Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand—even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes—the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well—are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a millennial or zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere.” Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling.”

The hippie student he was in the ‘60s lost his enthusiasm for leftist ideas the following decade, as soon as he got his first paycheck from National Lampoon: a $300 check that filled him with joy—until he was told $140 would be deducted for taxes, health insurance, and Social Security. That day, he got mad at the government, and the grudge never faded. Before that, while still sporting what he called “a bad haircut”—think John Lennon’s worst style—he’d decided to tell his Republican grandmother he’d become a communist. Her response threw him off: “Well, at least you’re not a Democrat.”

O’Rourke was never one to romanticize his drug-fueled college days. “Oh God, the ‘60s are back,” he wrote. “Good thing I’ve got a double-barreled 12-gauge with a chamber for three-inch magnum shells. And speaking strictly as a retired hippie and former beatnik, if the ‘60s come my way, they won’t make it past the porch steps. They’ll be history. Which, for God’s sake, is what they’re supposed to be.”

From his time as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon in the ‘70s, we got his account in The Hollywood Reporter, “How I Killed National Lampoon.” The job was a blast, but the environment was hell: “Having a bunch of humorists in one place is like having a bunch of cats in a sack.” As a satirical war correspondent covering every late-century conflict, O’Rourke filled countless pages describing the struggle to find a damn glass of whiskey in the burning countries at the “end of history.” His last dangerous assignment was in Iraq. “I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq,” he wrote in Holidays in Heck.

The turning point for O’Rourke came during 2003 with the death of his friend and colleague Michael Kelly in Baghdad. They’d traveled together to the Iraq War. Kelly, former editor-in-chief of The Atlantic when O’Rourke wrote there, was “embedded” with the Third Infantry Division, while O’Rourke covered the war “unilaterally.” The last time they spoke, Mike joked that he’d get stuck on the way to Baghdad, while P. J. would be “driving a rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abaya contests.” Instead, O’Rourke wrote, “I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed.” That’s when he decided the war party was over.

In 2015, when the Daily Beast offered me the chance to cover Spain and its surroundings, what thrilled me most was that I would occasionally share a corner of the front page with P. J. O’Rourke. He had just joined as a columnist a couple of weeks earlier. The Toledo-born writer had a knack for navigating both left and right-leaning outlets because he’d mastered the art of humor’s universality—he was too funny to spark grudges and too free to stay confined to one column. That’s a rare gift.

O’Rourke was a pioneer in spotting the clash between contemporary progressivism and humor. Today, that clash has worsened with “cancel culture.” “I couldn’t stay a Maoist forever,” he wrote in Republican Party Reptile. “I got too fat to wear bell-bottoms. And I realized that communism meant giving my golf clubs to a family in Zaire. Plus, I couldn’t stand the left’s oppressive, dreadful seriousness.” He knew liberals seemed obsessed with stuffing their jokes full of political messages—making the message bigger than the laugh. Add to that their bad habit of taking themselves way too seriously, and you’ve got comedy that’s more likely to put people to sleep than make them laugh. Much of left-wing humor feels more about changing the world than cracking a smile. Real laughter, by contrast, is light, spontaneous, and wonderfully absurd.

O’Rourke was a free man in the most heroic sense. His defense of liberty wasn’t just an ideological stance; it was a way of life. He loved America but didn’t shy away from mocking its worst characteristics: “Wherever there’s injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening,” he wrote.

As a disciple of H. L. Mencken, O’Rourke’s great calling was spotting idiots—left, right, past, present, and even future ones. With Parliament of Whores, he tore apart the world of professional politics, not lingering too long on whether the targets of his skewering were “his people” or not. Though his stance was that of an underground—or punk—Republican, for O’Rourke, there was no single enemy. He had no problem taking shots at all politicians and parties alike when defending his ideas: “Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.” “Every government is a parliament of whores,” he declared. “The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.”

