Politics & Power Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

Optimism about government, P. J. O'Rourke suggests, is less civic virtue than a coping mechanism. The line lands because it takes a familiar self-help reflex - "look on the bright side" - and welds it to an arena where cheerfulness can become a kind of negligence. Government, in O'Rourke's framing, isn’t a vessel for collective idealism; it’s an ongoing emergency you learn to live with. The joke is bleak: you can curate your attitude, but you can’t curate reality.

The intent is classic O'Rourke: puncture the pieties of political faith without pretending cynicism is sophisticated in itself. His comparison does double work. First, it demotes "feeling good" to a private emotional project, implying that the warm glow people chase from politics is dangerously unconnected to outcomes. Second, it casts government as a permanent "catastrophe" - not necessarily total collapse, but an inherent mess of bureaucracy, incentives, and unintended consequences that persists regardless of your mood.

The subtext is a warning about sentimentality as anesthesia. If you need to feel good about government, you’re already treating it like a brand or a therapy session. When the bright-side goggles come off, nothing has improved; you’ve only lost the pleasant haze that kept you from noticing the costs.

Context matters: O'Rourke wrote from a late-20th-century American skepticism shaped by Watergate, Vietnam’s aftershocks, and the expanding administrative state. The line flatters no tribe. It’s anti-romance, pro-accountability: judge government by what it does, not how it makes you feel.