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

O'Rourke packs an entire theory of American governance into a vaudeville routine: Democrats as earnest salesmen of state power, Republicans as arsonists hired as firefighters. The joke works because it’s unfair in two directions at once. He skewers liberal technocratic optimism with the deliberately ridiculous promise to "remove the crabgrass on your lawn" - a suburban, petty annoyance elevated to the level of public policy. That image punctures the idea that government can be an all-purpose service bureau for personal betterment, not just collective problems.

Then he pivots to the darker punchline: Republicans campaign on the premise that government is broken, then govern in ways that confirm it. The subtext is less about incompetence than incentive. If your ideology depends on public institutions looking futile, you have political reason to starve them, sabotage them, or outsource them - and then point to the wreckage as proof. It's a tight little loop of self-fulfilling prophecy, described with the offhand cruelty of someone who’s watched it repeat.

Context matters: O'Rourke came up as a conservative-leaning satirist with a libertarian streak, writing through the Reagan era and the long shadow of post-1960s distrust in institutions. By framing both parties as selling comforting myths - one utopian, one nihilist - he’s not offering centrism so much as a diagnosis of the market logic of politics: hope and resentment as competing products, each requiring its own kind of exaggeration to move.