“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.”
That description of the two parties appeared in the New York Times in 2012, long after P.J. O’Rourke had established himself as one of the preeminent conservative political satirists and commentators in America. He died of cancer at the age of 74 at his home in Sharon, N.H. on Tuesday.
“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat,” he wrote in what many consider his signature book, Parliament of Whores, a riotous view of American politics which he wrote in 1991.
Starting out as a radical Maoist, O’Rourke’s intellectual journey mirrored that of the likes of David Horowitz, Peter Collier, Roger Simon, and a host of 1970s radicals who sobered up once it became clear to them what the New Left was all about. “They thought we weren’t radical enough,” he told People magazine in 1989 of a group of Maoists who had “occupied” the offices of Harry, a radical publication based in New York in the early 1970s.
O’Rourke went to work for The National Lampoon in 1972 and eventually became the publication’s editor. He also wrote for Jann Werner and Rolling Stone in the 1980s as “foreign affairs desk chief,” a title that O’Rourke admitted was mostly for show — it sounded important enough to impress Communist bureaucrats and Latin American dictators.
Out of his Rolling Stone gig came perhaps the most original travelogue in literary history. Holidays In Hell included trips to the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, and South Korea. Some gems from that book include:
“Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they’ve got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.”
“‘Bahala na,’ as the Filipinos say, which is an untranslatable phrase containing the same germ of philosophy as the Arabic ‘inshalla’ or the Spanish ‘mañana’ or the English ‘you must have me mixed up with somebody who gives a s**t.'”
“Instead of cathedrals, mosques and ancient temples, we have duty-free shops—at their best in Kuwait. I never knew there was so much stuff I didn’t want. I assumed I wanted most stuff. But that was before I saw a $110,000 crêpe de chine Givenchy chador and a solid-gold camel saddle with twelve Rolex watches embedded in the seat.”
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The rest of the media didn’t quite know what to make of O’Rourke. It could be that many on the left embraced him because he was a damn fine writer and was an equal opportunity basher. He was just as willing to call out conservative stupidity as he was liberalism’s many excesses.
But when O’Rourke turned his pen against Donald Trump, he lost many of his fans on the right.
During the campaign, Mr. O’Rourke announced that he was going to vote for Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump. Mrs. Clinton, he told The New Statesman in 2020, was “the devil I knew,” whereas no one he knew, he said, liked Mr. Trump.
“I just thought he was unstable,” he said, and dangerous. “I still do.”
As time went on, he continued in that vein, describing himself as a member of the “unorganized resistance” against Mr. Trump.
O’Rourke gained prominence at a time when “conservative satirist” was a misnomer. He was and remains an original thinker and a very funny man.
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