“It is not often, in these later days of the democratic
enlightenment, that positive merit lands a man in elective office in the United
States; much more often it is a negative merit that gets him there. That
negative merit is simply disvulnerability. Of the two candidates, that one wins
who least arouses the suspicions and distrusts of the great masses of simple
men. Well, what are more likely to arouse those suspicions and distrusts than
ideas, convictions, principles? The plain people are not hostile to shysterism,
save it be gross and unsuccessful. They admire a Roosevelt for his bold
stratagems and duplicities, his sacrifice of faith and principle to the main
chance, his magnificent disdain of fairness and honor. But they shy instantly
and inevitably from the man who comes before them with notions that they cannot
immediately translate into terms of their everyday delusions; they fear the
novel idea, and particularly the revolutionary idea, as they fear the devil.
When Roosevelt, losing hold upon his cunning at last, embraced the vast
hodgepodge of innovations, some idiotic but some sound enough, that went by the
name of Progressivism, they jumped from under him in trembling, and he came
down with a thump that left him on his back until death delivered him from all
hope and caring.
It seems to me that this fear of ideas is a peculiarly
democratic phenomenon, and that it is nowhere so horribly apparent as in the
United States, perhaps the nearest approach to an actual democracy yet seen in
the world. It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a
body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in
duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the
right-thinker. The fundamental concept, of course, was not original. The theologians
embraced it centuries ago, and continue to embrace it to this day. It appeared
on the political side in the Middle Ages, and survived in Russia into our time.
But it is only in the United States that it has been extended to all
departments of thought. It is only here that any novel idea, in any field of
human relations, carries with it a burden of obnoxiousness, and is instantly
challenged as mysteriously immoral by the great masses of right-thinking men.
It is only here, so far as I have been able to make out, that there is a right
way and a wrong way to think about the beverages one drinks with one's meals,
and the way children ought to be taught in the schools, and the manner in which
foreign alliances should be negotiated, and what ought to be done about the
Bolsheviki.
In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this
dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind
and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide
into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined
and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual
jelly-fish and inner tubes. There is room for two sorts of them—first, the
blank cartridge who has no convictions at all and is willing to accept anything
to make votes, and, secondly, the mountebank who is willing to conceal and
disguise what he actually believes, according as the wind blows hot or cold. Of
the first sort, Harding is an excellent specimen; of the second sort, Cox.
Such tests arise inevitably out of democracy—the domination
of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob emotions. In
private life no man of sense would think of applying them. We do not estimate
the integrity and ability of an acquaintance by his flabby willingness to
accept our ideas; we estimate him by the honesty and effectiveness with which
he maintains his own. All of us, if we are of reflective habit, like and admire
men whose fundamental beliefs differ radically from our own. But 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 count himself lost. His one aim is
to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge.
If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, of self-respect, it is cruelly
hard. But if he is, like Harding, a numskull like the idiots he faces, or, like
Cox, a pliant intellectual Jenkins, it is easy.
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas,
before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through,
carrying even the mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the
field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third
hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then 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.”
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