>>> Wojtek Sokolowski
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If we were to place Mencken on a political map, he would be definitely more on the Left than on the Right (especially the American Right.) I think he was disowned by the Left because he refused to jump on the Left's bandwagon of the 1930s - the (misguided) populism and the reverence for FDR.
^^^^ CB: The populism of this period is not misguided, and FDR-ism some of the best America has had. This position by Mencken is not to his political credit. Mencken may be on the petit bourgeois rebellious American "left", which is really often part of the right, objectively. See Lenin's discussions of petit bourgeois revolutionism, and the twininess of "Mensheviks" and "Socialist Revolutionaries", well sorta (smile)
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During WW2 he fell into further disrepute because of his unabashed Germanophilia. For these reasons, I think he was politically banished or exiled, rather than his views being intellectually refuted.
As far as comparison to Mark Twain is concerned, they share some common traits, notably criticicm of the petit bourgeois bigotry that dominated "the American psyche," but there is aone major difference, imho. Twain was fundamentally a defender of America and its values (cf. Innocents Abroad), he merely repudiated certain aspects of it (cf. parochial bigotry). Mencken, otoh, was an unabashed Europhile and a critic of Amerca and its core values - of which "boobois" bigotry was a central part.
In that respect I am more with Mencken than with Twain. Petit bouregois bigotry (manifested in multiple forms ranging from racism to elite and foreigner bashing), anti-intellectualism, parochialism, knee-jerk conformism and group-think (thinly disguised by individualistic rhetoric), faux religiosity (i.e. concern with church politics rather than theology and spirituality) and blown out of proprtion delusions of grandeur and self-righteousness seem to be the core elements of the American collective consciousness, rather thna accidental deviations from it. It is liberalism (i.e. progressive political views) that seems to be a deviation from that core.
^^^^^ CB: Well, in the last 75 years of US history the origin of a big liberal deviation is in FDR, and it's the best America has had. It came to dominate. The negation of it has been Reaganism. Can we negate that negation now ?
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There are, of course, socio-historical reasons for that, but that is another story.
Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------
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