William F. Buckley didn’t spring full-grown from the forehead of the American right. His distinctive fusion of wit, erudition, and showmanship had a lineage. Behind the elegant vowels and harpoon syntax stood a precedent: H. L. Mencken. Long before National Review, before Buckley’s eyebrow arched across the television landscape, Mencken had shown that the American polemic could be both cerebral and uproarious, a form of gladiatorial combat fought with syllables instead of swords.
It was Mencken who taught that the pen could be both rapier and cudgel. His was a prose of detonations — witty, erudite, and merciless. “Democracy,” he once wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” He meant populist democracy, of course. The remark captures his scorn for herd thinking as well as his relish for the well-turned sneer.
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