In perhaps the best distillation of Mencken’s conservatism, he suggested everyone live not quite sober and not quite drunk, but “gently stewed.” He explained what this solution entails:
Putting a brake upon all the qualities which enable us to get on in the world and shine before our fellows — for example, combativeness, shrewdness, diligence, ambition —, it releases the qualities which mellow us and make our fellows love us — for example, amiability, generosity, toleration, humor, sympathy. A man who has taken aboard two or three cocktails is less competent than he was before to steer a battleship down the Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw a deed of trust, or to conduct Bach’s B minor mass, but he is immensely more competent to entertain a dinner party, or to admire a pretty girl, or to hear Bach’s B minor mass.1
Of course, Mencken never would have forcefully implemented such a policy, launched a campaign for its adoption, or expected it to be popularly or influentially supported. He simply mentions it because it is fun, makes sense, reads well and gets a point across. It was only by such stretches of the imagination that he could be perceived as anything other than a conservative libertarian. He was so conservative and opposed to politics that even the lure, in 1914, of “$30,000 cash … to write anti-Prohibition speeches for the illiterates in the two Houses of Congress”2 was insufficient.
Mencken considered many problems of the world to be caused by indignation, but he never got too indignant about it. He saw that indignation is like magic: people are tricked into seeing things from a limited and misleading angle, and as a result they believe the impossible is possible and the difficult easy.
Footnotes