By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Believing in my bones, as I do, that both Hillary Clinton
and Donald Trump are unworthy and unqualified to be president of the United
States has inspired me to do a lot of soul searching, and that has drawn me
more and more to the writings of the legendary H. L. Mencken and
less-than-legendary Albert J. Nock. The two Tory anarchists, as some called
them, were friends and intellectual comrades-in-arms who stood athwart the
progressive and populist passions that defined American politics in the first
half of the 20th century.
The domestic madness of World War I galvanized both men.
Under Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the United States established the first modern
ministry of propaganda, the Committee on Public Information. The Wilson
administration jailed political dissenters by the thousands, encouraged the
brown-shirt tactics of the American Protective League, and censored newspapers
and magazines with abandon.
The president demonized “hyphenated Americans” — i.e.,
Irish Americans or German Americans — as enemies of the state. “Any man who
carries a hyphen about with him,” Wilson declared, “carries a dagger that he is
ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”
Nock wrote a scalding editorial for The Nation criticizing labor leader Samuel Gompers for supporting
the government. The Wilson administration responded by temporarily banning the
publication.
The government also banned booze — an effort led in
Congress by Republican Andrew Volstead. Prohibition further demonstrated for
both Mencken and Nock that the zeal to muck about with peoples’ lives was a
bipartisan affair.
“The more obvious the failure becomes, the more
shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives,” Mencken wrote in 1926. “In
plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism.
They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible,
disgrace upon the persons they hate — which is to say, upon everyone who is
free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having a better
time in the world than they are.”
What united Nock and Mencken most was a sense of
homelessness in the intellectual establishment. Franklin Roosevelt, who
campaigned on the promise to use the war-fighting methods of the Wilson
administration to fight the Great Depression, further cemented their
alienation. “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism,” Nock wrote in his
memoirs, “are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the
trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the
flavouring.” This was an exaggeration, but one can only exaggerate the truth.
Once again American politics is threatening to become a
competition between rival factions of statists, eager to use the government to
reward themselves and punish their enemies, with “enemy” defined as anyone who
doesn’t agree with them.
Today, America looks very different from the America of
Mencken and Nock’s era, but the similarities are hard to ignore. Liberal elites
have decided that if you have a problem with men using women’s bathrooms,
you’re not just wrong, you’re a bigot. A registered Democrat murdered 49
Americans at a gay nightclub, in the name of the Islamic State, and the smart
set insists that conservative Christians are somehow to blame. The zeal of Prohibition
has multiplied like a cancer cell, with reformers wanting to ban everything
they don’t like: vaping, free speech, coal, Uber, refusal to bake cakes for gay
weddings, and, if they could, guns.
On the right, the presumptive GOP nominee promises not
limited government but stronger, more protectionist government enlisted to
remedy the grievances of his constituencies. His white working-class supporters
represent “real” America, and their problems are always somebody else’s fault.
I’ve lost count of how many times his most ardent fans have called me a “bigot”
for opposing Trump.
True to their reputations as curmudgeons, no constituency
was above reproach for Nock and Mencken. Business elites were Babbitts, eager
to chart the course of least resistance. The people, in Mencken’s famous
phrase, were the great “booboisie.” The decent and right-thinking were,
according to Nock, a silent and tiny “remnant” hiding away from politics.
Democracy itself, according to Mencken, was “the theory that the common people
know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
My cynicism is not yet as great as theirs. I have some
cause for optimism. But one only looks for signs of hope when there’s ample
reason to despair.
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