[WS:] I do not meant to split hair, but a libertarian is closer to the left than to the right, at least in my book. There is a significant overlap between left and libertarian positions, eg. freedom of speech and assembly, human rights, or anti-authoritarianism. These are the core issues that the right fundamentally oposes.
As to aristocracy, my reading is that he had a Nitschean ideal of "superman" which was an intellectual synthesis of the Apollonian and Dionisian (or intellectual/creative and intutitive/instinctual) elemenst of th ehuman nature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian rather than admiration for the actual people.
In any case, this is really nit picking. The bottom line is that there are certain aspects of Mencken's critique of the American culture that is valid to this day, in my opinion, irrespective of whether the rest of his ideas suck.
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 ----------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message ---- From: John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 4:21:43 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Mencken
Gar Lipow wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 10:50 AM, John Thornton <jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>> Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>> Mencken wrote in praise of Strom Thurmond and in praise of Jim Crow.
>> He opposed lynch mobs because he hated mobs. Same for the KKK.
>> He also wrote that the US would have been better served if the South had won
>> the Civil War and the US was ruled by an elite Southern aristocracy.
>> I don't paint Mencken as virulently racist but he was a little more racist
>> than average in my opinion.
>> Better than 50% of American's opposed Jim Crow in 1950 but Mencken did not.
>>
>> John Thornton
>>
>
> Also, though he opposed individual cases of lynching, he also opposed
> Federal laws outlawing it as improperly stepping on States Rights. The
> overwhelming majority of Americans supported anti-lynch laws. Given
> some of his statements, I would paint him virulently racist.
>
> Again, I repeat that that Mark Twain really should never have been
> lumped in with Bierce and Mencken. Bierce and Mencken were primarily
> concerned with stupidity and self-delusion. At Twain's core was a
> hatred of cruelty and unnecessary suffering.
Whether one considers his racism virulent or not he was not left of anything as someone here claimed. He was a libertarian of a center/right sort who admired an elite aristocracy of which he considered himself an equal. Opposing lynching because it is "populist" in a disgusting way is not the same as opposing lynching for all the other more important reasons one can oppose it. Opposing any federal action to end lynching demonstrates the absolute shallowness of his anti-lynching stance.
John Thornton ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk