“Parliament of Whores” is a book that almost wasn’t written. Yet it is, debatably, the only civics textbook you’ll ever need. The Rodney Dangerfield film Easy Money premiered in August 1983. Thank God it flopped. Success would have tempted one of the movie’s screenwriters, former National Lampoon editor-in-chief P.J. O’Rourke, to follow the road that leads into the Hollywood Hills. Instead, failure freed him to do something invaluable. O’Rourke turned to freelance writing. He spent the rest of the 1980s covering—or more accurately, satirizing—international hot spots for Rolling Stone. He covered elections in Manila, Philippines; democratic transition in South Korea; and the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I decided to become a foreign correspondent,” O’Rourke wrote in an autobiography for his website. “Foreigners are funny and do my work for me.”
By 1988, O’Rourke needed a break from extensive travel to dangerous places. He followed the U.S. presidential race and moved to Washington, D.C. He found government’s daily operations more compelling than the political horse race. “I preferred to concentrate on systems and institutions,” he wrote later, “not because people aren’t important, but because people are important, in Washington, so briefly.”
His shift in focus was rewarded. The White House, Congress, Supreme Court, Pentagon, and other federal agencies all fell under O’Rourke’s gimlet eye. He mocked government and its follies, overreach, and pretense. But he also tried to understand how and why the system functions. Soon he accumulated enough material for a book. “Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government” came out in 1991. It was his first bestseller, a career-defining success. Yet Parliament of Whores is more than a classic. It remains the only civics textbook you’ll ever need—and an excellent primer on the craft of reporting and writing. Thirty-four years later, it has lost none of its freshness, relevance, and bite.
Consider O’Rourke on government spending: “The budget grows because, like zygotes and suburban lawns, it was designed to do nothing else.” On national security: “A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense. But for much of the post-Vietnam era we haven’t had that either.” And on the Department of Transportation: “Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.”
Each of these sentences could be written today. But only O’Rourke could write them so well. His prose moves along at a unique, clipped pace, using simple words and declarative sentences. His points are clear. His jokes are unmistakable. Reading O’Rourke, you begin to feel as if you are standing next to him or, better yet, sitting one stool over at the bar. His direct style is, at once, casual and instructive.
The man is endlessly quotable. When O’Rourke died three years ago at age 74, many tributes noted that at one point he had more entries in the Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations than any living writer. Not long after O’Rourke died, editor Terry McDonell published The Funny Stuff: The Official P.J. O’Rourke Quotationary and Riffapedia. The Quotationary is filled with delights: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”
Still, the best way to read O’Rourke is through his full-length books. Well-wrought creative nonfiction is a rare pleasure. Today’s media environment is oversaturated with content: long-form podcasts and viral video clips, streamers, and online commenters. The cure is quality: a well-placed word, a snappy sentence, world-building that spirits you away. Paragraphs stuffed with jokes are just a bonus.
O’Rourke was not merely a humorist; he was one of America’s greatest feature writers. He built his stories through the skillful layering of detail, dialogue, and character. He conveyed facts seamlessly. Readers are so busy chuckling that they don’t notice they’ve just mastered the intricacies of federal agriculture policy.
The book’s structure points to O’Rourke’s mastery of the form. In one chapter of Parliament, he accompanies D.C. police on a drug raid. In another, he travels to the South Bronx with Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels—and, now, New York City’s Republican mayoral candidate. One section finds him in Peshawar, Pakistan. Another chronicles a visit to Panama after U.S. forces captured the dictator Manuel Noriega. Then O’Rourke spends time on the USS Mobile Bay, a Ticonderoga class Aegis missile cruiser, prompting the following insight: “This is the way to waste government money.”
P.J. O’Rourke’s depiction of government endures because government’s ambitions will forever outrun its means.
A high school or college student interested in writing could do a lot worse than study O’Rourke’s techniques: how he establishes scenes, narrates actions, riffs on themes. A sense of humor can’t be taught. But, through close reading and practice, you can learn the methods behind immersive reporting and lucid writing. And we need more of both.
We need more of O’Rourke’s philosophy, too. In his final decade the “Republican Party Reptile” found himself, like a lot of people, politically homeless. Donald Trump, MAGA populism, and economic nationalism didn’t appeal to him. Bernie Sanders, socialism, and wokeism didn’t either. O’Rourke remained an advocate for freedom: Conservatism is, at least in its American form, a philosophy that relies upon personal responsibility and promotes private liberty. It is an ideology of individuals. Everyone with any sense and experience in life would rather take his fellows one by one than in a crowd. Crowds are noisy, unreasonable, and impatient. They can trample you easier than a single person can. And a crowd will never buy you lunch.
This emphasis on dignity, freedom, and responsibility may seem archaic to the critics of so-called “Zombie Reaganism.” But it is fundamental to humane conservative politics. An American conservatism that has no place for freedom neither inspires nor connects to the wellsprings of the American political tradition: constitutional rule of law and a limited government that makes room for family, church, civil society, and individual choice.
P.J. O’Rourke’s depiction of government endures because government’s ambitions will forever outrun its means. And his convictions speak to the best in American conservatism: its common sense, its celebration of political and economic freedom, its fun-loving spirit, and its cutting wit. Read Parliament of Whores, and remember its central argument: Democrats “are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” Some things never change.
