P.J. O’Rourke: the finest satirist of his generation

P.J. O’Rourke was the finest conservative satirist of his generation and therefore the finest of any political persuasion. Satire, an impertinent and mean-spirited attack on authority, is generally and perhaps even inherently a left-wing genre but O’Rourke came into his own in the wake of the 1960s, when the counterculture tried to overthrow authority but ended up replacing it instead. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan may have swept the ballot boxes but where real power lay — in the newsrooms and the entertainment industry, on the campuses and in the publishing houses — the radicals won in a landslide. This gave rise to a new culture in need of countering and O’Rourke, an ex-leftist, lampooned its neuroses and hypocrisies with an impish, outrageous heresy unmatched by writers more in political sympathy with the times.

O’Rourke, who has died aged 74, was unusual for an American conservative in that he believed in conserving things, and unusual for an American libertarian in that he had views on things other than weed.