Though P. J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology—and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.
Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand—even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes—the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well—are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a millennial or zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere.” Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling.”
The hippie student he was in the ‘60s lost his enthusiasm for leftist ideas the following decade, as soon as he got his first paycheck from National Lampoon: a $300 check that filled him with joy—until he was told $140 would be deducted for taxes, health insurance, and Social Security. That day, he got mad at the government, and the grudge never faded. Before that, while still sporting what he called “a bad haircut”—think John Lennon’s worst style—he’d decided to tell his Republican grandmother he’d become a communist. Her response threw him off: “Well, at least you’re not a Democrat.”
O’Rourke was never one to romanticize his drug-fueled college days. “Oh God, the ‘60s are back,” he wrote. “Good thing I’ve got a double-barreled 12-gauge with a chamber for three-inch magnum shells. And speaking strictly as a retired hippie and former beatnik, if the ‘60s come my way, they won’t make it past the porch steps. They’ll be history. Which, for God’s sake, is what they’re supposed to be.”
The problem of freedom—the central theme of O’Rourke’s work and thought—has been humanity’s problem since its very first day on Earth.
From his time as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon in the ‘70s, we got his account in The Hollywood Reporter, “How I Killed National Lampoon.” The job was a blast, but the environment was hell: “Having a bunch of humorists in one place is like having a bunch of cats in a sack.” As a satirical war correspondent covering every late-century conflict, O’Rourke filled countless pages describing the struggle to find a damn glass of whiskey in the burning countries at the “end of history.” His last dangerous assignment was in Iraq. “I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq,” he wrote in Holidays in Heck.
The turning point for O’Rourke came during 2003 with the death of his friend and colleague Michael Kelly in Baghdad. They’d traveled together to the Iraq War. Kelly, former editor-in-chief of The Atlantic when O’Rourke wrote there, was “embedded” with the Third Infantry Division, while O’Rourke covered the war “unilaterally.” The last time they spoke, Mike joked that he’d get stuck on the way to Baghdad, while P. J. would be “driving a rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abaya contests.” Instead, O’Rourke wrote, “I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed.” That’s when he decided the war party was over.
In 2015, when the Daily Beast offered me the chance to cover Spain and its surroundings, what thrilled me most was that I would occasionally share a corner of the front page with P. J. O’Rourke. He had just joined as a columnist a couple of weeks earlier. The Toledo-born writer had a knack for navigating both left and right-leaning outlets because he’d mastered the art of humor’s universality—he was too funny to spark grudges and too free to stay confined to one column. That’s a rare gift.
O’Rourke was a pioneer in spotting the clash between contemporary progressivism and humor. Today, that clash has worsened with “cancel culture.” “I couldn’t stay a Maoist forever,” he wrote in Republican Party Reptile. “I got too fat to wear bell-bottoms. And I realized that communism meant giving my golf clubs to a family in Zaire. Plus, I couldn’t stand the left’s oppressive, dreadful seriousness.” He knew liberals seemed obsessed with stuffing their jokes full of political messages—making the message bigger than the laugh. Add to that their bad habit of taking themselves way too seriously, and you’ve got comedy that’s more likely to put people to sleep than make them laugh. Much of left-wing humor feels more about changing the world than cracking a smile. Real laughter, by contrast, is light, spontaneous, and wonderfully absurd.
O’Rourke was a free man in the most heroic sense. His defense of liberty wasn’t just an ideological stance; it was a way of life. He loved America but didn’t shy away from mocking its worst characteristics: “Wherever there’s injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening,” he wrote.
As a disciple of H. L. Mencken, O’Rourke’s great calling was spotting idiots—left, right, past, present, and even future ones. With Parliament of Whores, he tore apart the world of professional politics, not lingering too long on whether the targets of his skewering were “his people” or not. Though his stance was that of an underground—or punk—Republican, for O’Rourke, there was no single enemy. He had no problem taking shots at all politicians and parties alike when defending his ideas: “Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.” “Every government is a parliament of whores,” he declared. “The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.”
He ridiculed the left’s environmentalism long before it began shaping our lives. After writing his essay “Ship of Fools,” he never missed a chance to mock those who use environmentalism as a position of moral superiority from which to take potshots at capitalism. There’s no difference between the anti-war, Beatles-and-Vietnam-era environmentalism and today’s climate fanaticism—O’Rourke understood full well that they’re just different faces of an ideology far more interested in dismantling capitalism than cleaning oceans.
O’Rourke’s satirical style led some to dismiss him as an economic expert, but it made him one of the most effective champions of libertarian-conservative thought.
His satirical style led some to dismiss him as an economic expert, but it made him one of the most effective champions of capitalism, Adam Smith—he even humorously reimagined The Wealth of Nations—and libertarian conservative thought. Until the rise of rockstar Javier Milei, no one had quite matched his ability to reach such a broad audience with that mission. “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators,” he wrote. And in Eat the Rich, he observed that: “Microeconomics is about money you don’t have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.” Through humor, he found ways to express serious truths.
In his later years, he remained the living satirist with the most quotes in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, but no publication championed his presence as they once did. Today, no newspaper would fund a comedic correspondent to Kyiv in the middle of a war; we live in strange times: now the comedian, Zelensky, leads one side of the conflict, while on the other, the leader seems to be losing his sense of humor. And in these thin-skinned times, no one would dare publish a poverty analysis with lines like, “Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.”
Poverty, freedom, good manners, stupidity, technological invasion, or the automobile—nothing escaped O’Rourke’s sharp eye. Everything remains relevant. Although, thanks to capitalism, poverty has decreased, the left still clings to the belief—almost like a ritual act—that it’s not capitalism but socialism that’s worked miracles. Freedom is always under threat, and our privacy is invaded. Good manners are definitely out of fashion among Twitter/X addicts. Stupidity is enjoying a global boom. The technological invasion is making our brains short-circuit. And now, they’re forcing us to trade in our cars for four-wheeled electric scooters.
The problem of freedom—the central theme of O’Rourke’s work and thought—has been humanity’s problem since its very first day on Earth. And so has the problem of the economy. Adam and Eve had to make a choice. They got it wrong, sure—but at least they taught us a key idea of capitalism: economics is the science of choices; if the choices are bad, the economy goes straight to hell.
Now that much of the West is experiencing a revival of libertarian and conservative ideas—with increasingly younger supporters—O’Rourke could serve as the perfect gateway drug. His sarcastic, provocative tone is always cheerful, and it’s also the best weapon against a left that seems more and more detached from reality, furious even with biology and science, while growing steadily more humorless and unbearably self-important. Let’s not forget that Judith Butler—the mother of progressive postmodern theories from the waist down—somehow managed to turn grotesque ideas, the kind that would’ve made us burst out laughing just a decade ago, into painfully boring books. You can’t respond to Butler with Blaise Pascal or Thomas Aquinas. Unless you want to lose your mind like her followers, there’s only one answer: with P. J. Take a look at the West and who’s currently in charge, and tell me if there’s a more relevant and timely warning than the classic from the author of Parliament of Whores: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
