Although he was mainly conservative, O'Rourke was a popular iconoclast with respect to both major U.S. political parties. That you could read him in the Washington Post and also find him on an NPR show like Wait, Wait, Don't Tell me points to a time seemingly in the distant past when the U.S. wasn't so politically entrenched and polarized. If you didn't agree with what he said, it was still easy to enjoy his writing and find truth in it.
Not sure there is any comparable figure today that comes to mind.
Here's a transcript from one of his appearances on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" giving his opinion on the 2016 candidates:
> I have a little announcement to make. I mean my whole purpose in life basically is to offend everyone who listens to NPR. No matter what position they take on anything like I'm on the other side of it you know.
> I'm voting for Hillary.
> I am endorsing Hillary and all her lies and all her empty promises. I am endorsing Hillary. The second worse thing that could happen to this country, but it's she's way behind in second place you know.
> I mean she's wrong about absolutely everything but she's wrong within normal parameters.
I'd say he also encapsulated the appeal of Trump: he's wrong, sure — they're all wrong — but at least he's a different kind of wrong. People thought they'd give it a shot, because how could it be worse? I'm honestly not sure if it was or not, even yet.
> how could it be worse? I'm honestly not sure if it was or not, even yet.
By showing us that it is all lies by lying about literally everything, we will become wiser? By demonstrating that our democracy is weak by attempting to topple it, we will become stronger?
It sounds like some kind of Tough Love dream. I don't care for it, though, I think draining the swamp is an admirable idea so long as filling it back up with the sewer isn't the second part of that plan. I'm not convinced the path to a better country requires that we destroy it first.
I subscribe to the idea that people become more conservative as they get older because they've seen all the times change has resulted in worse outcomes, and have lost faith that change will result in something better, so would rather stick with what they know and have spent decades learning to work with than mix it up some more. Life beating pessimism into people until they are jaded.
On the flip side, you have the young who are optimistic enough to think that things will only get better because so many people are hoping to make things better, and with that backing how could it get worse?
This progression might be greater or lesser in some people, or even go in reverse. Regardless, I suspect somewhere in the middle of this is where we usually should be. Where people want change but are cautious because they've seen good intentions backfire and movements be subverted, but also when they haven't become so jaded as to not want change for the sake of not having to deal with it anymore, even when it's important issues that help a lot of people.
That I view myself at where I describe as a good spot in this progression is probably informed by a non-negligible amount of subconscious bias on my part.
I'm pretty sure if Covid had happened during a Hillary Clinton administration, she wouldn't have been stealing PPE and test supplies from state governors and stuff like that.
Pretty sure 100's of thousands of people wouldn't have died.
Pretty sure she would have sanctioned Russia a lot harder, to try to, oh, dissuade them from invading Ukraine.
Don't think that a Clinton presidency would have nudged needle one way or the other in regards to Covid. The only thing we did that had a real impact was get the vaccines, and that would not have been any quicker with Clinton.
There were two things that had a major impact. One was the vaccine. The other one was the massive improvement in care and containment practices between March and May 2020. The case fatality rate dropped substantially; infections of care personnel became much less common. (Masks had a controversial-relevance impact, but seeing as the international community at large didn't get to masking any faster than the US, it's unlikely Clinton would have changed anything here.)
On that second point, Clinton absolutely would have made a difference, because we know that the administration was aware of the pandemic well before the cases started spiking in New York, and we know [1] that Trump autonomously decided not to publicly release that information or tell the CDC to prepare for a major epidemic. That was a major, avoidable mistake. I doubt it would have prevented 100k deaths; rather somewhere in the range of 10k-50k.
Also, Trump really energized vaccine denialists; he was already catering to them in 2016 [2], and a loss in 2016 would likely have significantly reduced his audience on this point. It's not clear how many more people would have gotten vaccinated in a world where Clinton won in 2016, but it might be significant. Densely urbanized blue states led in deaths per capita before the vaccine came out, but now only New York and New Jersey are in the top 10, and my state of Rhode Island dropped from 4th-most DPC to 18th [3] -- I don't recall there being a strong correlation between Republicans and vaccine denialism before Trump, and in fact, the correlation may have reversed since 2011 [4].
> massive improvement in care and containment practices between March and May 2020.
This was 100% attributable to Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell's rebellion video to youtube, where he called out the academic doctors for giving doctors like him the terrible advice to ventilate SARS-CoV-2 patients as the best treatment.
Dr. Kyle-Sidell's journal letter discussed his observation of hypocapnic hypoxia. This would've been easy to treat, if Medicine hadn't forgotten about #OxygenToxicity.
There would presumably been less chaos and drama. Maybe; the Trump supporters would still have been out there. But there isn't a lot to suggest outcomes would have been a lot different.
