A friend posted a Fox News report about an earthquake off the Russian coast that sparked tsunami warnings in Japan, Alaska, and the entire west coast of the U.S. of A. (and, I presume, Canada). I applied search engines and found no news coverage; a further inspection found that the Fox report was dated July 29, 2025. Once again, the words of the philosopher poet Tom Petty ring true: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”
Afterward she asked, perhaps rhetorically, why these sort of things appear in her Facebook news feed, and I replied with H.L. Mencken’s famous quote about practical politics and hobgoblins, adding, “Social media algorithms seem to have been designed with practical politics in mind.”
I wanted to quote Mencken accurately, and so I turned to In Defense of Women, the 1918 book where that wonderfully succinct sentence appeared, and I discovered that the context remains also tremendously relevant:
“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers.”
I’m not sure if I would ever describe war as “waged by the will of superior men” or “the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race,” but I probably forget that Mencken was possessed of a supreme wit and sense of irony.
The point is that Mencken, 108 years ago, described war and politics as accurately as one of our contemporaries might. Of what are our practical “republican” or “democratic” politicians capable beyond “throwing the mob into a panic”? Who are they other than “mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers”? And how could you better describe our political conversation than “an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary”?
When I peruse what passes for the news of the world today, I need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, no matter how insane it all appears, God is in control, and “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Second, Henry Louis Mencken was one of the canniest observers of the human condition ever to have lived.
