we pick a person at random, already the odds are about 50-50 that they’d be a Trump supporter. When we look specifically at a person whose politics align with Trump’s in key ways, the odds have to be higher.

[Kimstu]

@HMS_Irruncible

Like most conservatives, he loved women up to the point where they started getting ideas about having equal access to civil rights and power.

Hmmm.

@H.L. Mencken

That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters. One finds very few professors of the subject, even among admitted feminists, approaching the fact as obvious; practically all of them think it necessary to bring up a vast mass of evidence to establish what should be an axiom. […]

My own belief, based on elaborate inquiries and long meditation, is that the grant of the ballot to women marks the concealed but none the less real beginning of an improvement in our politics, and, in the end, in our whole theory of government. As things stand, an intelligent grappling with some of the capital problems of the commonwealth is almost impossible. […]

For a hundred years past the people of the United States, the most terrible existing democratic state, have scarcely had a political campaign that was not based upon some preposterous fear—first of slavery and then of the manumitted slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first of the old and then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they are not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily into such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to snuffling and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that would cause a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off mobocracy and safeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this sniffing. […]

The officers nominated by the male electorate in modern democracies before the extension of the suffrage were usually chosen, not for their competence but for their mere talent for idiocy; they reflected accurately the male weakness for whatever is rhetorical and sentimental and feeble and untrue. […]

This was the male champion. I do not venture upon the cruelty of comparing his bombastic flummeries to the clear reasoning of a woman of like fame and position; all I ask of you is that you weigh them, for sense, for shrewdness, for intelligent grasp of obscure relations, for intellectual honesty and courage, with the ideas of the average midwife. […]

The gradual emancipation of women that has been going on for the last century has still a long way to proceed before they are wholly delivered from their traditional burdens and so stand clear of the oppressions of men. But already, it must be plain, they have made enormous progress—perhaps more than they made in the ten thousand years preceding. The rise of the industrial system, which has borne so harshly upon the race in general, has brought them certain unmistakable benefits. Their economic dependence, though still sufficient to make marriage highly attractive to them, is nevertheless so far broken down that large classes of women are now almost free agents, and quite independent of the favour of men. Most of these women, responding to ideas that are still powerful, are yet intrigued, of course, by marriage, and prefer it to the autonomy that is coming in, but the fact remains that they now have a free choice in the matter, and that dire necessity no longer controls them. […]

At the end I crave the indulgence of the cultured reader for the imperfections necessarily visible in all that I have here set down—imperfections not only due to incomplete information and fallible logic, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to certain fundamental weaknesses of the sex to which I have the honour to belong. A man is inseparable from his congenital vanities and stupidities, as a dog is inseparable from its fleas. They reveal themselves in everything he says and does, but they reveal themselves most of all when he discusses the majestic mystery of woman. Just as he smirks and rolls his eyes in her actual presence, so he puts on apathetic and unescapable clownishness when he essays to dissect her in the privacy of the laboratory. There is no book on woman by a man that is not a stupendous compendium of posturings and imbecilities.