I seriously raised at least one FmH reader’s hackles last week in passing on Rafe Coburn‘s proposal about their lack of empathic capability being one of the defining characteristics of rabid conservatives. Now, with delight, I’m reproducing another of his comments of a similar ilk, but this time he casts his lot, and thus in turn I do, with a consummate curmudgeon:

“I’m currently reading a collection of H L Mencken’s essays, The Vintage Mencken. In one essay, ‘The National Letters,’ Mencken describes George W Bush (err, the American plutocracy circa 1920), thusly:

It is badly educated, it is stupid, it is full of low-caste superstitions and indignations, it is without decent traditions or informing vision; above all it is extraordinarily lacking in the most elemental independence and courage. Out of this class comes the grotesque fashionable society of our big towns, already described. Imagine a horde of peasants incredibly enriched and with almost infinite power thrust into their hands, and you will have a fair picture of its habitual state of mind. It shows all the stigmata of inferiority–moral certainty, cruelty, suspicion of ideas, fear.

Mencken’s argument is that what’s needed is a real aristocracy. I’m not sure I buy into that necessarily, but his description of the American plutocracy then and now is dead on.” [thanks to walker]