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

O'Rourke snaps this line like a rubber band: it stings because it targets his own ecosystem. By accusing ideology, politics, and journalism of "luxuriat[ing] in failure", he’s not just calling them pessimistic; he’s alleging a perverse incentive structure. Failure is their natural habitat. Politics thrives on grievance to mobilize. Ideology needs a crisis to justify its purity tests. Journalism, especially in its modern attention economy, is rewarded for calamity, scandal, and the perpetual sense that things are falling apart. "Luxuriate" is the dagger: not merely reporting or responding to failure, but reclining in it, savoring it, turning it into a lifestyle and a business model.

The kicker is the second clause: "impotent in the face of hope and joy". That’s O'Rourke’s contrarian optimism, delivered through mockery. Hope and joy aren’t treated as naive here; they’re framed as disruptive forces that break the machinery. A genuinely hopeful public is harder to stampede. A joyful one doesn’t click as readily, doesn’t outrage-share, doesn’t demand a villain every morning. He’s suggesting that our loudest institutions lose their grip when people feel basically okay.

Context matters: O'Rourke wrote as a journalist-comedian with libertarian instincts, suspicious of grand programs and moral panics. The line reads like a warning to media consumers as much as to media makers: if your news diet never allows joy, that might not be insight - it might be a revenue stream. Hope, in his telling, is not sentimental. It’s insurgent.