DON’T VOTE
It Just Encourages the Bastards
ALSO BY P. J. O’ROURKE
Modern Manners
The Bachelor Home Companion
Republican Party Reptile
Holidays in Hell
Parliament of Whores
Give War a Chance
All the Trouble in the World
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
Eat the Rich
The CEO of the Sofa
Peace Kills
On The Wealth of Nations
Driving Like Crazy
DON’T VOTE
It Just Encourages the Bastards
P. J. O’Rourke
Copyright © 2010 by P. J. O’Rourke
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To my wife, Christina,
for her encouragement of this particular bastard
and for not imposing term limits
Contents
Acknowledgements
Apologia Pro !%@& Sua
PART I
THE SEX, DEATH, AND BOREDOM THEORY OF POLITICS
1. Kill Fuck Marry
2. Politics Makes Us Free—And We’re Worth It
3. A Digression on Happiness
4. The Happy Realization That All Freedoms Are Economic Freedoms (And Failure Is an Option)
5. The Murderous Perverted Nuptial Bliss Method of Establishing Political Principles
6. The Purgatory of Freedom and the Hell of Politics
7. Morality in Politics—And What’s It Doing in There?
8. Taxes
9. More Taxes
10. Being Penny-Wise
PART II
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
1. The U.S.S. Thresher Bailout and the Washing-Machine-for-Her-Birthday Stimulus Plan
2. And While We’re at It...
3. Generation Vex
4. Health Care Reform
5. Climate Change
6. The End of the American Automobile Industry
7. The Trade Imbalance
8. Gun Control
9. Campaign Finance Reform
10. Terrorism
11. Foreign Policy
12. Foreign Policy, Part Two—It Keeps Getting More Foreign
PART III
PUTTING OUR BIG, FAT POLITICAL ASS ON A DIET
1. Why I’m Right
2. Where the Right Went Wrong
3. A Digression on Shouting at Each Other
4. The Next Big Stink
5. The Fix Is In
6. All Hands on Deck
Acknowledgements
The title belongs to the great American political consultant, campaign strategist, advance man, and political prankster Dick Tuck. More than thirty years ago Dick told me that “Don’t vote—it just encourages the bastards” was a favorite saying of his mother.
Dick Tuck was the Nemesis of Dick Nixon. At the first Nixon–Kennedy debate Tuck hired an old lady to get in front of the TV cameras wearing a Nixon button and throw her arms around the sweaty candidate who thought he’d bested his young opponent. “Don’t worry, son,” the old lady said loudly. “He beat you now, but you’ll get him next time.”
Tuck did some of his best work for the Kennedys, in particular the most estimable of them, Robert. Dick, I apologize for any harsh words about my fellow bogtrotters in the following pages. Although Tuck and I are, politically, an aisle apart, I’ve never had a partisan argument with him. Who could argue with the Nemesis of Dick Nixon?
Along with some jokes, this book is a work of political theory. As such it is not too original, and I mean that in a good way. Nothing is worse than a too original political theory except perhaps a too original cookbook. “Bring water to a boil and immerse live pythons.” To call an artist derivative is an insult.1 To call a political theorist derivative is to admit that he or she has paid some attention to the eon of human political activity from which political theory derives.
Any reader who notices my use of the phrase “politics is an arrangement among persons” (or my use of the phrase “It’s not a thinking man’s game”) may suspect that Don’t Vote is a gloss or a glib exposition upon Michael Oakeshott’s 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics.”2 And that’s true. Or I think maybe it’s true. Twenty years of intermittent efforts were required for me to push my way through the prose brambles of Oakeshott’s thesis. What you read here may be a passage of thought, or it may be a record of scratched mental tissue and torn ideological clothing resulting from an attempt to follow in Oakeshott’s footsteps.
There are other writings that should be consulted for smarter versions of what I’ve written. Novus Ordo Seclorum—The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution by Forrest McDonald delivers what it promises it will. Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments was the best work (and still is) of moral philosophy available as the moral philosophy of America was being formed. McDonald believes that The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations were the dominant flavorings to the broth of intellect in which America’s founders stewed. (A silly metaphor but one of the pleasures an author takes in writing acknowledgements is knowing that they go to press lightly edited.)
Thomas Paine is a political theorist whom I love for his sheer irksomeness to authority.3 All there really is to say about the politics of liberty is contained in Paine’s dictum “man has no property in man.” But I have a crumbling, old collection of Paine’s work (cover price 50¢) where, in a windy introduction by John Dos Passos, Paine’s limitations are inadvertently pointed out. Dos Passos damns Paine by praising his “faith in man’s unaided reason.” A fellow hated by both the king of England and Robespierre and distrusted by John Adams—surely there was more to Paine than that.
