Notes on Democracy by enormously influential journalist and cultural critic H. L. Mencken is an incisive and astonishingly timely critique of democracy. Mencken is not opposed to democracy but in his powerful, unabashed polemic, he calls out its inherent and unavoidable fragility. His bracing realism reminds us that naive faith in the inevitable triumph of democracy over all other forms of government is a dangerous delusion, and warns that democracy will not be saved by more democracy. In today's fraught political moment when democracies around the world are under threat from within and without, Mencken's book exposes some of the underlying tensions that must be understood by anyone committed to protecting democracy now and in the future.

Includes a noteworthy review of the original 1926 edition by Walter Lippmann, an afterword by Ulrich Baer, and a biographical timeline.