You're getting downvoted, clearly, but I think you're more right than wrong. I still think the feds would have screwed up the response and just as many people would have died. But the spats with governors likely would not have happened. And she's certainly far more of a hawk than Trump, so I expect you're right that she'd have been more aggressive towards Russia. Not sure if it would have dissuaded them from invading Ukraine, though, Putin is pretty crazy.
I mean, to the first part, yes, but why aren't you sure it was worse? Do you really want to be ruled by a facist dictatorship in the USA, which is what we'd now have if Trump had a second term? We may yet have that under someone else, but Biden bought us a couple of years, at least.
Or do you just not see the actual danger here and think Trump was a fairly decent guy who's just a bad/corrupt real estate huckster as opposed to a sociopathic grifter?
I agree this is how he was classified on the modern spectrum but I think he was really a classic liberal, a pre-Peter Thiel libertarian without all the distracting noise. He's a hard person to fit cleanly into any single bucket, which is a good thing that isn't received well in our current binary environment.
"There is only one basic human right: the right to do as you please, without causing others harm. With it comes our only basic human duty: the duty to accept the consequences of our actions."
We're pretty good at the former, and almost universally ignore the latter.
He indicated repeatedly that he believed the bit about individualism and human rights applied to today's conservatives. I find his writing delightful and amusing, certainly, but he definitely fits squarely into the current political tribal definitions. Though as much as he tried to be satirical about it, he definitely saw his own side through much rosier glasses than he saw the left.
It's mostly old school moderate liberals who call themselves classical liberals. Because today's loudest self described liberals have abandoned core principles like free speech. So the moderate among us have to make this distinction.
Calling us conservative or right wing is a way to other us, to kick us out of the tribe. It's purification. See the endless torrent of hate being directed at Bill Maher lately for maintaining liberal values. I've seen it hundreds of times on Twitter, "I'm so done with him! He's not one of us."
The GOP is not Libertarian on policy. Classical liberals are. You almost definitely prefer the CL stance to the GOP stance on almost every issue, and would therefore be well-served to encourage this movement.
Your reaction to it springs from a lack of knowledge about it. Calling the difference "1 or 2 policies" is reductive and ignorant.
My apologies for having a different view than you on how it is applied? You may be technically correct, but that is not, at least in my experience, how people use it. And that is all I’m talking about. How it is used, how people wield the term. So maybe cool it with the ad hominems?
I'm not attacking you personally, but I do see how I was too harsh, please forgive me. I'm simply saying that your opinion isn't fully formed and you're slinging mud at an ideology you don't understand. Classical liberalism is a relatively mature system, and claiming that it's barely real—simply because you don't get it—is silly.
I think parent's point is that, whatever "classical liberalism" means formally and historically, the label is typically used _today_ by people thought of as run-of-the-mill Conservatives (i.e., Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Brett Weinstein, etc.).
All three of those people are genuinely classical liberals, or at least aligned with them, and the fact that they're now considered mainstream conservatives is a huge victory, showing how the mainstream right is swinging towards libertarianism and away from the Reagan cosplay.
There's a very O'Rourke style quip in there too: the term "Classical Liberal" is an attempt to explain something with a label that is too complicated (or... often too inconveniently controversial) to do with an argument.
To wit: someone who calls themselves a classical liberal is doing the same thing other people do when they tell you their pronouns.
Note also: 'classical liberal' has been an attempt to clarify/brand a certain viewpoint for decades, as the US label of 'liberal' has drifted from what it previously meant.
So I suspect your observation about the "last few years" is more a reflection of the evolution of your specific info-environment, & rhetoric consumption, than a broader trend.
For example, Google books show it rising from nothing before the 1930s 'New Deal' era (of massive new government economic interventions), to a steep growth in the 1980s (Reaganism etc), starting to plateau in the 20X0s:
In the late 1800s, 'liberal' overwhelmingly meant in favor of free trade, less government involvement in running or regulating private enterprises, & free speech – not especially "liberal" policies in present US politics. (Though, in late 20thC, US 'liberals' were still among the strongest free-speech advocates.)
But in the UK & some very-left circles, 'liberal' still has some of those meanings – compared to more radical leftism, for sure – but is often labelled (or slurred) as 'neoliberal'.
He was militantly anti-gay rights and anti-gay marriage. I'm not familiar with the rest of his conservative views, but I don't find much iconoclastic or libertarian in there- he was a standard-issue Republican in the GWB era
> I'm so conservative that I approve of San Francisco City Hall marriages, adoption by same-sex couples, and New Hampshire's recently ordained Episcopal bishop. Gays want to get married, have children, and go to church. Next they'll be advocating school vouchers, boycotting HBO, and voting Republican.
— "I Agree With Me" (July/August 2004)
Are you sure you're referring to the same P.J. O'Rourke?
It's also entirely possible to be pro-gay marriage in 2004 and anti in the 1980s. Certainly a ton of people fit that description. That said, I've probably read most of his books and I don't remember him talking about gay rights one way or the other though who knows what stereotypes he wrote about that simply didn't register 25+ years ago?
Being anti-gay-marriage in the 1980s would make you wrong, but it wouldn't make you a Republican. Don't-ask-don't-tell and DOMA were both implemented by Bill Clinton, after all.
On the other hand, inventing the term "Republican Party Reptile" probably makes you a Republican. Because, like, you know.
“Anti-gay marriage” isn’t the same as “not pushing for gay marriage.” Both are evil and unfair to the LGBT community, to be clear, but I find it pretty disingenuous to “both sides” that issue in the late 2000’s, especially as democrat states one after the other were legalizing it.
Not to laser in too much on something that's not key to your point but, are you saying that it's notable that as a conservative he was in those places, or to indicate a significant gulf between the political leanings of the Washington Post and NPR? Because I, and I think most people, would slot both outlets in a pretty similar place.
"Not sure there is any comparable figure today that comes to mind."
There isn't.
Every single one of that breed is gone (from the conservative to the liberal, because there is no replacement for Molly Ivins either). The closest we have are a few UK public intellectuals/satirists (e.g. Stephen Fry, Ian Hislop) but even they aren't quite the same animal. There are writers of a certain quality that are massively entertaining and brilliant, like Cintra Wilson (Her book on the national Fame-virus epidemic, "A Massive Swelling" is essential), but her focus isn't just on political satire, so it's still not quite the same.
Attacking icons; the classic iconoclasts wanted to destroy sacred church imagery as a distraction from the proper worship of god.
In O'Rourke's case it meant that while saying that he was a republican and having a go at cyclists and fat women and other "safe" targets, he was also happy to rip into Reagan for supporting Marcos against the peaceful Yellow Revolution, or his seminal essay on the war on drugs, "The Whiffle Ball Life", where he pointed out that the people selling the war could always be sure that they or their kids would never suffer any serious consequence for their own drug use, but that it would be borne by black teens and young men.
PJ was part of my holy trinity of American political satirists when I was in high school/college (PJ, Hunter S Thompson, Molly Ivins)* and to this day I have yet to encounter any current satirists who CONSISTENTLY come close. Part of it I suspect is that our political terrain is such a goat rodeo, and that the kind of caustic humor these folks espoused (often thumbing their noses at any number of conventions) that today would get them promptly dragged, but their insights into the zeitgeist was at the time, intensely engrossing.
* I also revered Twain and Mencken, but PJ/HST/MI were contemporaries and in my time, which carried a more visceral stamp to them.
> the kind of caustic humor these folks espoused (often thumbing their noses at any number of conventions) that today would get them promptly dragged
I think it's the opposite actually. I think 'satirists' now are expected to be so extreme that the only think people think is funny is "the other side is composed of dribbling morons". Humor that suggests that the people with different political views may have feelings and brains is completely unacceptable.
I mean their style of humor often touched on tropes and used verbage that would now be considered...problematic. Case in point, I once got into an argument with someone over Hunter S Thompsons use of the word "queer"...I couldn't get the person to understand that 1) HST wrote and came from a different era, and even for that era, that 2) his use of the word was itself peculiar and intentionally used towards the outsized persona he broadcast through "gonzo journalism" and you had to read it in context to remotely follow along.
They simply wouldn't buy into the idea that people from "the past" would have different views and that you can't try to understand them absent that context. Otherwise everything since before 2005 is likely "wrong" somehow (I'm being horribly simplistic, but you get the idea).
It's like when I hear a lot of views right now about the CIS region, from people who have no recollection of the Cold War, or think the Cold War "was stupid". As someone who lived through the Cold War, I might even agree it was stupid, but I also understand that when I was 10-15 I was living IN it realtime, not pondering it decades after the fact.
Do a web search for O'Rourke's "Foreigners around the world" and report back.
> Humor that suggests that the people with different political views may have feelings and brains is completely unacceptable.
I think this may be a case of politically polarization widening as the range of allowable humor narrows. What would be an example of a joke that would have been career ending for an edgy American comedian or satirist 40 years ago, but not now?
Somehow, satire has degenerated into snark. It's lazy. It's mean. It poisons the well (of public discourse).
Two quick examples are thestranger.com (under the leadership of editor Dan Savage) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Whatever point, perhaps even meritorious, they're trying make, it's buried under sarcasm and insults.
Absolutely exhausting.
Maybe this cycle started with TV. All the slapfights. Gore Vidal v William F. Buckley Jr. Shows like Crossfire.
O'Rourke led the way into snark. Remember he was contemporary with George Carlin and Richard Pryor, both consistently, actually funny. He was just mean-spirited.
I don't think he was mean-spirited at all, at least through the mid-90s, but he didn't really start to lose the plot until he became a CATO fellow/left Rolling Stone in the early 2000s.
He was terse, and spoke things out loud about the American subconscious that was often uncomfortable (much like Mencken) across the political spectrum. To plagiarize a BBC article: PJ O'Rourke memorably said that the American public viewed the Bosnian war as pitting the "unspellables" against the "unpronounceables".
You can view that as heartless detachment, or you can see it as an unvarnished observation of the total disconnect the American people had with what happened in the Balkans at the time. I suspect PJ left those kinds of statements open-ended for the exact purpose of having to make people think about them...were they capable of mustering the electricity between the ears (knowing that some likely wouldn't).
_Parliament of Whores_ was assigned reading in my high school polisci class and I was a fan from then on though our politics diverged along the way. There's a terrific doc about Molly Ivins on HBOMax currently!
Pierce can get some good ones off, but I find his writing often lacks the laconic elegance or sheer surrealism of some of PJ or Thompson's writing. Sometimes he veers into old-man-yells-at-cloud territory, and too be fair it feels like most political commentary from a certain generation has succumbed to that amidst and post Trump.
I heard PJ talk in a show about having a three party system in the US. And this is what he had to say.
“Our big and sloppy political system keeps America away from abstract political theorists. Away from abstract political theory is a good place to be. Our compromised and compromising system with its messey conflicts and fitful bipartisanship keeps governments close to real life. Because in reality we all contain within ourselves elements of the democrat and republican. We are conservatives when we catch the kids smoking pot and we are quite liberal when we catch ourselves doing it. No one ever says oh goodie when its time to pay the taxes and no one ever turns down a government benefit. Abondining the two party system would mean abondining a great truth. The truth that we are all of two minds about politics Greater certainity in our political system would mean more politics, more arguments, more strife we dont need that we got enough...”
Sounds articulate, plausible, and just so, so wrong.
Other countries are not stuck with our system. We are stuck with it, but that is not a reason to come to like it. We have to find ways to work around being stuck with it. Pretending it is OK actively interferes with that.
Yeah, I think most people look at the endless 1v1 party sparring of America's political system and just see a recipe for unending revenge and bitterness.
Most parliamentary systems, or multi-party systems, do not have the same amounts of longstanding political polarization that has come to grip America, where every issue must be divided along party lines or you're a "traitor to the cause".
The weird thing though ... is how recent that polarization really is. Pre-polarized America (which is subjective and has been a long slide down a continuum) basically had something similar to parliamentary coalition-building politics where factions would shift within (and more rarely between) parties. There was a significant balancing act of the different "wings" of each party, and the regional differences were much more present.
> The weird thing though ... is how recent that polarization really is
The weird thing is that people refer to the period of the overlapping post-WWII realignments, and the associated misalignment of the divide between the major parties with the major ideological divides, as being “pre-polarization”, since it was a time of intense political polarization, characterized by the period of the some of the most intense and violent sustained internal political conflict in the country after the Civil War (the overlapping Race/Civil Rights, Anti-War, and some overlapping less conflicts of the 50s-70s), where the polarizing issues just didn't cleanly align with the divide between the major parties.
Intense political polarization isn't new. What is new (or, rather, has returned to it's historical norm after an unusually long break) is the partisan divide actually aligning with the main salient ideological divides around which the polarization occurs, as the period of realignment settled out around the early-to-mid-1990s.
What is new is that, instead of the partisan divide aligning with the ideological divide, the ideological divide turned over and around to match where the arbitrary partisan divide happened to be.
So now we have "conservatives" identifying with Russians and against election regularity, and "liberals" identifying with the FBI and government mandates and against free speech and inquiry.
> What is new is that, instead of the partisan divide aligning with the ideological divide, the ideological divide turned over and around to match where the arbitrary partisan divide happened to be.
No, the ideological divide had basically settled out by the 1980s, and the parties sorted out to match by the mid-1990s.
When I was a young lass I read "Holidays in Hell" over and over again. His complaint that Europe had no real ice cubes and if you asked for Scotch on the Rocks they gave you "the crumbling leftover from some Lilliputian puddle freeze"[1] still lives in my head. I didn't always agree with him politically, then and now, but his writing and his person transcend politics.
[1] Fortunately I was able to find the exact quote on Google
>I didn't always agree with him politically, then and now, but his writing and his person transcend politics
His intro to "Republican Party Reptile" more or less said (this is from memory) that his politics fit more into the Republican mold, but that he wasn't particularly happy about that, because he also liked having fun. It's hard to cubbyhole P.J., and he preferred it that way.
He had a way of turning a phrase that made you go, "yeah, I wish I came up with that." I have to viciously edit anything I write because if I'm not paying attention I will blithely rip off something of his without thinking about it.
Loved that book. I remember him complaining that European countries were 'stoo small to swing a cat, without it passing through customs' and that Korean dog soup was remarkably palatable 'when you consider what a hot, wet dog smells like'.
I remember reading "Modern Manners" and laughing so hard. The first edition was so extreme that the working was softened in later versions. "Dating is a social engagement with the threat of sex at its conclusion."
Although it's from a different time, Parliament of Whores should be required reading in High School government class. Some of its lessons about sausage making and log rolling would greatly behoove developing minds of all political persuasions.
For me, "Give War a Chance" was where I started finding him less and less interesting, as he seemed to move closer and closer to Republican orthodoxy; "CEO of the Sofa" consolidated that for me.
The most memorable chapter for me in "Parliament of Whores" was Moscow on the Mississippi which, much like Whiffle Ball Life from "Holidays" was a great example of his willingness to turn his guns at the people who shared his party but not his ideals.
I bought Holidays in Hell on the strength of mentions since his death, and it is tough going and dated to start with - it's just a series of national stereotypes played for cheap laughs that made me wince rather than smile.
I haven't looked at a National Lampoon in many years. But I'm guessing that a lot of modern audiences would find a lot to object to during the magazine's heyday. Of course, a lot of its humor was always pretty sophomoric but in its heyday it was probably a lot more acceptable to say "I probably shouldn't be laughing at this but it's really funny anyway."
> "I probably shouldn't be laughing at this but it's really funny anyway."
Part of me feels fairly uncomfortable with this idea. Humor is such a complicated emotion, but lately we seem to try to distill it to a single interpretation, shallow, derisive, and then proclaim what it's okay to laugh about or not.
There's also a strong component of enforcing the right not to be offended. That's always existed to some degree but lately there's a much stronger sense of it.
The enlightenment position holding: «Monsieur l’abbé, je déteste ce que vous écrivez, mais je donnerai ma vie pour que vous puissiez continuer à écrire» isn't celebrated by the mainstream culture anymore. It always was a bit hypocritical, there were historical boundaries for whatever the contemporary view of obscenity might be, but free speech was still valued. Nor is the simple child's rhyme "Sticks and stones may break my bones But words shall never hurt me" held to be true. We really need to figure out a middle way that preserves some of the older enlightenment virtues with more modern understandings of verbal harms. There has to be social norms that discourage assholes without the instant-banishment, or fear-of-mispeaking that has edged its way forward. Or the boorish result of the backlash involving those saying any inane thing without a filter.
JournalismJobs.com: Why have conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard and Fox News Channel become more popular in the past few years?
Matt Labash: Because they feed the rage. We bring the pain to the liberal media. I say that mockingly, but it's true somewhat. We come with a strong point of view and people like point of view journalism. While all these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket. I'm glad we found it actually.
I've seen a lot of authors I respect say how great PJ was, but satire tends to go stale. If I wanted to read him today for the first time without nostalgia-tinted glasses, what should I start with? I was not able to find such a list on Google.
I'd start with Parliament of Whores or Holidays in Hell. It's not as well known, but Modern Manners is a real howler with more laughs per page than just about any book I can think of, and is the perfect night table book because you can read short snippets of it right before bed.
P.J. O’Rourke played a huge part in the formation of my world view and my transformation from an idealistic, liberal college kid to a conservative grown-up, as he might say. I stumbled upon him while reading the “Best of American Travel Writing” annual series and I had no idea at the time that his wit would eventually win me over and lead me to adopt a pragmatic and realistic approach to solving the world’s problems (and my own).
Rest in peace, sir. Hopefully with a cigarette and some fine scotch in hand. I will miss you greatly.
PJ O'Rourke was my first into to a feeling that I've become more familiar with over the years - "liberal cringe"
I still count myself as a liberal (more classical than modern) these days but I can't help but view a lot of standard progressive empty promises through an O'Rourke-ian lens.
One of the defining properties of liberals and, even more, progressives is idealism. The idea that you set your sights on a destination that is unattainable due to the vagaries of reality rather settle for status quo and incrementalism.
There is an adaptive and maladaptive side to that psychology.
