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

O'Rourke lands the punch with a deadpan premise that feels almost impolite to repeat: Americans like government in theory, just not in proximity. The line works because it shrinks a whole moral vocabulary - democracy promotion, national interest, security - into a suburban instinct: keep the mess off my lawn. He’s not arguing policy details; he’s exposing a temperament.

The first sentence sets a trap by using "sensible Americans", a phrase that sounds like praise but functions as bait. Who wants to volunteer as the unsensible one? Then he slips in the real accusation: "whatever it is that the government does" flattens the distinction between benevolent programs and coercive power. In O'Rourke's telling, government action is inherently intrusive, so the only sane preference is displacement. It’s libertarian suspicion dressed up as common sense.

The second sentence turns that domestic dodge into a theory of empire. Foreign policy, he implies, becomes a kind of moral outsourcing: if the state is going to police, regulate, topple, surveil, or spend, better that it happen "to somebody else" - somewhere far enough away that the costs feel abstract and the consequences can be described in PowerPoint nouns. The joke isn’t that Americans are uniquely hypocritical; it’s that democratic publics are uniquely skilled at wanting power without wanting the sensation of wielding it.

Contextually, O'Rourke is writing from late-Cold War/post-Vietnam skepticism, when intervention was sold as necessity and experienced as distance. The wit is sharp because it hits a durable contradiction: a citizenry allergic to state force at home, but comforted by it abroad, as long as it stays off-camera.