- O'Rourke, P. J.
Don't Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards.
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-8021-1960-5.
-
P. J. O'Rourke is one of the most astute observers of the
contemporary scene who isn't, I believe, taken as seriously
as he deserves to be simply because his writing is so
riotously funny. In the present book, he describes the
life-changing experience which caused him to become a
conservative (hint: it's the same one which can cause
otherwise sane adults to contemplate buying a minivan
and discover a new and distasteful definition of the
word “change”), and explores the foundations
of conservatism in a world increasingly dominated by
nanny states, an out-of-touch and increasingly inbred
ruling class,
and a growing fraction of the electorate
dependent upon the state and motivated to elect politicians
who will distribute public largesse to them, whatever the
consequences for the nation as a whole.
This is, of course, all done with great wit (and quite a
bit of profanity, which may be off-putting to the more
strait-laced kind of conservative), but there are a number
of deep insights you'll never come across in the legacy media.
For example, “We live in a democracy, rule by the people.
Fifty percent of people are below average intelligence. This
explains everything about politics.” The author then
moves on to survey the “burning issues of our time”
including the financial mess, “climate change” (where
he demolishes the policy prescriptions of the warm-mongers
in three paragraphs occupying less than a page), health care,
terrorism, the collapse of the U.S. auto industry, and
foreign policy, where he brings the wisdom of Kipling to
bear on U.S. adventures in the Hindu Kush.
He concludes, in a vein more libertarian than conservative, that
politics and politicians are, by their very nature, so
fundamentally flawed (Let's give a small number of people
a monopoly on the use of force and the ability to coercively
take the earnings of others—what could possibly go
wrong?) that the only solution is to dramatically reduce the scope
of government, getting it out of our lives, bedrooms, bathrooms,
kitchens, cars, and all of the other places its slimy tendrils
have intruded, and, for those few remaining functions where
government has a legitimate reason to exist, that it be
on the smallest and most local scale possible. Government is,
by its very nature, a monopoly (which explains a large part
of why it produces such destructive outcomes), but an ensemble
of separate governments (for example, states, municipalities,
and school districts in the U.S.) will be constrained by competition
from their peers, as evidenced by the demographic shift from high tax
to low tax states in the U.S. and the disparate economic performance
of highly regulated states and those with a business climate which
favours entrepreneurship.
In all, I find O'Rourke more optimistic about the prospects
of the U.S. than my own view. The financial situation is
simply intractable, and decades of policy implemented by
both major political parties have brought the U.S. near the
tipping
point where a majority of the electorate pays no
income tax, and hence has no motivation to support policies
which would reduce the rate of growth of government, not to
speak of actually shrinking it. The government/academia/media
axis has become a self-reinforcing closed loop which believes
things very different than the general populace, of which it
is increasingly openly contemptuous. It seems to me the most
likely outcome is collapse, not reform, with the form of the
post-collapse society difficult to envision from a
pre-discontinuity perspective. I'll be writing more about possible
scenarios and their outcomes in the new year.
This book presents a single argument; it is not a collection of
columns. Consequently, it is best read front to back. I would
not recommend reading it straight through, however, but rather
a chapter a day or every few days. In too large doses, the
hilarity of the text may drown out the deeper issues being
discussed. In any case, this book will leave you not only
entertained but enlightened.
A podcast
interview with the author is available in which he concedes that
he does, in fact, actually vote.
December 2010 