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“This Holy Terror [H. L. Mencken] from Baltimore is splendidly and exultantly and contagiously alive. He calls you a swine, and an imbecile, and he increases your will to live.” —Walter Lippmann “Mencken’s vigor is…like an electric current. In all he writes there is a crackle of blue sparks…that give you a sense of enormous hidden power. Who could quarrel with such generosity, such vibrating sympathy, and with a mind so intensely alive.” —Joseph Conrad Notes on Democracy by enormously influential journalist and cultural critic H. L. Mencken is an incisive and astonishingly timely critique of democracy. Mencken is not opposed to democracy but in his powerful, unabashed polemic, he calls out its inherent and unavoidable fragility. His bracing realism reminds us that naive faith in the inevitable triumph of democracy over all other forms of government is a dangerous delusion, and warns that democracy will not be saved by more democracy. In today’s fraught political moment when democracies around the world are under threat from within and without, Mencken’s book exposes some of the underlying tensions that must be understood by anyone committed to protecting democracy now and in the future. Includes a noteworthy review of the original 1926 edition by Walter Lippmann, an afterword by Ulrich Baer, and a biographical timeline. Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956) was an American journalist, critic, and satirist who shaped modern American fiction and public life. His broad-ranging articles were characterized by unexpected, deeply thoughtful, and provocative analysis and assertions. Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University and has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships. He has written introductions to numerous classic works of literature and philosophy.

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