He
exacts no deference. He is urgent to makes others share what he knows
and wants and achieves. He does not think of others as his but as the
End's.
There is a base democracy just as there is a base aristocracy, the
swaggering, aggressive disposition of the vulgar soul that admits
neither of superiors nor leaders. Its true name is insubordination. It
resents rules and refinements, delicacies, differences and organization.
It dreams that its leaders are its delegates. It takes refuge from all
superiority, all special knowledge, in a phantom ideal, the People, the
sublime and wonderful People. "You can fool some of the people all the
time, and all the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the
people all the time," expresses I think quite the quintessence of this
mystical faith, this faith in which men take refuge from the demand for
order, discipline and conscious light. In England it has never been of
any great account, but in America the vulgar individualist's
self-protective exaltation of an idealized Common Man has worked and is
working infinite mischief.
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