H. L. Mencken seemed to think it was inevitable that American democracy would produce as leaders clowns and charlatans who, along with their other disabilities, couldn’t speak English. He considered what they said and the way they said it entertainment, rivaled only by Barnum and Bailey. It took an Orwell—and a Second World War, and savage totalitarian dictatorships in Germany and Russia—to make us realize that this comical rhetoric could be turned into an instrument of political tyranny.
~ Philip Roth via The Atlantic

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