P.J. O’Rourke came to his conservatism in a roundabout way, says Helen Brown in the London Telegraph. The humor writer arrived at college in the late 1960s as a staunch Republican, but found he wasn’t handsome enough to attract the wealthy, preppy girls. So he grew his hair long and became a hippie to lure the “leftie girls.” It worked, but after he graduated and began working, disillusionment set in. More than a third of his paycheck was gone before he ever saw it. “I’d been struggling for years to achieve socialism in America,” O’Rourke says, “only to discover that we had it already.”
He became a Republican, but a libertarian one, given his long fondness for substance use. “I think drugs are fun,” he says, but now that he’s both a parent and a conservative, “I think fun is bad.” He doesn’t spare his children his acerbic wit. Recently, he says, his teenage daughter was complaining, “‘Life is not fair, life is not fair.’ I got fed up. I said, ‘You’re cute. That’s not fair. You’re smart—that’s not fair. Your family’s well off—that’s not fair. You were born in the U.S.—that’s not fair. Darling, you better get down on your knees and pray that things don’t start getting fair for you.’”
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