Video: P.J. O’Rourke on Millennials vs. Baby Boomers

Originally posted on Aug 26, 2014:

“Just this whole process of going through the baby boom’s
history, I began to realize what a nicer society—kinder, more
decent society—that we live in today than the society when I was a
kid,” says P.J. O’Rourke, best-selling author of Holidays in Hell,
Parliament of Whores, and many other titles.

O’Rourke sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie at Freedom Fest
2014 in Las Vegas to discuss his new book, The Baby Boom: How it
Got That Way and It Wasn’t My Fault and I’ll Never Do it Again. As
the father of three kids born between 1997 and 2004, he also lays
down some thoughts about millennials, noting that they live in a
much nicer, more tolerant world than the one in which he grew up.
“I don’t think my 10-year old boy has ever been in a fist fight,”
says O’Rourke, who was born in 1947. “I mean there might be a
little scuffling but I don’t think he’s has ever had that kind of
violent confrontation that was simply part of the package when I
was a kid.”

He also feels that the internet “fragments information” in a way
that destroys the sweep of history, at least at first. “You end up
with mosaic information,” he says. “Now, I think over time the kids
put these mosaics together but I don’t think the internet itself
lends itself to the sweep of history.”

The interview also includes a tour of O’Rourke’s long and varied
career in journalism, from his humble beginnings writing for an
underground alt-weekly to his time as editor of National Lampoon
and his incredible work as a foreign correspondent for Rolling
Stone to his current position as columnist at the Daily
Beast. 

A prominent libertarian, O’Rourke also discusses the
difficulties in selling a political philosophy devoted to taking
power away from politicians.

“If libertarianism were easy to explain and if it weren’t so
easy to exaggerate the effects of libertarianism—people walking
around with ‘Legalize Heroin!’ buttons and so on—I think it
would’ve been done already,” says O’Rourke, the H.L. Mencken fellow
at the Cato Institute. “But the problem is, of course, is that
libertarianism isn’t political. It’s anti-political, really. It
wants to take things out of the political arena.”

Edited by Zach Weissmueller. Interview by Nick Gillespie. Shot
by Meredith Bragg, Jim Epstein, and Weissmueller. Music by
Antiqcool.

Watch the video above, or click below for downloadable versions.
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 Link
to full rush transcript of this interview.