The DNC, Harris-Walz, and the Enduring Mencken

Henry Mencken (1880–1956) attended and reported on every national political conventions from 1904 to 1948. His was a time whose time has passed. Still, his reports are highly readable, instructive, brutally entertaining and truer than most contemporary reports on national conventions. This was because Mencken knew that a convention was a piece of political art, and art is always artificial, less so when it is most beautiful, like the plays of Shakespeare and the musical works of Bach.

The current Democrat National Convention, he probably would agree were he alive and writing today, is a metaphysical mess of tasteless but predictable porridge.

What is a national convention, most people, some of them reporters and political polemicists, will be asking themselves? The answer to this question, if we can take past history as a guide, might go something like this: A convention is an assembly of state delegates chosen in primaries as representatives to appoint the leaders of their party. The delegates represent state voters that previously had selected in democrat primaries the president to be affirmed by convention delegates. The role of a delegate then is to effect and establish the will of state voters.

According to this time-honored process, the 2024 Democrat National Convention is highly unorthodox, even a little mean, however joyous. Primary Democrat voters numbering about 14 million chose current Democrat President Joe Biden to be the presidential nominee of their party.

Party elites, at first hidden but now lining up to be recognized, nixed the state voters’ primary choice and heaved up quasi-socialist Kamala Harris, an alternative choice to sitting President Biden, deemed by party leaders unfit to run for a second term in office but, unaccountably, sharp as a tack during the remaining three months of his present term in office. The delegates to the Democrat National Convention, delighted to be rid of an encumbrance, are midway in the process of ratifying the choice made by party elites.

It was entirely within the province of party elites to allow an open convention in which delegates chosen in primaries might democratically choose their 2024 presidential nominee, but the elites of the Democrat Party frowned on such naked displays of democracy in action.

They felt, as did Mencken, that democracy in the case before them was an improper vehicle of statecraft, and the publicity shy elites crafted a new nomination process that differed not at all from the party-boss chosen candidates of pre-primary days. It was Mencken after all who said “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it -- good and hard.”

Mencken’s friend and colleague Alistair Cooke said of “the sage of Baltimore” following his 1904 debut, “a convention was to him the arrival of a circus to a country lad. Once every four years, he went to work on them with his self-confessed ‘impartiality,’ which is to say the Hippocratic zeal of a surgeon who picks the same scalpel to excise the appendix of a Boy Scout or a dope peddler.”

Nice. One rarely stumbles over such displays of wit and common sense in current reporting. And Mencken’s central precept – that the tribunes of the people are supposed to stand guard over the constitutional liberties of the people -- is as rarely displayed.

Here is a typical Mencken comment on national conventions: “The convention system, at bottom, is certainly not a bad one. It gives the people of all parts of the country their chance to be heard; it provides for free debate; it insures voting in the open; it is fundamentally fair and honest. But in practice it has become so horribly enmeshed in formulae that two-thirds of the ends that it was designed to achieve are defeated. The delegates spend nearly all their time and energies not in considering the business before them but at the hollow maneuvers of trained animals.”

Mencken viewed national conventions as gaudy political sideshows. One Mencken dead is worth the whole lot of mainstream partisan neo-progressive political commentators alive.

For weeks prior to the Democrat National Convention, much of the legacy media was gnawing its knuckles attempting to account for Harris’ selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz over another Vice Presidential contender, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Jewish and considerably more moderate than Walz. After all, Shapiro’s state was more electorally important than once moderate Minnesota.

Waltz is Harris’ neo-progressive pilot fish who steered Minnesota from liberal moderation to the neo-progressive wonderland that makes the DNC such a joy – for neo-progressive Democrats. Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty, the 39th governor of Minnesota from 2003 to 2011, has dubbed Walz “Bernie Sanders in hunting gear.”

While governor, Waltz signed into law a bill that allows abortion until birth, as well as a “trans refuge” bill that makes Minnesota a sanctuary for minors seeking sex changes. Under Walz’s guidance, Minnesota is now one of the top ten out-migration states and a top crime state. As elsewhere, low student achievement in Minnesota is purchased by higher spending on public education.

When, largely because of high taxes and an organic recovery from the politically caused COVID epidemic, Minnesota enjoyed a $18 billion surplus, Walz spent the boodle “boosting government programs, providing free college for middle-income families, free school lunches for all students, and a paid family leave program,” Nicole Russell writes in a Washington Examiner piece, “Tim Walz Signals Democrats’ Left Turn.”

Both Walz and Harris are, it should have been obvious to those who have ears but hear not and eyes but see not, two of a kind, fellow travelers on the rocky road to state socialism. Mencken, at least, would have had some fun with future national dislocations should Sanders’ choice for president overcome former President Donald Trump in November.