Thomas Paine by Craig Nelson and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens gave me a better understanding of one Tom. And Hitchens’s Thomas Jefferson: Author of America shed light on the complications of another. That book also ends with a splendid line of Christopher’s, which I meant to find a place for in this book. Here will have to suffice: “History is a tragedy and not a morality tale.”
While randomly pulling books from my reference shelf to look up some small historical matter I made the happy find of Hugh Brogan’s The Penguin History of the United States of America. My copy was published in England in 1990, and I seem to have owned but not consulted it for a score of years. Brogan turns out to have a discerning eye for the manifold threads of populism in American politics. I thank him for an improved comprehension of Jacksonian Democrats, Radical Republicans, Greenbackers, and Progressives.
As to populism, I was holding forth in a lecture hall not lo
ng ago and, in answer to a question about the Tea Party movement, I said, “At least they aren’t demanding any further positive rights from government. Name me another American populist group that hasn’t demanded new positive rights.” A voice from the crowd called out, “The Whiskey Rebellion!” Point taken.
For the concept of positive and negative rights, I—and all the rest of us—owe gratitude to Isaiah Berlin and his 1959 book Two Concepts of Liberty.
When I’m faced with political-economy conundrums (and political economy seems to contain nothing else), I fall back on a few works filled with common sense: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, and Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman.
These books are moral as well as material guides. Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, once had an argument with Milton Friedman on this point. It went something like this:
Arnn: “Free to Choose is a deeply moral book.”
Friedman: “Free to Choose is a book of practical economics.”
Arnn: “It’s a moral book.”
Friedman: “It’s a practical book.”
Arnn: “It’s a moral book.”
Friedman: “I wrote it, and I say it’s a book of practical economics.”
Arnn: “Once you write it, it isn’t yours anymore. I read it, and I say it’s a moral book.”
When I become confused by economic theory (and is there any other way to be?), I turn to New Ideas from Dead Economists by Todd Buchholz. He quickly and cogently explains the ideas of dead economists and tells us why to hope that most of them stay dead.
Then there is a book that provides a negative lesson. Much as I admire the stylings of H. L. Mencken, it is his worst work, Notes on Democracy, that I find inspiring. Notes was published in 1926 and is an extended bitch on the subject. All Mencken can manage by way of complimenting democracy is to ask, “Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men.” That’s crap. Witness mankind’s experiences with “every other form of government.” Witness the alternatives to democracy on offer the very year Notes came out: Russia’s communism, Italy’s fascism, the whiff of mob rule in Britain’s general strike.
One more writer upon whom I’ve relied heavily—though he’s neither profound nor consistent—is me. Writing about politics after an adulthood spent writing about politics would be impossible without a certain amount of self-plagiarism.
Some phrases, sentences, and the occasional paragraph from my previous books reappear in this one. In Parliament of Whores, All the Trouble in the World, Eat the Rich, and On The Wealth of Nations I tried, in different contexts, to think through some of the same problems I’ve tried to think through here. Sometimes you say things as well as you can and when it’s time to say the same thing the person you end up quoting is you.
“He must be a poor creature who does not often repeat himself,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, ‘Know thyself,’ never alluding to that sentiment again.” And I’ve used that before too, in The CEO of the Sofa. Only once, however, do I lift a long passage from a volume of my own. In 1993 I wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal saying what I thought of Hillary Clinton’s health care reform proposal. I included this in a 1995 collection, Age and Guile. As a testimony to the circles—per Dante’s Inferno—that politics runs around in, I changed one name and a couple of numbers and this was what I thought of Barack Obama’s health care reform proposal.
Besides cribs from my books, at least twenty-seven essays and speeches written over the past fifteen years have served as rough drafts for parts of Don’t Vote.
I am very grateful to The Weekly Standard where I’ve had a happy home since it was founded in 1995. I thank everyone on its staff from William Kristol and Fred Barnes at the top of the masthead to the most temporary of interns who politely pretend to know who I am when I phone the office. It is a pleasure working with all of you. And for adding ideas to my head and subtracting solecisms from my prose I give specific thanks to deputy editor Richard Starr, literary editor Philip Terzian, managing editor Claudia Anderson, and my oldest friend in Washington, senior editor Andrew Ferguson.
I also had ample opportunities to talk, think, and write about politics at The Atlantic under the editorship of Cullen Murphy and before that under the editorship of the late and much-missed Michael Kelly.
The chapter “Why I’m Right” appeared in the book Why I Turned Right, edited by the brilliant Mary Eberstadt, mother of my goddaughter, Alexandra.
“The End of the American Automobile Industry” chapter I owe to an assignment from The Wall Street Journal.
Jim Denton, my other oldest friend in Washington and the publisher of World Affairs, encouraged me to plunge into the morass of foreign policy.