The adaptive side is that all plans tend to work out at less than 100%. If you aspire to something just past your destination, you may actually reach where you originally wanted to go. If you aim right for it, you'll fall short. Also, reality doesn't always make it clear where the real boundaries are. Often you can accomplish more than is apparently possible if you have the courage to try.
The maladaptive side is considering any policy too coupled to reality as stinking of compromise and defeatism, or as a designed-to-fail Trojan horse from the other side. Any idea that might actually be feasible instead becomes suspect by virtue of its feasibility. The only goals you feel comfortable holding in your heart are ones that never risk getting sullied by any actual incremental progress.
I think progressives in the past used to be better at keeping their eyes on the future while getting their hands dirty with today's work. But, perhaps because of decades of horror shows like the War in Iraq, climate change, rising inequality, corporate take-over of culture, and political polarization, I see less of the latter. There's a sort of fatalism of prefering to die a martyr with hands unstained by sin than possibly staving off death by consorting with the enemy.
It seems to me the fatalism comes from the game-theory side of it; when your enemy has no ideals except beating you, his diabolical tactics really undermine morale.
>One of the defining properties of liberals and, even more, progressives is idealism.
If you mean idealism as a way of conducting your personal life, I don't think it has anything to do with any particular political persuasion.
If you mean idealism as a political philosophy, while I agree this is a defining property of progressives, for liberals, at least the classical liberals that were the original referent of the term, no. (Today "liberal" pretty much means the same thing politically as "progressive", but that wasn't always the case.) Classical Enlightenment liberalism was highly suspicious of idealism as a guiding principle of politics and public policy, because it recognized the limitations of humans. We are simply not smart enough to come up with useful idealism on the scale of a country. Every time we try, it causes far more problems than it solves. Classical liberals preferred to let institutions on a larger scale evolve from the bottom up, as people exercised their individual freedom of choice on a smaller scale and were held accountable by the people they interacted with.
> possibly staving off death by consorting with the enemy.
The Democrats have tried to "consort with the enemy" for three decades now, and all that happens is that the Republicans move further to the right and laugh at them.
This is the iterated prisoner's dilemma of modern US politics.
If you compromise and cooperate with the other party, some fraction of time you will make progress, and some fraction of time you'll get screwed because they're cooperation was a bad-faith trap.
It's certainly the case that at least since New Gingrich the odds of the former have grown much higher when Democratic politicians try to work with Republicans.
I think history will look back and see that Newt Gingrich shares a disproportionately large share of the blame for the tribal politics we are experiencing now. He wasn't first, but he was effective.
> I think history will look back and see that Newt Gingrich shares a disproportionately large share of the blame for the tribal politics we are experiencing now.
Much as I loath Gingrich, I think that the blame for transformation of political culture that he has gotten really from day one of his speakership is overblown, and that the two main factors are:
(1) the reversion to the normal alignment of partisan and ideological divides as the long era of the overlapping realignments of the post-Depression era (New Deal and Civil Rights) and,
(2) Clinton’s political triangulation strategy reducing opportunity for partisan differentiation on a wide range of high-saliency policy issues, driving a focus on personal and culture war issues as well as a rightward policy shift to re-enable differentiation on those issues (which itself required relying on personal and cultural identity politics heavily.)
Gingrich, was a problem, to be sure, but there is always a Gingrich around (many of them), but he became successful when he did because both structural forces and choices by the other party created an environment in which his approach would be rewarded.
I'm an environmentalist. Let me tell you about empty promises from the big-Ds...
Edit: to keep it in theme with PJ and the article, where PJ says that politicians always want wars on X because it's the only way to get people to move in a direction and they get to wield a baton... Of course such "wars" are only fought because someone makes money regardless of winner or loser, or they aren't really wars. Global Warming? Now THAT'S a war. You know it is, because it is ignored.
It's not generally what the parent means though, they probably meant essentially the powers of the Ds just virtue signal to get votes or rely on the comically evil other side to scare up votes, but never really work for a better welfare state, healthcare/benefits, equality, or the like.
The Biden administration is already a classic example. They could play hardball to get the votes, rein in Manchin, and other techniques. Instead, those minor hurdles are treated as unsolvable barriers and the status quo is maintained.
Because where is Biden from? Same place Obama was: the corporate arm / Democratic Leadership Council. Obama never prosecuted the mortgage crisis, never pursued breaking up the megabanks and monopolies, setup the internment camps for the refugees at our border, used drone assassinations, didn't get out of Iraq/Afghanistan, etc etc etc.
The only thing Obama did well IMO was spur investment in solar and wind, but that may have been an technological evolutionary inevitability. And maybe Obamacare, the right hated it so much it must have some good stuff in it.
