History Repeating

HL Mencken defined democracy this way:

Democracy is the theory that the booboisie know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Mencken, a fellow Baltimoron and probably the most gifted writer to have come from the gentle bosom of Mob Town, couldn't sustain much enthusiasm for the promise of democracy except as sport

What grotesque false pretenses! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing?

The natural inclincation is to rise up on our hind legs and reject his corrosive brand of cynicism. And then you read this -

6 percent of Clinton's own [Pennsylvania] voters said that they would defect to John McCain in the fall against Clinton herself.

6% of 2 million is 120,000. How many of those 120,000 are just funning with the pollster or didn't quite grok the question? Having lived near Pennsylvania it could be substantial.

kid.

Exclude the stumped and mistaken, and also set aside the Limbaugh Democrats, and you're still going to be left with -optimistically- tens of thousands of people who are sincerely voting for Clinton, all the while pretty sure they won't do it again in the fall.

The question that needs answering:

What does a sincere, reasonably well-informed voter who fits this profile think he or she is accomplishing?

Another question that needs answering:

Are they more racist than they are misogynist, but definitely misogynist?

Lets give the last word the HL and see how much we hind-leg-dismissing we muster now:

One cannot observe [democracy] objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity... Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves.... I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world.

Last question that needs answering:

If Democracy always and forever fails to deliver on its premises -let alone the promises- is it really better, as some have said, than all the others?