Question

In a democracy, each party devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed and are right.

—H. L. Mencken

Assume that the democracy Mencken refers to is the United States. Explain and evaluate Mencken's statement.

Answer 1

He is saying that the two party system does more harm than good. Even though the government is meant to focus on protecting the people, it seems as if government is more focused on the the competition between parties.

Answer 2

H. L. Mencken criticized the auth state of democracy we find not only in the United States, but in the world. Democracy preaches that citizens have the right to choose their rulers based on the proposals that these rulers have. Based on this, we can conclude that in an election, political parties should spend their time showing what the party's proposals are to improve people's lives and strengthen the country. However, what the parties do is to base their entire campaign on judging and exposing the mistakes that other parties have made. In this way, they end up not revealing any proposal and only passing to the citizens that no party is good, all parties are wrong and will continue like this.