"After I broke the news to him that his embedded Atlantic editor and good friend, Michael Kelly, perished on the charge to Baghdad when his Humvee was fired upon and crashed into a canal, I watched P.J. hunt-and-peck out an appreciation of Kelly on my borrowed laptop, tears in his eyes, scotch by his side, but never losing his cool. He peered in on the TV action – Iraqis looting their country like there was an all-you-can-steal fire sale – as he played the faux optimist, cracking, “This will eventually evolve into shopping.” " Goddamn is that funny.
Promises that sound nice, but have huge economic consequences and therefore wouldn't be passed by a sane government. An example: Medicare for All combined with amnesty for illegal immigrants. It sounds nice, until you think about the obvious result.
> amnesty for illegal immigrants. It sounds nice, until you think about the obvious result.
You mean because of the sizable labor black market would shrivel up and suddenly all of these laborers would be able to collect on benefits on the taxes they've paid on the system? there is a good question there.
What is the approximate size of benefits that are getting funded but lie unclaimed by black market labor?
Don't take me out of context and then demand I defend a strawman. I clearly referred to the combination of amnesty and public healthcare as expensive, not one or the other. The bottom 50% of the country by income, which by-and-large black market labor falls under, pay less than 3% of federal taxes. That's not going to fund very much.
It seems like the natural conclusion is that the US health system is inadequate to the task of providing health care for every citizen. Some portion of the population has to do without.
That sounds uncharitable, yes. But the same contingent that claims we cannot feasibly support universal healthcare due to the bottom 50% being essentially leeches on society happens to be the same people who insist that we cannot improve income for the bottom 50% because the free market is speaking.
There are solutions to Healthcare that do not involve a single-payer solution. Namely, targeted deregulation to allow meaningful competition. Shorten the IP window for pharma companies. Allow startups to move fast and break the system.
Or "forgive all student loans" ... (I believe we should immediately reset the interest rates to 0 or some slightly larger nominal value, and immediately close all loans that have paid more than the original principle) ... but I don't know how this works to just forgive all of them.
The problem with forgiving the loans is not economic. It would be trivial to do, and the economic consequences probably positive.
It is a moral hazard. First, it amounts to a giveaway to people aren't necessarily all that sympathetic -- people who can afford to go to college at all, even if they borrowed money to do it. Remember how much of the population couldn't even get that far. Second, any kind of student debt jubilee without first reforming the system just invites every future student to take as many loans as possible with the expectation that they too will have their debt forgiven.
Sure we could. We "forgive" lots of debts in bankruptcy proceedings already, but student loans have a high bar discharge in bankruptcy. Historically debt forgiveness has a long history, as David Graeber and others have shown:
Sure. According to https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/, there's $1.75t in outstanding student loan debt in the US. You can just print the money and contribute to the huge inflation the Fed is already wrangling, but that's a very short-sighted move.
Will they become high earners? The vast majority of taxes are paid by high earners and the wealthy, with those making under ~$43,600 a year—50% of Americans—paying just 3% of income taxes. (Source: https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...)
Existing Medicare funding comes (mostly) from payroll taxes, not income tax, and the two work very differently.
It'd be more informative to look at who's funding healthcare now, including the private portions. I doubt very much that the bottom 50% are only covering 3% of that.
Anyone who is interested in P.J.'s earlier work should look at his contributions to the late, great National Lampoon, where at one time he was editor. His piece "Foreigners Around the World" is completely outrageous and certainly NOT politically correct. Still to this day I consider it the funniest thing I have ever read.
I spent my tween years reading an assortment of his work. Absolutely brilliant, and didn't think what he was told to. He was a formative influence on me, and I appreciate the impact he had on the world. Rest in peace, you glorious troll.
Very nicely written. Mr. O’Rourke’s politics don’t match mine but he was damn funny and kudos to him for taking a swing at all those who deserve it. Parliament of Whores should be required reading in high school.
I was in Australia when I read a piece from him on Desert Shield/Storm in an Aussie newspaper. I saved it. A few years later he was to sign books in DC, and I brought along the paper. He signed my book, and also signed the paper. I'd told him I'd seen it while in Australia. He said, "I wonder if I got paid for that?"
I fell off the O'Rourke fan train back in the early 00s when I was flipping thru his 'Enemies List' in a bookstore and came to the realization that if the B-52s were his enemy then I was one too.
Did O'Rourke ever say anything about 'cancel culture'? Because that book is an excellent example.
Is it an excellent example of 'cancel culture', though? Disliking something, and considering it your enemy, isn't the same as cancelling something. Did he ever try to stop one of their concerts, or demand that nobody else listen to them, or get their management to drop them?
