‘”No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” is how the quotation from H.L. Mencken has come down to us. It’s a paraphrase of a paragraph from an article in the Chicago Tribune, but the part of the quotation that is almost always left off is the most relevant for understanding this year: “No one has ever lost public office thereby.”
Donald Trump’s campaign, which has combined the art of the huckster with the willingness of the American public to buy what he is selling is, so far, a confirmation of Mencken’s assumption. Pundits have churned tons of butter in an effort to explain Trump’s appeal. One of the most common explanations offered by those experts who took Trump’s declaration that he “loves the poorly educated,” was to see in that some kind of “new” dumbing-down of the electorate.’
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