Book Review | Notes on Democracy

NOTES ON DEMOCRACY | H.L. Mencken, Aristo Books, (2024) 222p​

In the brash, acerbic, and irreverent style only H. L. Mencken could master, Notes on Democracy is a rollicking takedown of the sacred myths surrounding democratic governance. Written with the incisive wit of a man who reveled in skewering the pieties of his age, this book is not so much a treatise as it is a gleeful literary detonation. Armed with his pen and unyielding contempt for mediocrity, Mencken sets his sights on the political dogmas of his day—and ours—with an unapologetic ferocity that remains as relevant as it is unnerving.

The central thesis of Notes on Democracy is less a structured argument than an unrelenting autopsy. Mencken dissects the mechanisms of democracy, slicing through its noble pretensions with surgical precision. Far from the soaring rhetoric of a Lincoln or Jefferson, he offers a sobering, often scornful, appraisal of the democratic project: a system designed, in his view, to elevate the mediocre while shackling the exceptional. The “common man,” whose virtues democracy claims to extol, becomes in Mencken’s hands a hapless everyman—vain, gullible, and prone to the obedience of the herd. The result? A system governed by whim and sentiment rather than by reason or excellence.

What makes Notes on Democracy so powerful and infuriating to its critics is Mencken’s refusal to flatter his audience. He offers no utopian alternatives, no cheery prescriptions for reform. He rejects that education or civic virtue can redeem democracy’s inherent flaws. To Mencken, the problem lies not in the governance details but in the idea itself: that the majority should steer the ship of state with its banal preferences and pedestrian appetites. His vision is unapologetically elitist—not in advocating kings or oligarchs, but in championing an intellectual aristocracy, where excellence is neither sentimentalized nor sacrificed to mediocrity.

It is an ancient irony that democracy, heralded as the great bulwark of justice, sentenced Christ and Socrates to death by vote. Mencken does not fail to see such contradictions or extend mercy to the hypocrisy of those who ignore them.

The prose is quintessential Mencken: sharp, sardonic, and brimming with disdain for cant. Few writers could make such bleak conclusions so delightfully entertaining. His style is a master class in polemic, weaving the erudition of a classical scholar with the bite of a streetwise pugilist. Each sentence lands like a jab; each paragraph builds like a combination. It’s as if Mencken is daring the reader to disagree, fully aware that even those who reject his conclusions will begrudgingly admire the audacity and elegance of his argument.

Yet, for all its brilliance, Notes on Democracy has flaws. Mencken’s unrelenting cynicism, while exhilarating, can tilt into a kind of misanthropic absolutism. His dismissal of the “booboisie” as irredeemable can feel gratuitously harsh, even cruel. The critique, though penetrating, lacks nuance. One wonders if Mencken’s scorn is as myopic as his idealism gleefully eviscerates.

Still, Notes on Democracy is a book that demands engagement. Mencken’s voice refuses to be ignored, whether you nod in agreement or recoil in indignation. The book is a challenge, a provocation, a wake-up call for those content to rest on the laurels of inherited dogma. More than a critique of democracy, it is an indictment of intellectual laziness—a clarion call to think harder and more honestly about the systems we venerate.

Reading Mencken is not unlike stepping into the ring with a heavyweight fighter. You may emerge bruised, battered, even humiliated—but you will have fought in the arena. For that, Mencken deserves not just our grudging respect but our gratitude. Notes on Democracy is not a book to agree with; it is a book to wrestle with, to argue against, and ultimately to savor. It is a reminder that the most dangerous thinker is not the ideologue but the contrarian, who refuses to accept easy answers—even, or especially, his own.