Additional articles from which I’ve drawn material appeared in Forbes, the Financial Times, and, of all places, Rolling Stone where for some reason Bill Greider and I were allowed to conduct a months-long left vs. right debate in print, doubtless to the utter mystification of the Rolling Stone target demographic. (Bill’s a great guy—wrong about everything, but a great guy.)
For almost thirty years I’ve been working with—well, he’s done all the working—Don Epstein at the Greater Talent Network lecture agency. Through the kind and diligent efforts of Don and everyone at GTN I’ve had the opportunity to try out various political ideas and opinions on lecture audiences around the county. (No audience members were harmed in these experiments. As far as I know.)
When the idea for this book was larval, Larry Arnn listened attentively to my description of the grub.
Greg Lindsay, executive director of The Center for Independent Study, invited me and my family to Australia and New Zealand in 2009. There Greg and his family showed us splendid hospitality. (Greg, Tina is still Googling “How to remove red wine stains from white lamb’s wool rugs.”) The talks that I gave in Sydney, Canberra, Perth, and Wellington would, through no fault of Greg’s, evolve into the opening chapters of Don’t Vote.
Thanks also to John Green and his family for making our antipodean journey so excellent (for everything except white lamb’s wool rugs).
The Cato Institute, that most thoughtful of Washington think tanks, has been providing me with research support—not to mention the moral kind—since the 1980s. There is no one working at Cato who hasn’t, in some way, helped form my political ideas. To name a very few of them:
executive vice president David Boaz, especially for his book Libertarianism: A Primer and for his editorship of The Libertarian Reader.
Tom Palmer and Roger Pilon for their knowledge and understanding of constitutionalism.
Peter Van Doren, editor of Cato’s invaluable antiregulatory Regulation magazine.
Jerry Taylor, who knows everything about resources and the squandering of them, which government is so good at.
Michael Tanner, Michael F. Cannon, and Aaron Yelowitz, without whose mastery of facts and figures I could not have written the health care chapter.
And, of course, Ed Crane, Cato’s president-for-life, who has bestowed upon me the title “Mencken Research Fellow” at Cato. I’m honored even though I’m pretty sure Ed has read Mencken’s Notes on Democracy.
Max Pappas was my assistant a decade ago and has done well anyway. He now occupies the post of vice president, public policy, at FreedomWorks. Max researched the origins of modern terrorism, and I apologize for taking ten years to put his research to use. It was also Max who walked me through the blind alleys of ratiocination behind campaign-finance reform and who explained to me what the hell the recent Supreme Court ruling on the subject was all about.
Richard Pipes, the preeminent historian of Russia and the Russian revolution, is a good friend and also a great teacher about the process by which reform turns to radicalism and radicalism turns to riot. I am deeply i
n debt to his book Property and Freedom, the most powerful argument for linking these social goods since Adam Smith’s.
It was Charlie Glass who, more than a quarter-century ago, showed me through the ruins of Lebanon and let me see that, when we call the American political system “highly polarized,” “chaotic,” and “corrupt,” we are full of shit. Charlie and I don’t usually agree about politics, but it is my hope that he’ll be able to get through at least a few chapters of this book before he writes to tell me that I remain a right-wing nut.
Jay Winik confirmed my hunch that Alexander Hamilton never recanted his objections to the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. “But,” wrote Jay, “I also strongly suspect that, like most of the other founders, he made peace with the Bill of Rights.”
Nick Eberstadt provided me with, among many other things, an educated guess at the body count from Mao’s “let a hundred flowers bloom” pogrom.
Kudos to Neil Hudley for rediscovering Milton Friedman’s radio interviews from the Paleolithic (1970’s) era of media.
Tim Baney pointed out the number of gun murders (none) in North Dakota, a state with notoriously lax gun-control laws.
Ed Mallon and Des Desvernine are doing important ongoing undercover work, therefore I cannot name them publically.
Candles for Men—”Mandles”—was the idea of Alex Vogel. The complete range of scents available as soon as Alex gets his start-up capital: Beer, Cigars, Old Dog, Spilled Bourbon, Gear Oil, Pool Hall, Frying Meat, Grass Clippings, Charcoal Smoke, Chainsaw Exhaust, Canvas Tarpaulin, and Trout.
Michael Gewirz had the savvy notion for marketing Home Colonoscopy Kits.
“Motorized cupholders” is a quip I stole from Lee Bass. Lee will know what I mean when I say, “After finishing this book I need to sit down for a moment and sort things out.”
I swiped the line about Japan sticking its economy “where the rising sun never shines” from my old friend Dave Garcia in Hong Kong.
James A. Weiner, Foreign Service Officer (Ret.), provided me with a joke that will go unspecified.
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