Government and Mission Creep: An Interview with P.J. O'Rourke

When it comes to conservative political satire, there’s probably no more popular practitioner of the form than P.J. O’Rourke. Having overcome his own crazy hippie days in the ’60s, O’Rourke went on to become one of the defining writers of the National Lampoon in the ’70s and burst into politically-themed writing with an astonishingly funny series of articles for Rolling Stone throughout the 1980s, in which he planted himself as a white American guy into some of the troubled and anti-American places on earth. (The best of these can be found in his collection, “Holidays in Hell.”)

In 1991, he took on the U.S. government itself with a furor and viciously funny intelligence that would make Mark Twain proud, when he unleashed the book “Parliament of Whores” upon the world. The massive bestseller exposed the abject corruption and bloated nature of a modern-day government whose expanse vastly exceeded the roles which our Founding Fathers intended for it.

O’Rourke has continued in that vein for much of the past two decades, but his ability to settle into domestic bliss with his second wife and their two young children led him to focus on the still funny yet less pointed collection of fatherhood essays, “The CEO of the Sofa.” He also took on Adam Smith’s classic economics primer “The Wealth of Nations,” and broke it down in a funny yet informative way that made the tome accessible for modern audiences.

But as he stared down a cancer scare in the last two years, O’Rourke reclaimed his former fire and has written his angriest, funniest book since “Parliament” with the new “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards.” Caught amid a nation gripped by Obamamania and a 21^st century set of problems, O’Rourke tackles all the big issues – from gun control and health care reform to terrorism and climate change – in a profane and defiantly funny set of essays that’s perfectly timed to the midterm elections.

Speaking exclusively with Big Government via phone from the Union Club in New York City on Monday, Sept. 27, O’Rourke spoke at length about his personal and professional transformation into conservatism and about the state of the union. He was loose, engaging, laid-back yet undeniably opinionated – just the way we like him.

Q: Is the new book an intentional return to the topicality of “Parliament of Whores”?

O’ROURKE: Yes, a conscious return to political reporting. Not so much an updating. Parliament of Whores was about how government works and I’ve been wanting to write about why it works. I’ve been thinking for years about political theory, and this started out being about democratization around the world. Then that movement started to take some lumps, and so I started thinking about where we’re going in our own country and ended up back where I started with Parliament.

Q: How do you feel about the emergence of the Tea Party? Is it meaningful and does it provide any hope for conservatism?

O’ROURKE: I think the Tea Party’s a good sign, but I think overall over the course of the past 50 years or so, we have let government to experience mission-creep. Government has expanded to the point where it doesn’t matter if it’s good, bad or indifferent. It couldn’t possibly do all those things that it’s called to do. It’s as though in society, we’re choosing to only use the political tool. Not true fully, but we are using it to the exclusion of many private and religious solutions, and all the elements of civil society like private enterprise, social and fraternal organizations.

Fraternal organizations like the Freemasons are also fading out. My godfather asked me one day when he was in his 80s how come I never joined the Masons? Frankly it never occurred to me. More’s the pity, probably.

Personally, being conservative, I hope the country swings back to the Right. But what may be more important is that the Tea Party phenomenon and all the groups that fall under that rubric – I hate using TP label because so many diff groups involved – that group of people has gotten the message on the size and scope of government. And they get it on the expansion of positive rights like housing and health care, and how dangerous the extension of positive rights can be to liberty and economic well being. The fact that people are worried about this is an extremely healthy sign.

Q: You really became famous as a political satirist with your foreign pieces in Rolling Stone. Do you still pay any attention to foreign affairs?

O’ROURKE: I do address foreign policy a little bit in the book but I didn’t feel that fit in the realm of political science. I would say if I were looking to one other issue besides the expansion of size and scope of government, it would be foreign policy.

Whether you’re liberal or conservative, people have to see there are limits to asking how much you can ask government to do and we may be past those limits. It can’t possibly live up to all of the requests. We’re asking government to protect us from outsiders, lawlessness, and to give us our basic freedoms but also give us our daily bread. The great temptation is to vote ourselves rich, and that simply can’t be done.

The third thing bugging me here is that I’m very concerned about the nature of liberty, that people don’t really understand that the expansion of government power even if all good and we agree with all it does, that it creates a dangerous construct where an enormous amt of power is put in the hands of a few institutions and a few people. Even if they use it for good, nonetheless there the power is and what if someday you have a diff group of people who want to do bad with the power, it’s there for the taking and that itself is worrisome.

Q: How did you get involved with updating “Wealth of Nations”? Was that an intent to get younger generations educated about principles they weren’t hearing elsewhere anymore?

O’ROURKE: The Adam Smith book wasn’t my idea. The fellow who runs the UK division of Grove Atlantic press had an idea for whole series of books by modern writers giving their take on various important books like the Bible, Koran, Das Capital, Freud. Because of my interest in economics he asked me to do the Adam Smith one. I never thought who I was aiming at. Not particularly young but someone without time and patience to sort through Smith’s book, where these ideas came from, and what Smith’s original intentions with putting forward these ideas were and how they’d affect modern society. It was kind of a home study course on my own, and it was interesting for me to learn all about that.

