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The man can be a brilliant speaker, but he needed to get to the "dumbed down" middle class people, where he lives, works, hires, listens. This is how he had to talk at his rallies: he had to grab their attention span, which wasn't that long and zero in on his points...
And the man walked away from the roll call vote with over 1,700 delegates... Call the man anything you want, but don't call this man stupid, far from it, he already is a year into his Presidency and we haven't even gotten to November yet...
This vanity will take the notion of "voice of middle class people" to a whole new level thanks to the commentary of maybe the greatest pundit America has ever seen: H. L. Mencken.
Back in the days of the Great Depression, Mencken wrote a short essay entitled, Vox Populi, a highly insightful and devilishly-fun-to-read analysis of the American political scene — as you'll soon see.
Now a very interesting point her is that Vox Populi seems to presage the arrival of a Trump, a man with a good sense of how the society should be led, and someone who is also a master in the arts of persuasion and influencing the masses.
What I've done here is extract and lightly edit the best parts the text. Hopefully this will excite you enough to read the full essay or even get yourself a copy of the book I found it in: H. L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticismwhich holds a special place on my library shelf.
Vox Populi
H. L. Mencken
June 1922
The Key Political Question:
How, in spite of the incurable imbecility of the great masses of men, are we to get a reasonable measure of sense and decency into the conduct of the world?
The Traditional Answer is to Educate the Masses..
By spreading enlightenment, by democratising information, by combating what is false with what is true.
But Educating the Masses doesn't Work...
Why? Because that scheme, however persuasively it is tried, invariably gets shipwrecked by two or three immovable facts:
- One is the fact that a safe majority of the men and women in every modern society cannot be educated, save within very narrow limits. It is no more possible to teach them what every voter theoretically should know than it is teach a chimpanzee to play the viola de gamba.
- Second, the safe majority, far from having any natural yearning to acquire this body of truth, has a natural and apparently incurable distrust of it.
- And third, no body of teachers in Christendom is capable of teaching the truth. The teacher, almost ex officio, seems to corrupt it and put it down, so the inevitable tendency is to preserve and spread the lies that are respectable to the current masters of the mob.
Now, I Don't Deny that People can Learn Things...
The great masses of men can take in certain sorts of knowledge, at least within narrow limits:
- Fully 80 percent of the inhabitants of the United States, within our own time, have absorbed a number of solid facts, before unknown to them — for example, that beer is easy to make in the kitchen, that wood alcohol has various unpleasant physiological effects, and that it is dangerous to crank a Ford.
- Probably half as many have taken in information of a somewhat wider and more philosophical kind — for example, that the guarantees in the Bill of Rights are merely rhetorical, that saving the world for democracy costs a great deal of money, that feeding a human infant on fried liver will not make it flourish, and every old woman who mumbles as she shuffles along is not a witch.
- Go back a thousand years, and you will be able to show even greater accretions of knowledge, much of it sound.
- The average member of the American Legion, though the professors may report him a moron, knows more, I am convinced, than the average legionary of Caesar's Gallic army, and what he knows is better organized.
- The average American farmer, though he voted for Bryan, is more intelligent than the peasant of Charlemagne's time.
- Even the average American Congressman, at least in matters that do not concern the business of lawmaking, probably has more useful information in him than the average member of a Tenth Century Witenagemot.
The Progress of Enlightenment Doesn't Reach the Great Masses of People
- Enlightenment is a matter which concerns exclusively a small minority of men. The size of that minority is always grossly overestimated.
- Because a man is a Ph.D. and licensed to teach Latin grammar it is assumed that he is generally intelligent — that he shares, to some extent at least, in the stupendous miscellaneous knowledge of a Virchow or Huxley. The assumption is often false. He may be, in fact, practically an imbecile, and not infrequently he actually is.
- I do not here argue, of course, that the intelligence of a man is to be determined by subjected him to an examination like that recently proposed by Thomas A. Edison. Edison himself, indeed, though he could pass his own examination, must be thick-witted at bottom, for when he goes on a holiday he chooses such men as Harding and Henry Ford as his companions.
- But what I do argue is that no man can be said to share fully in the progress of human knowledge who is ignorant of any of its basic facts — for example, the facts that ghosts do not actually haunt graveyards, that printing money cannot make a nation rich, and that men cannot be made virtuous by law.
The Human Race is actually split into Two Distinct Species
- The one species is characterized by an incurable thirst for knowledge, and an extraordinary capacity for recognizing and taking in facts and evidences.
- The other is just as brilliantly marked by a chronic appetite for whatever is most palpably false and a chronic distrust for whatever is palpably true.
- To the second species being the overwhelming majority of individuals under democracy, including all the favorite politicians, philosophers, theologians, star-gazers, and diviners. These half-wits now run the world.
The People in Power Today are Mob-Masters
- The great nations of the world are run today, not by their first-rate men, nor even by their second-rate or third-rate men, but by groups of professional mob-masters, all of them ignorant and most of them corrupt.
- Well, how is it that such men reach so high an estate in a great nation — and in every other great nation, under democracy, there are scoundrels to match him?
- It comes very simply. The mob-master is imprimis, so near to the mob in his natural ways of thought — his gross self-seeking and lack of sensitiveness, his tendency to reduce all ideas to hollow formulae, his feeling of kinship with the ignorant and degraded men — that is is easy for him to put himself into their collective mind.
- He is so lacking in ordinary professional pride and conscientiousness that he is willing to submit with alacrity to the mob's mandates, even when he dissents from them and regards them as dangerous and wrong.
- In brief, he is a demogogue, and his power rests wholly upon his talent for that role. What keeps him in office is simply his tremendous capacity for evoking the emotions of the mob.
The Problem of Democratic Government Narrows Down to...
- How is the relatively enlightened and reputable minority to break the hold of such mountebanks upon the votes of the anthropoid majority?
- At first glance, the thing seems insoluble, but there is one consolation: The man of education and self-respect may not run with the mob, and he may not yield to it supinely, but what is prevent him deliberately pulling its nose?
- What is to prevent him from playing on its fears and credulities to good ends as a physician plays upon them by giving its members bread bills, or as a holy clerk, seeing to bring it up to relative decency, scares it with tales of mythical hell?
- In brief, what is to prevent him swallowing his political prejudices in order to channel and guide the prejudices of his inferiors?
- It may be, at first blush, an unsavory job — but so is delivering a fat woman of twins an unsavory job. Yet obstetricians of the first skill and repute do it — if the fee be large enough. So is hearing the confessions of Freudian old maids. Yet priests do it. So is going to war. Yet the chivalry of the world has just done it.
What I propose, in truth, has been done already
- Men of very considerable intelligence have done so to brilliant effect. I allude to the boob-bumping that was undertaken during the late war by certain members of the intelligentsia.
- Some of the most potent raids upon the boob emotions made during those days were planned and executed, in fact, by men who were normally too sniffish to engage in any such enterprise.
- If they devote themselves to the arts of the demogogue in peace times as ardently and ingeniously as they did in war times, they would present a very formidable opposition to the Bryans, Roosevelts, Hardings, Cabot Lodges, Cal Coolidges and other professionals, and perhaps debauch the booboisie into accepting ideas of relatively high soundness. Not, of course, as ideas, but as emotions.
- As a matter of bald sense or decency, I believe, it is a sheer impossibility to induce the mob to do or believe anything. But as a matter of fact it is possible to make it do or believe almost everything. The demagogue is a man who is privy to this fact.
- There will come a change in the conduct of the world when men of intelligence and integrity also become privy to it, and being privy to it, act upon it boldly and vigorously.
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