> If we hope to wreck careers, destroy reputations, and drive holistic Ortega fans into exile in Sausalito and Amherst, we're going to need tactics very different from those used by Roy Cohn, Bobby Kennedy, and [McCarthy].
> We have to come up with more clever ways to ruin these people.
And from chapter 2:
> We need some means of persecuting neuterers, nutters, and screaming greenies...
I only ever saw him on Bill Maher's show, but would enjoy the show so much more when he was on it. I always told myself that I needed to go check out more of his work and never did. My loss. Aside from some of the pieces already linked in the thread are there any worth reading that stand out? RIP.
I've always been left-of-centre, although drifting more towards "centre-with-a-slight-lean-to-the-left" these days, but I enjoyed O'Rourke's cutting wit as a teenager despite ferociously opposing his politics. Which says a lot for his capacity to write.
I never found him that funny. And I don't say that just because he was un-PC, or racist, or sexist -- though he was those things -- but because he didn't have good jokes, which is the only thing that matters in comedy:
> The Chinese have decided to import money instead of things they can immediately enjoy — my black Lab would make quite a stir fry.
This is hack, open-mic-nite-at-the-Sheraton stuff. Yawn.
I get that for people of a certain age (and sex and skin color) this was really cutting-edge, and part of the formative experiences of finding one's own sense of humor in the world, but its time was long past even when these jokes were best-sellers. It's me-me-me boomer stuff that doesn't work as comedy, and I think that's what ultimately sinks the guy's legacy.
> racist, or sexist —- though he was those things --
Those are pretty serious accusations and seems odd of you to so cavalierly throw them out.
I’m not super knowledgeable about O’Rourke, but I’ve seen him around on tv shows and opinion pieces for a few decades and don’t think he’s sexist or racist.
If you’re going to make such statements, back them up a big.
O’Rourke has written hundreds of thousands of words that promote racist ideas. Of course people will always debate whether making racist jokes make one a racist, but the sheer volume of his work is surely evidence of a kind.
That’s not true. Again, if you have claim, please support it.
I think the problem is that non-racist works are being conflated with something racist. I’d have to judge what’s racist joke as it’s hard nowadays to take someone’s world for it.
Anyone can cherrypick one line, quote it out of context, and decide it's not funny. If you squint hard enough you might even find something to feel outraged about. Does that make you feel good?
I've read a number of PJ's books and genuinely laughed out loud more times than I can count. Your comment, on the other hand, is exceptionally dull.
Yes. If you read carefully, nothing he says is even slightly funny. Some people like it because he would say petty things about people they didn't like. I don't like Hillary much more than he did, but what he would say was never anything substantial about what she said or did, just things he wanted to believe about her personally.
> Yes. If you actually do read carefully, nothing he says is even slightly funny.
It is easy to confuse snark with humor if you don't like who the snark is about. There were other people at the time who actually were consistently funny. Put them side by side and the difference is stark.
Real classy of you. If you didn't enjoy his work, maybe don't comment on his death.
The not so subtle racism / sexism accusation plug (I disagree), segued into slamming of his work during his death is despicable. The ageism was cherry on top.
Opinions are fine, but it's my opinion that you should save the negativity at this time, unless it's a ruthless dictator.
I flagged your post and hopefully this comment thread gets nuked. It's a time of mourning, not a time of slander.
If you’re a prolific writer then the occasion of your death will inevitably be a time for the public to reflect on your life’s work. He was intentionally antagonistic, so it’s actually a sign of respect, not the opposite, that people continue to engage with his ideas after he is gone.
Lol how is “ha ha Chinese eat dogs” not racist. It’s playing on the racist stereotype that asian people eat dogs. (It is true that in some parts of Asia they eat dogs but not in China.)
Prejudice does not make a racist. This is the crux of the issue.
It may meet the definition in modern liberal CRT terms, but that's not what it was or the accepted definition among most people.
If you want to hijack the definition of racism go ahead, but don't be taken aback when you get called out for accusing someone of a term reserved for a person that hates another based on his race or believes he's not equal due to race.
That's your opinion, and you're free to express it and vote accordingly. But flagging it for moderator intervention because you find it personally distasteful seems like going a bit too far. (In my opinion.)
It's a slander and inappropriate at this time. But yes it's my opinion that it breaks the rules. It introduced needless toxicity and turned this thread into a flamewar.
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Human beings like Doug Kenny, P.J. O'Rourke, Anne Beatts, Michael O'Donohue, and every one of the incredibly talented writing and production staff at The National Lampoon during the 70's are proof that God is indeed merciful.
Not sure there is any comparable figure today that comes to mind.
Last week I enjoyed listening to a rebroadcast of his appearance on James Altucher's podcast: https://jamesaltucher.com/podcast/pj-orourke/