He ridiculed the left’s environmentalism long before it began shaping our lives. After writing his essay “Ship of Fools,” he never missed a chance to mock those who use environmentalism as a position of moral superiority from which to take potshots at capitalism. There’s no difference between the anti-war, Beatles-and-Vietnam-era environmentalism and today’s climate fanaticism—O’Rourke understood full well that they’re just different faces of an ideology far more interested in dismantling capitalism than cleaning oceans.

His satirical style led some to dismiss him as an economic expert, but it made him one of the most effective champions of capitalism, Adam Smith—he even humorously reimagined The Wealth of Nations—and libertarian conservative thought. Until the rise of rockstar Javier Milei, no one had quite matched his ability to reach such a broad audience with that mission. “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators,” he wrote. And in Eat the Rich, he observed that: “Microeconomics is about money you don’t have, and macroeconomics is about money the government is out of.” Through humor, he found ways to express serious truths.

In his later years, he remained the living satirist with the most quotes in the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, but no publication championed his presence as they once did. Today, no newspaper would fund a comedic correspondent to Kyiv in the middle of a war; we live in strange times: now the comedian, Zelensky, leads one side of the conflict, while on the other, the leader seems to be losing his sense of humor. And in these thin-skinned times, no one would dare publish a poverty analysis with lines like, “Of course, the humans in Haiti have hope. They hope to leave.”

Poverty, freedom, good manners, stupidity, technological invasion, or the automobile—nothing escaped O’Rourke’s sharp eye. Everything remains relevant. Although, thanks to capitalism, poverty has decreased, the left still clings to the belief—almost like a ritual act—that it’s not capitalism but socialism that’s worked miracles. Freedom is always under threat, and our privacy is invaded. Good manners are definitely out of fashion among Twitter/X addicts. Stupidity is enjoying a global boom. The technological invasion is making our brains short-circuit. And now, they’re forcing us to trade in our cars for four-wheeled electric scooters.

The problem of freedom—the central theme of O’Rourke’s work and thought—has been humanity’s problem since its very first day on Earth. And so has the problem of the economy. Adam and Eve had to make a choice. They got it wrong, sure—but at least they taught us a key idea of capitalism: economics is the science of choices; if the choices are bad, the economy goes straight to hell.

Now that much of the West is experiencing a revival of libertarian and conservative ideas—with increasingly younger supporters—O’Rourke could serve as the perfect gateway drug. His sarcastic, provocative tone is always cheerful, and it’s also the best weapon against a left that seems more and more detached from reality, furious even with biology and science, while growing steadily more humorless and unbearably self-important. Let’s not forget that Judith Butler—the mother of progressive postmodern theories from the waist down—somehow managed to turn grotesque ideas, the kind that would’ve made us burst out laughing just a decade ago, into painfully boring books. You can’t respond to Butler with Blaise Pascal or Thomas Aquinas. Unless you want to lose your mind like her followers, there’s only one answer: with P. J. Take a look at the West and who’s currently in charge, and tell me if there’s a more relevant and timely warning than the classic from the author of Parliament of Whores: “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

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Much of this utopianism can be traced back to the Age of Enlightenment’s fantasies about perfecting society. Although largely unknown today, the French author Étienne-Gabriel Morelly is particularly representative of this tendency. Today he is forgotten partly because his utopian theories are now overshadowed by the more famous communist ideologues, and partly because his central work was anonymous and falsely attributed for centuries to Diderot, who, in any case, did nothing to deny the attribution and even tried to capitalize on it. The work in question is titled Code of Nature, Or, The True Spirit of Laws. Morelly, of whose biography we know almost nothing, had published Floating Islands, or the Basiliad (1753), an allegorical novel depicting a society founded on the precepts of communism. The backlash against Basiliad was so fierce and widespread that just two years later, the author responded to his critics with Code of Nature, an essay in which he dogmatically laid out the theoretical framework glimpsed in the fiction of his novel. In a way, it could be seen as a user manual for bringing the utopian vision of Basiliad to life.