Speaking of how our school books are, people in Texas are complaining about Islam being taught more in schools than Christianity is I gotta wonder to myself how complimentary to Islam could Texas textbooks be? Nobody bothered. in the news stories, to give an example what they’re protesting against. But I did notice my kids were coming home from school with a clearer idea of who Martin Luther King was than Jefferson. Not that I object to King but they oughta know about Jefferson too. But we could correct that around the house. Schools might be afraid to teach about Christianity due to the whole church and state issue, yet feel compelled to teach about Islam under current events. The results can be paradoxical, with kids knowing more about the prophet Mohammed than Christ.

Q: Why and how did your political views undergo such a change?

O’ROURKE: I think it was part of the natural course of growing up. I didn’t have any special intense political views, just what was laying around on the sidewalk at the time. It just so happened that young people at my time were extra stinky hippies, but 100 years before I would have followed along with Reconstructionist Republicans. I wasn’t thinking about it hard, and didn’t think it through until the New Left antiwar movement started turning violent with the Weather Underground. And I said, “Wait this isn’t what I was into.” Then the Right was killing people at Kent State. So I was like “Wait a minute, I’m middle class kid in need of a haircut. Both sides are getting creepy.” At first it was disillusionment with the New Left, then as I was getting older and paying taxes and paying attention where my taxes were going, I started thinking this wasn’t a good idea after all. It was gradual, and just from growing up. There was no real Road to Damascus moment.

Q: Was it hard to get along at Rolling Stone when you were Republican?

O’ROURKE: I didn’t really get hassled. I think it was just a novelty act, they wanted a house Republican and I was the only one they knew. By the middle ’80s there were quite a few Rolling Stone readers who had voted for Reagan and Rolling Stone was mystified what to do and one response was to bring in a Republican. At the same time they had Bill Greider, who was very left, so it was their attempt at a balancing act. They still have their pretensions to having some sort of importance as a journalistic medium. One thing telling in McChrystal story is that the author is never named and I can’t remember who it is, and Rolling Stone is only mentioned as a side issue.

All the discussion about that piece was about how indiscreet our military people are allowed to be, and which ones actually said anything. It didn’t do anything for their rep as a serious magazine. I thought it was sort of surprising that here’s a countercultural magazine that had a real impact not on policies but on personnel in charge of policies. All this shit might as well have turned up on Youtube.

Q: Do you think Hillary will run against Obama in 2012?

O’ROURKE: I never liked Hillary. but she couldn’t do anything without everyone questioning her motives, and Obama got a free pass in ’08. Never thought I’d feel sorry for her, but I do. It wouldn’t surprise me if she ran against Obama, but I don’t think it was her intention originally. He had a strong victory over an established guy and she must have felt all bets were off for 8 years, and she’d see what came around then. Being Secretary of State was a good resume builder. I doubt she had the thoughts back then about 2012 but if she didn’t still, she’d be more than human. There is the Kennedy run at Carter in ’80 to show how hard it is to dislodge a sitting president in your own party. Teddy did have baggage but was probably at the height of his popularity nonetheless.

Q: How are you doing with your battle against cancer?

O’ROURKE: I’m good healthwise. Got my 2 year checkup and everything was fine. As cancers go, it was not an extremely invasive one. It was where there was a long standing protocol of treatment with good results in the past and as these go, it went well.

Q: And how do you feel about the health of the nation?

O’ROURKE: I think the beauty of democracy is it has the capacity to be self-corrective. I understand where Beck gets his frustration and anger. I don’t particularly disagree with him, yet I feel he overstates the case but that’s his job. We’re all entertainers and part of being an entertainer is to overstate the case and make the best show you possibly can. His show is maybe not as much to my taste, but that’s not to say he’s wrong.

In that Smith book , I recounted how some student of his rushed in with the news that Cornwallis had surrendered, gave the news and said ‘The nation is ruined!” This was a full 100 years before the peak of British rule, and Smith said ‘There’s a lot of ruin in a nation.’ I want there to be a sense of urgency because I don’t really want to keep people home from polls.

Q: Where do you think Obama stands with people now?

O’ROURKE: I think Obama is losing a lot of people in the US because he’s got a know it all, lecturing sort of attitude. He’s a capable public speaker but he talks down to his audience constantly, and that’s irksome. I haven’t been a fan of the tone of any recent president. Bush could not get foot out of his mouth. My wife works to get corporate execs to express themselves in public. She said you can train a chimpanzee, but Bush won’t take advice. I always felt all gooey after Clinton got done speaking, and Bush Senior was incomprehensible in his own way, a mumbly WASP.

Q: Finally, a liberal friend wanted me to ask you what I think is a fair question. Our national debt first started growing under Reagan. Why was it OK for him to deficit spend but not Obama?

O’ROURKE: Deficit spending should be on everyone’s conscience. Reagan thought you could limit government by limiting its funding, which revealed he’s unsophisticated about how government can fund itself. Clinton was the president most concerned with deficit spending and did very well. He was lucky in many respects, operating at boom time and when national defense was a less essential issue. I think the Democrats’ long history of desiring to increase federal spending makes them easier targets. Reagan may have done it but didn’t want to. But your friend has a good point.