WaPo Book Critic Sneers at 'Self-Important Pipsqueaks' on the Right

Mark Lewis at Forbes.com wondered "is there anyone among the current crop of right-wing pundits who can bear comparison to" legendary columnist, critic, and curmudgeon H.L. Mencken? "Absolutely nobody," declared Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, who edited Mencken's posthumous memoir My Life as Author and Editor.

"These people are self-important pipsqueaks," Yardley said, via e-mail. "I don't respect a single one of them, much less think that a single one of them deserves to be compared to H.L.M. I do have a measure of respect for David Brooks, whose knee doesn't seem to jerk in his sleep, but he's no Mencken and I suspect he'd be the first to say so."

Lewis noted that Ann Coulter has declared herself the new Mencken, and that other conservatives have drawn the comparison: P.J. O’Rourke, Mark Steyn, and R. Emmett Tyrrell, (who seems most eager to capture the Menckenesque voice).

It might be fair to argue that no one on today's political journalism radar can match Mencken, the "sage of Baltimore." But it's quite another for this WaPo veteran to lash out so pompously against the "pipsqueaks" on the right.

Lewis also interviewed Mencken biographer Terry Teachout:

"Mencken was every bit as heartless as he made out," Teachout said, via e-mail. "Not on an individual level--he was capable of great personal kindness--but everything that he wrote in Notes on Democracy should be taken seriously as an expression of how he thought the world worked. Another way to put it is that he believed that politics existed in order to block the otherwise inevitable operation of social Darwinism. For that reason, he didn't have any serious expectation that his ideas would ever be adopted in America: He knew that elitism has no appeal in a democracy."

"It's important to keep in mind, though, that Mencken was the furthest thing from a practical political thinker," Teachout added. "He was essentially a literary artist who played with ideas. This doesn't mean that he wasn't serious about those ideas, but it would never have occurred to him to think through how they might be made to work in the real world. That wasn't what he understood to be his job--he was a critic, period."

Teachout kindly reviewed Yardley’s edited Mencken volume in The New York Times back in 1993.