Mencken! Thou shouldst be here at this hour. I didn’t start reading H.L. Mencken until middle age, partly because certain ugly aspects to his character came to light during my youth, partly because conservatives adopted his style, and partly because I didn’t like Mencken’s contempt toward the “booboisie.” But Mencken’s rudeness was the right antidote to the politically clueless 1920s, and it has a new relevance 100 years later.

“As democracy is perfected,” Mencken wrote in 1920, “the office [of the President] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

You’ve probably heard that quote before. We could conduct a lively debate about when Mencken’s prophesy came true. In my opinion, it was in January 1981. (You must remember that before he was a secular saint, Ronald Reagan was a person whose forehead-smiting ignorance occasioned a steady stream of news stories.) If not Reagan, then certainly George W. Bush fulfilled Mencken’s prophecy. Which means I should have been used to the phenomenon by the time Trump came along. I am not.

The occasion for these sour........

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