Morelly thus became the first to codify the communist utopia into enthusiastic law, and the result, viewed through the lens of 2025, is chilling—not for its utopianism, but for the number of parallels we can draw between his totalitarian roadmap and the thinking and policies of our modern Western societies in the twenty-first century. I suspect we’ve also been underestimating Morelly’s importance in the gestation of the more radical strands of the Enlightenment.

Eighteenth-century authors who fought against private property broadly fall into two groups. Some, like Rousseau or Diderot, attacked the social order underpinning property but stopped short of fully rejecting it, while others, like Morelly or Mably, adhered blindly to communist principles. Morelly in particular believed in the natural goodness of man and attributed all evils and deviations to greed. And, as you might guess, for him, the sole cause of greed was the existence of private property.

What was novel about Morelly’s utopian Code of Nature was his determination to build the communist system from a moral theory, as well as his crafting of a pragmatic plan for the birth of a regenerated society where men could once again be happy as they were in their primitive origins, before private property. That plan consists of the “fundamental and sacred laws that uproot vices and all societal ills.”

Remarkably, his scheme for revolutionizing law bears a certain similarity to latter-day utopian plans, such as the United Nations’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Swap “sustainable development” for “collective happiness,” and you’ll see that three hundred years later, we’re more or less in the same place. And it’s not just the 2030 Agenda. What’s been called “wokeism” advocates for strong state intervention to correct historical injustices through laws, quotas, or policies aimed at repairing historical harm or restoring what was theoretically stolen from certain groups. The goal is the same: to march toward a happy world without inequalities.

Like the radical Enlightenment, contemporary woke ideology, whose seams have recently begun to fray, also originates from the notion that traditional structures—capitalism, the family, gender, individual freedom, or meritocracy—are the root of all ills, namely, artificial inequalities that must be eradicated. In both cases, the ideal is a happy society where differences, whether material, biological, identity-based, or even in talent, do not create hierarchies. In both cases, the only way out is repression or coercion, perhaps reminding us once again of Reagan’s words, 36 years after the fall of the Wall: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

The first of Morelly’s laws establishes the abolition of private property: “Nothing in society will belong particularly to anyone, except things of current use for the individual, for their needs, pleasures, or daily work.” Citizens are forbidden from accumulating; they can only take what they need at that moment. You could acquire your daily bread, as allotted, and the baker could acquire the grain needed based on the loaves he plans to bake. All acquisitions would be free because everything belongs to the state. The citizen owns nothing. It’s impossible not to recall here the controversial World Economic Forum video about the year 2030 and its slogan: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”

The second law turns all citizens into state employees: “Every citizen will be a public man, maintained and supported at public expense.” While the United States still partially resists this invasion of public life into the private sphere, Europe’s political elites have been walking this path for years, seeking to control as much of citizens’ lives as possible—whether directly through public employment or indirectly through subsidies, endless bureaucracies, and other forms of public dependency. Elites, from the Davos Club to UN leaders, also push for state intervention to “free” the individual.

Morelly’s third law, inevitably, mandates universal labor: “Every citizen will contribute to the public good according to their strength, talent, and age; their duties will be regulated accordingly by distributive laws.” The author of Code of Nature then decreed a kind of mandatory military service, but for agricultural production: farm work would be compulsory for all from ages 20 to 35, after which individuals could choose their profession. All products would belong to the state, which would distribute them, with bartering, exchange, or trade strictly forbidden. This law aligns with the 2030 Agenda’s goals on education, inequality reduction, decent work, peace, industry, innovation, infrastructure, justice, and strong institutions. But this is just the beginning of the laws. The true social engineering unfolds in subsequent decrees. The nation is divided into families, tribes, and provinces. All must live in cities, mandatorily distributed across identical neighborhoods and buildings, and even clothing is dictated by enforced equality: the state provides uniform attire.

