H.L. Mencken wrote often of The Democratic Man, his noble, compassionate and decent citizen, essential to the functioning of democracy. This man (or women) was rare in his time, and rare in our time. I was thinking this morning that the political news that bombards us daily now also challenges me to think about the Democratic man and the idea of liberty and to rise to the moment, in so far as I can.
The Democratic Man is a citizen of honor. He is honest, compassionate, rational. He rejects cruelty and conflict. He is often lonely.
I read some Mencken and Jefferson this morning to refresh me, and to draw out my better self and I absorb the daily drama of the news. I want to vote with my life, not with my mouth. Politics is not an argument for me, but a way to be, a way to think. Freedom is not an abstract thing to me, but the very core of my life. Freedom is about everything we want and need to be fulfilled.
Liberty, in its truest sense, is a concept that lies beyond the reach of many of the people who talk the loudest about it. For some, freedom is the right to choose between weak and angry people, to shout for the angriest and most dishonest. Genuine liberty, said Jefferson, demands a particular kind of courage. The man who lives it, said Jefferson, must be willing to fight for it. Blood, he said, is its natural manure.
The free man or woman, I think, has broken free of the mob, in our time called the “left” or the “right,” and has won a small and precious territory from the many forces seeking to tell us how to live and die what it will cost to be safe. The Democratic man knows his territory – for me, it is my small farm – and is prepared to defend it and to make it support him.
The Democratic Man does not watch the news and tremble and post angry messages on social media. He summons the courage to be honorable and live a good and free life.
The Democratic Man believes, as Henry David Thoreau believed, that we each have to make our own way and learn from our own mistakes, the Democratic Man was conceived before Facebook. Life was not about sharing, but about living.
All around us are enemies of a kind, people pressuring us to live in their way, not ours. We can not always depend on other men and women to stand with us, because they have their own important struggles to wage. Everyone has it worse off than I do.
“The vast majority of persons,” said Sir Francis Galton, “have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing and acting alone.” It is just five or six generations back, say historians, that four-fifths of the people of the world, black or white, were slaves, in reality if not always in literal name.
Liberty is a baby, still learning to walk, easy to talk about, difficult to grasp. We were slaves much longer than we have been free.
Jefferson reminded us that democracy is messy and often ugly. It is not a perfect system, it is simply the best system yet devised for people to resolve their differences and have a shot at being free. In a democracy, no one gets everything they want, every one is supposed to get some of what they want. It’s the alternative – endless war and slaughter and agony – that is unacceptable.
We love democracy until it happens, then we throw up our hands in fear and outrage.
When people cannot be free, when the rich and the powerful forget their promises and responsibilities, then the mob rebels and revolts.In the Corporate Nation, many people have become slaves again, to lives without meaning and work without security. They wish to be free again, they have lost faith in liberty. The rich have to decide whether to fight or back away. Every revolution in the history of the world was started by an angry mob, almost always in a city.
One person at a time, is my notion. My task is to live my own life freely and openly, to defend my precious territory and ask it to support me. I am a warrior for liberty, for me, this is not a hoary patriotic term but the most important thing in my life. To be free to love, create, be fulfilled.
Mencken is a good guide to democracy, an idealistic cynic and realist. Politics, he said, is the trade of playing up our natural poltroonery – of scaring us half to death, and then proposing to save us. Free people often wonder at the slavishness of others, not always seeing that there is most often no difference between us.
He reminds me that democracy is not a beautiful thing or a rational thing or a peaceful thing. It is just the best thing, the only thing that has ever even thought about bringing us liberty. So I want to be the Democratic Man, rejecting the mob, a citizen of honor.