Some of Us Were Worried About America before the Election

If you read H. L. Mencken with any sense that he has a point, you were not convinced the United States was exceptional before Donald Trump became POTUS:

What, then, is the spirit of Americanism? I precipitate it conveniently into the doctrine that the way to ascertain the truth about anything, whether in the realms of exact knowledge, in the purple zone of the fine arts or in the empyrean reaches of metaphysics, is to take a vote upon it, and that the way to propagate that truth, once it has been ascertained and proclaimed by lawful authority, is with a club. This doctrine, it seems to me, explains almost everything that is indubitably America, and particularly everything American that is most puzzling to men of older and less inspired cultures, from American politics to American learning, and from the lush and unprecedented American code of morals to the amazing and almost fabulous American code of honor. At the one end it explains the archetypical buffooneries of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, the Anti-Saloon League, the Department of Justice, and at the other end it explains the amusing theory that the limits of the nation’s aesthetic adventures are to be fixed by a vague and self-appointed camorra of rustic Ph.D.’s, and that any artist, indigenous or imported, who dares to pass them is not only a sinner against the beautiful but also a traitor to the flag, and that he ought, shall and must be throttled by the secular arm. Patriotism thus gathers in aesthetics and gives it suck, as it has already given suck to ethics. There are artists who are worthy of the boon of freedom, and there are artists who are criminal and must be put down, as anarchists and polygamists are put down. The fancies of the poet in his velvet coat, the vast soarings and grapplings of the metaphysician in his damp cell, the writings of the logician chained to his rock, become either right or wrong, and whatever is right in them is American and whatever is wrong is not American. (H. L. Mencken, “The American Tradition”)

Notice that the right viewed President Obama through the Americanist grid. The New York Times and Washington Post now return the favor with President Trump. Mencken was on to the moralism of America ninety years ago.

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