As Election Day approaches, I often find myself thinking of H.L. Mencken. Particularly during off-year contests. “The Sage of Baltimore,” as he was known, expressed lifelong disdain for politicians, and his mordant wit made him very funny about it. “Democracy,” he wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Mencken’s heyday was the 1920s, in the shadow of the Great War. Unlike most contemporary pundits, he felt no need to express false pieties or flatter his audience. “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” he argued.