The Code’s slightest hint of freedom appears in the matter of marriage: Morelly’s laws permit it, yes, but make it mandatory upon reaching adolescence, “according to conjugal laws that prevent all licentiousness.” Divorce is allowed, but only after ten years of marriage. Even love is rationed, in a typically utopian exercise of dehumanization.

Children are raised by their mothers until age five. At that point, they are separated from their parents and moved to a sort of gymnasium, where the state educates them equally. From age ten, children are assigned to workshops for vocational training.

The preservation of marriage is a mere illusion. For Morelly, the family structure is just another link in the chain of state control, expanding from the individual to the family, from the family to the tribe, and then to the city. The happiness he promises is, after all, the chimera of a new Sparta. Forced marriage and the state’s theft of children are nothing more than a ploy to dissolve the individual’s only hope of freedom: the privacy of the family and the home. Using different mechanisms, today’s left promotes the destruction of the family, dissolving the institution into a mere shapeless mass.

And what of God and religion? Before banning personal revelations and dreams of faith, Morelly decrees that children be taught only “that the author of the universe can be known solely through his works; that they proclaim him as an infinitely good and wise being”; “the youth will be made to understand that the innate feelings of sociability in man are the only oracles of divine intentions.” It’s striking how closely Morelly’s educational ideas align with those Rousseau would outline seven years later in Emile. This species of secularism, of course, lives on in the ideology of the left today.

Morelly believes freedom of thought must be eradicated in youth. Thus, he establishes “laws for studies that will prevent the wanderings of the human mind and any transcendental delirium.” “There shall be,” he adds, “absolutely no other moral philosophy than that founded on the plan and system of laws.” This may be the point where, in 2025, we feel most trapped by the same utopia. Cancel culture policies, the mandatory belief that climate change is humanity’s fault, or the impossibility of publicly questioning the virtues of multiculturalism are prime examples of how freedom of thought—and the ability to subscribe to any alternative moral philosophy—is mutilated. The consequences are harsh, though with some differences still between Europe and the United States: social and professional exclusion, legal persecution, and public shaming of dissenters.

In the height of his contradictions, the French thinker senses that his utopia of mandatory happiness might collapse on its own. Perhaps that’s why he concludes his work with penal laws: serious offenses lead to social exclusion and transfer to horrific prisons located in the most remote, barren, and gloomy outskirts of the city, surrounded by massive, impenetrable bars. Of all crimes, the one Morelly pursues most fiercely is that of anyone who attempts to “abolish the sacred laws to introduce detestable property.” Such a person “will be confined for life, like a raving madman, in a cave situated” in “the place of public graves,” and marked as an “enemy of Humanity.” Furthermore, “his name will be erased forever from the list of citizens: his children and entire family will abandon that name and be separately incorporated into other tribes, cities, or provinces.” It’s astonishing how he juxtaposes an idyllic description of the utopian society—claiming the community is the social state best suited to nature and the source of all good things—while simultaneously devising a plan of gruesome punishments to force citizens to uphold this supposedly sublime and pleasurable system.

Once again, whenever communism leaps from theory to practice, it must include an appendix to its happy, egalitarian fundamental laws, outlining every possible form of repression to sustain the utopian system—as the history of twentieth-century totalitarianism demonstrates.

Perhaps you’re thinking that Morelly’s description better fits today’s China, Soviet Russia, or even Cuba or Venezuela than the West. Yet what’s more immediate and novel is how, like Morelly, our century has sought to impose uniform thought through woke ideology. The penalties, as noted: cancellation and social exclusion. The mandatory beliefs: feminism, environmentalism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism. The state’s savage distributism: taxes, fines, and fees.

In short, we find Morelly—and those who followed him down the totalitarian communist path—in nearly the entire framework hidden within what today’s utopian theorists call “social justice.” The key difference is that the French author merely wrote it on paper, while today’s woke utopians are actively carrying out this experiment through planned social engineering to limit private property, outlaw capitalism (replaced by the circular economy), and muzzle individual freedom to an extreme degree. I can still hear Milton Friedman’s words echoing with stunning relevance: “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

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