The American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr: Chicken McMencken

"So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken"-The Sun Also Rises During the 1920s, when the nation became a predominantly urban society, many rushed to join what was widely hailed as a revolution in manners and morals. Yet the voters elected three avuncular Republican conservatives in a row from rural America-Harding, Coolidge and Hoover-who stood squarely for genteel orthodoxies their generation thought imperiled by a younger generation who regarded the new century as theirs to remake in their own, more modern image. The inevitable clash between rapidly liberalizing attitudes and entrenched conservative values created controversy over fundamental moral, political, and social issues. Conditions were particularly ripe for young, irreverent journalists eager to mock the older generation in power by rooting out vice and folly"bunk," to use a term coined during the period.' Few journalists relished the challenge as much as H. L. Mencken and none was as successful or as famousor infamous-as a harsh, uncompromising critic of American politics and culture. Mencken hit his satirical stride during the 1920s, flailing away at sanctimonious but hypocritical moralists and politicians as well as a gullible public too easily fooled by them. America was a "carnival of buncombe," a great and gaudy show and he was content being the bedazzled spectator with a front row center seat. "No other country houses so many gorgeous frauds and imbeciles as the US," he marvelled in 1928; "I love this country as a small boy loves the circus."2 Indeed, Mencken retained a child-like fascination with the adult world as gaudy and freakish while he cultivated the public persona of the cosmopolitan carouser, Falstaffian in his appetite for fatty foods, German beer and big cigars. He enjoyed most of all showing off, whether in print or at the Baltimore (men-only) bar, before a select audience-a "forlorn intelligentsia," he called it ("American Culture"),3 who shared his disdain for a commercial society paralyzed by corruption, fear and demagoguery. But when the glittering '20s crashed in 1929, and the nation had to sober up and face a world dangerously balkanized, Mencken found himself dethroned and reduced to an anachronism. Increasingly out of touch, he turned sour and bitter-lingering on until he was silenced by a stroke in 1948, eight years before his death. Later, however, Mencken's satirical style resurfaced, unexpectedly-in the 1970s, during another Republican ascendency, and then entered the mainstream in the 1980s. Like the 1920s, this period was also driven by cultural clashes played out in much-expanded media between swiftly liberalizing attitudes and conservative values just as swiftly retrenching. Mencken might have called the TVmediated 80s a more gorgeous, gaudier show if only because the new "carnival of buncombe," was presided over by a genius of a Master of Ceremonies-Ronald Reagan, another amiable, avuncular conservative from rural America. "Mencking"-my short-hand term for his style of debunking-grew louder and more strident when the Democratic Party galloped into center ring in 1992and rowdier still when, in November 1994, its elected members were rudely kicked out of the ring. The neo Menckenites are ex-liberal baby boomers out of the universities who caught the attention of the conservative wing of what Kevin Phillips called in 1970 "the emerging Republican majority"-a "forlorn intelligentsia," one might say-by mocking prominent liberals during the Carter-and now Clintonpresidency. A select few found favor, fame, and fortune by writing for the established neoconservative press when Reagan came to power. They include Mitchell Ross, author of two books mocking post-'60s liberalism in Mencken's debunking style (An Invitation to the Times, The Literary Politicians), P.J. O'Rourke, columnist for Rolling Stone and author of several books of Menckenesque "prejudices" that have been best sellers (Republican Party Reptiles, Parliament of Whores, among other books of humor), and, most notably, R. …