Notes on Democracy quotes

His Appearance in the World

Democracy came into the Western World to the tune of sweet, soft music.

There was, at the start, no harsh bawling from below; there was only a dulcet twittering from above.

What baffles statesmen is to be solved by the people, instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition. Their yearnings are pure; they alone are capable of a perfect patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness on this lugubrious ball.

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!

This notion, as I hint, originated in the poetic fancy of gentlemen on the upper levels—sentimentalists who, observing to their distress that the ass was over-laden, proposed to reform transport by putting him into the cart.

Meanwhile, of course, there had been a certain seeping down of democratic theory from the metaphysicians to the mob—obscured by the uproar, but still going on.

Rhetoric, like a stealthy plague, was doing its immemorial work.

Where men were confronted by the harsh, exigent realities of battle and pillage, as they were everywhere on the Continent, it got into their veins only slowly, but where they had time to listen to oratory, as in England and, above all, in America, it …

I leave such contentions to the frequenters of Little Bethel, and pause only to observe that if the progress of the human race had depended upon them we’d all believe in witches, ectoplasms and madstones to-day.

Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata.

Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes.

I allude to the fact that man on the lower levels, though he quickly reaches the limit of his capacity for taking in actual knowledge, remains capable for a long time thereafter of absorbing delusions.

What is true daunts him, but what is not true finds lodgment in his cranium with so little resistance that there is only a trifling emission of heat.

I shall go back to this singular and beautiful phenomenon later on. It lies at the heart of what is called religion, and at the heart of all democratic politics no less.

The difference is not only qualitative; it is also, in important ways, quantitative.

One thus sees the world as a vast field of greased poles, flying gaudy and seductive flags.

Up each a human soul goes shinning, painfully and with many a slip. Some climb eventually to the high levels; a few scale the dizziest heights. But the great majority never get very far from the ground.

The list might be lengthened indefinitely; a complete chronicle of the Republic could be written in terms of it, and without omitting a single important episode.

It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something.

The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favour of colourless mediocrities. The former are shining marks, and so it is easy for demagogues to bring them down;

Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, i. e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science.

Politics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos.

The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!” It has been so in the United States since the earliest days.

… his foes to take the offensive out of his hands, and in the last scene of all he himself was the pursued, and the tide of the battle was running so heavily against him that even the hinds at Dayton, Tenn., were laughing at him.

Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm.

Its processes are most beautifully displayed at times when they stand most naked—for example, in war days. The history of the American share in the World War is simply a record of conflicting fears, more than once amounting to frenzies.

In character his amorous fancies are the same; in intensity they are immensely exaggerated. His brain, in the first years of his second decade, ceases to develop, but simultaneously his glands begin to unfold gloriously, and presently they dominate his whole organism.

In his middle teens, he is no more than a vast geyser of hormones.

The sweet passion of love, in these years, is to him precisely what it is to a Tom cat.

That longing is vain. There are no cabarets in the village, but only sordid speak-easies, selling raw spirits out of filthy jugs.

Drinking cider in the barn is so lonely as to be a sort of onanism.

Where is the music? Where are the whirling spangles, the brilliant lights? Where is the swooning, suffocating scent of lilies-of-the-valley, Jockey Club? Where, above all, are the lost and fascinating females, so thrillingly described by the visiting evangelist?

One of the most valid of them—that of free speech—was actually given its first support in law by the most absolute monarch of modern times, to wit, Frederick the Great.

When the city mob fights it is not for liberty, but for ham and cabbage.

When it wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to that end. And its second is to butcher all professional libertarians.

Liberty is unfathomable to him. He can no more comprehend it than he can comprehend honour. What he mistakes for it, nine times out of ten, is simply the banal right to empty hallelujahs upon his oppressors.

He is an ox whose last proud, defiant gesture is to lick the butcher behind the ear.

“The vast majority of persons of our race,” said Sir Francis Galton, “have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing and acting alone.”

Thus it oscillates eternally between scoundrels, or, if you would take them at their own valuation, heroes.

Politics becomes the trade of playing upon its natural poltroonery—of scaring it half to death, and then proposing to save it.

There is in it no other quality of which a practical politician, taking one day with another, may be sure. Every theoretically free people wonders at the slavishness of all the others. But there is no actual difference between them.

In two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena to the lynching-party—and another inch: from the obscenities of the Saturnalia to the obscenities of the Methodist revival. So he lives out his life in the image of Jahveh.

What is worth knowing he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true.

The cardinal articles of his credo are the inventions of mountebanks; his heroes are mainly scoundrels.

There is, first, the mob, theoretically and in fact the ultimate judge of all ideas and the source of all power. There is, second, the camorra of self-seeking minorities, each seeking to inflame, delude and victimize it.

The political process thus becomes a mere battle of rival rogues.

But the mob remains quite free to decide between them. It may even, under the hand of God, decide for a minority that happens, by some miracle, to be relatively honest and enlightened.

Worse, they are donkeys. Yet worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats. They are thus constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of their own number, by determined and ambitious individuals, and even by exterior groups.

The business of victimizing them is a lucrative profession, an exact science, and a delicate and lofty art.

It has its masters and it has its quacks. Its lowest reward is a seat in Congress or a job as a Prohibition agent, i. e., a licensed blackleg; its highest reward is immortality. The adept practitioner is not only rewarded; he is also thanked.

Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself.

He becomes a coward and a trimmer ex officio. Where his dignity was in the days of his innocence there is now only a vacuum in the wastes of his subconscious.

Vanity remains to him, but not pride.

Thus the ideal of democracy is reached at last: it has become a psychic impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union, save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness even of God.

Out of the muck of their swinishness the typical American law-maker emerges. He is a man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled.

He knows the taste of boot-polish.

He has suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretences.

It is, when it becomes a reality, the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of men, like knowledge, courage and honour. A special sort of man is needed to understand it, nay, to stand it—and he is inevitably an outlaw in democratic societies.

The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.

Nietzsche, with his usual clarity of vision, saw the point clearly. Liberty, he used to say, was something that, to the general, was too cold to be borne.

Such is the theory behind Prohibition, comstockery, vice crusading, and all its other familiar devices of oppression. That theory, of course, is false.

The Puritan’s actual motives are (a) to punish the other fellow for having a better time in the world, and (b) to bring the other fellow down to his own unhappy level.

Such are his punitive and remedial purposes. Primarily, he is against every human act that he is incapable of himself—safely. The adverb tells the whole story. The Puritan is surely no ascetic.

But no protest comes save from specialists in liberty, most of whom are so busy keeping out of jail themselves that their caveats are feeble and ineffective.

The mob is always in favour of the prosecution, for the prosecution is giving the show.

In the face of its applause, very few American judges have the courage to enforce the constitutional guarantees—and still fewer prosecuting attorneys. As I have said, a prosecuting attorney’s success depends very largely upon his ferocity.

The impulse to be magnanimous, to forgive and forget, to be kindly and generous toward a misguided and harmless old man, was overcome by the harsh Puritan compulsion to observe the letter of the law at all costs.

Every Puritan is a lawyer, and so is every democrat.

This moral compulsion of the Puritan and democrat, of course, is mainly bogus. When one has written off cruelty, envy and cowardice, one has accounted for nine-tenths of it.

… fellow men is not admiration for their inner virtues, their hard striving to live according to the light that is in them, but admiration for their outer graces and decencies—in brief, confidence that they will always act generously and understandingly in their intercourse with us.

We must trust men before we may enjoy them.

Manifestly, it is impossible to put any such trust in a Puritan. With the best intentions in the world he cannot rid himself of the delusion that his duty to save us from our sins—i.

Such phenomena, as I say, puzzle the more academic pathologists of democracy, but as for me, I only say that they seem to be in strict accord with God’s invariable laws.

Why should democracy rise against bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale bribery.

In place of a government with a fixed purpose and a visible goal, it sets up a government that is a mere function of the mob’s vagaries, and that maintains itself by constantly bargaining with those vagaries.

it is regarded universally to-day as a pious fraud—which is to say, as a Puritan. Nor has England, the next most eminent democratic state, got the name of perfide Albion for nothing.

Ruled by shady men, a nation itself becomes shady.

In its domestic relations, of course, the same causes have the same effects. The government deals with the citizens from whom it has its mandate in a base and disingenuous manner, and fails completely to maintain equal justice among them.

the habit, to wit, of inflicting as much mental suffering as possible upon its victims. That is to say, it not only has at them by legal means; it also defames them, and so seeks to ruin them doubly.

The constant and central aim of every democratic government is to silence criticism of itself.

It begins to weaken, i. e., the jobs of its component rogues begin to be insecure, the instant such criticism rises.

I avoid the banality of pointing to the cases of Lincoln and Wilson. No man would want to be President of the United States in strict accordance with the Constitution.

There is no sense of power in merely executing laws; it comes from evading or augmenting them.

I incline to think that this view of government as a group of men struggling for power and profit, in the face and at the expense of the generality of men, has its place somewhere in the dark recesses of the popular mind, and that …

In the United States, through such agents as the late Gompers, they keep Demos penned in a gilt and glittering cage. Public opinion? Walter Lippmann, searching for it, could not find it. A century before him Fichte said “es gar nicht existirte.”

Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob’s fears. It is piped to central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured, and put into cans.

It came into the world as a cure-all, and it remains primarily a cure-all to this day. Any boil upon the body politic, however vast and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote; any flux of blood may be stopped by passing a law.

The aim of government is to repeal the laws of nature, and re-enact them with moral amendments.

War becomes simply a device to end war. The state, a mystical emanation from the mob, takes on a transcendental potency, and acquires the power to make over the father which begat it.

And no doubt the dogma of Transubstantiation came under fire in the Reformation because it had grown too simple and comprehensible—because even the Scholastic philosophy had been unable to convert its plain propositions into something that could be believed without being understood.

Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism.

One cannot discuss it without colliding with preposterous postulates, all of them cherished like authentic hairs from the whiskers of Moses himself.

But what is defiant is surely not official, and what is not official is open to examination.

For all I know, democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be.

There are obvious paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack. It offers John Doe a means to rise above his place beside Richard Roe, and then, by making Roe his equal, it takes away the chief usufructs of the rising.

The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true—and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true.

Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism.

They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth.

This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a commonplace of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms.

The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself.

There is a government, not of men, but of laws—but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be.

Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out.

Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves.

I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very corner-stone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it.

my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of.

How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive.

In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself—that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle.

I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy.

I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely.

It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: