Arts & Letters

Mencken, Schmencken

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Michael Barone has a good post where he mentions how Mencken hated FDR: “Mencken was taken to be a force for social liberalism and toleration in the 1920s. But in the 1930s, he vitriolically opposed Franklin Roosevelt … and the New Deal.”

Barone is right, and it is unusual to see anyone mention Mencken’s anti-FDR phase. He is usually treated as a liberal hero for ridiculing religious people, and his disdain for the Republican presidents of the 1920s and those who voted for them.

But Mencken hated FDR at least as much as he despised Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover.

He did make one grudging concession to Coolidge:

Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.

This is actually half wrong. It is accurate to note that Wilson, Hoover and FDR, three presidents who are not usually lumped together, were all “world savers”, and this is not usually a good thing for a president to be. But Coolidge had a well-developed philosophy and acted on it. Like Eisenhower, he did the actual work quietly, while presenting a soothing image to the public. But Mencken was too convinced of his own intellectual superiority over everybody to notice that. That unearned arrogance is what makes Mencken age rather poorly, in my opinion. That said, he can be a clever writer and sometimes astute, and frequently funny. But the self-regard is grating.

Mencken was at his best in his books about the American language. There he mostly restricted himself to observable facts, or reasonable deductions therefrom, and while an amateur, he did a good job with it. His books of memoirs are also good, because they seem to have less spite in them, and his positive qualities shine through.

Worthwhile Reading

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Nick Cohen was raised by liberal and very political parents, and never met a conservative until he was 13. In this post, he writes about the evolution of his thinking and about leftist attitudes toward Iraq.

Cohen’s book, What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way will be published in February.

Today at A&L

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A&L links to The Common Review, which appears to be  the “Great Books Club”  official journal- but I may be wrong. It is clearly associated with Penguin. Do the Chicago lads (and lasses, I guess) know anything about the path of the Great Books Clubs from then to now?

A&L was looking at the review of a new E. D. Hirsch book, The Knowledge Deficit. Albert Fernandez begins with some grudging agreement with the argument Hirsch develops.

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Another Path to Our Democratic Hearts

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Architecture can move us and if we come to associate the institutions and offices of a democracy, the role of the rule of law, then those buildings are going to invoke in us a powerful allegiance. State capitols and county seats are the focus of our towns. In Europe, a visitor asks the natives where the cathedral is; a good tourist visits even the tucked-away chapel with the great painting. Few Europeans coming here find very satisfactory answers when they ask us. A few churches are lovely, of course. While we may be more religious in many ways than Europe, you can’t necessarily tell that from the beauty, centrality, or even inspiring nature of most of our churches. It isn’t just that we haven’t been religious as long and missed the great cathedral building centuries. We are splintered and take our religion a lot more personally.Across broad swaths of America and in small to middling towns, county courthouses define the geography, the history, and even the current social life of a town. Local citizens sit on the square, gossiping, watching the town’s life go by. As I sit wait to be taken or excused from a jury, I watch a cross-section of our community. Our history/government department put up a large poster of the county seats in Texas some old, some new. Students stare at them intently, trying to find their county. The poster connects them to both the towns from which they came and the importance of the requirements for American history and federal/state government.

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Lex Says and, Mostly, Lex is Right

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A state strong enough to enforce property rights and contracts, but which chooses not to be a predator is a rare anamoly. We are lucky to be here. Lex

Lex’s post on political music startled me & I responded in a slapdash manner. I hadn’t thought of it in quite that way. Of course, the left leaning nature of entertainment in general is hard to miss and the communist’s appeal to nineteenth century romantic folk traditions – all that singing around the fire in youth groups my ex-Iron Curtain friends describe – has paid for & encouraged groups that toured locally. Decades ago, the guy who edited the poetry magazine organized Wobbly songfests & my husband’s colleagues organized a party around Arlo Guthrie’s appearance. I was going to say I’ve found most of this politicized music as boring as it was irritating. But, then, I think, I still listen to Willie Nelson & Kris Kristofferson. Their self-indulgent & inconsistent stands are more leftish than anything though it’s hard to consider these as consistent political arguments. They are pretty much for the underdog whoever they perceive it to be. But that is the pull of such music the age old narrative of the underdog, of David, as well as the communal nature of the communal political. And that may be the power that Lex rightly sees in some of that music. (I always thought “I am Woman” was that kind of a song.)

Lex concludes:

Good governance cannot be sung about. But people need things to sing about.This is a real problem for people who love freedom in a sensible, empirical, small-l libertarian kind of way. It has no songs. It does not grab the heart. Our enemies will always be more powerful in this department as a result. Too bad. But I see this as a condition to be worked with, not a problem which can have a solution.

Lex is right in general, especially if you look at the genre of political songs and eliminate nationalism. But, then, if you take out nationalism, you take out one of the ways we associate institutions with our emotions. Communism, like terrorism, was a world-wide movement one based on a faux religion, the other on what may be a misunderstood but real one. “Onward Christian Soldiers” is in that tradition. But, the rule of law, the importance of private property, freedom of speech & religion, free enterprise all of these must begin within a country itself. Libertarian blogs bash the EU and the UN because they recognize that state control is not going to get looser the larger the body grows. A recorder of deeds is a part of government. This is embodied in the rule of law authorized & enforced by the state. Nationalism and these values are so intertwined that taking them out leaves only abstractions.

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