Bush and Dukakis: Ideologically Inseparable

The file is a single polemical essay/chapter on the 1988 U.S. presidential election. Rothbard’s scope is narrow but pointed: compare George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis by policy rather than campaign image. His thesis is that both represent the same establishment Keynesian center—committed to spending, taxation, monetary inflation, regulation, protectionism, and, in Bush’s case especially, international monetary centralization.

George Wallace’s famous adage that “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties” was never more true than in election year 1988.

The opening frames electoral competition as staged ideological contrast. Rothbard’s method is to strip away rhetoric:

This maxim is particularly true if we concentrate, as we should, on the actual and proposed policies of the candidates rather than the rhetoric or their media imagery.

On that basis:

Both Bush and Dukakis are centrists (“mainstreamers”) devoted to the preservation and furtherance of the establishment status quo.

The domestic economic argument begins with advisers and deficits. The advertised gap between conservative and liberal Keynesians is, for him, rhetorical; neither side intends retrenchment.

Neither candidate will do a single thing to cut government spending; neither one will cut the enormous deficit that both parties and all centrists have now come to accept as a fundamental part of the American way of life.

He adds that both will raise taxes through semantic disguise. The growth formula is treated as inflationism: deficits will not be solved by cuts but by monetary expansion and manipulation.

As Keynesians, both candidates may be expected to expand the money supply mightily, and then strive, by fine-tuning and coercive policies, to try to control the resulting price inflation through manipulations by the Federal Reserve.

Rothbard then changes scale from promises to governing record. Carter and Reagan become evidence against partisan mythology: Carter’s spending share barely shifted, while Reagan’s anti-government presidency left federal spending higher as a share of private product. This allows Rothbard to redefine ideology by the measurable expansion of state power:

Either Bush or Dukakis can be relied upon to continue the expansion of government power and domination over the individual and the private sector.

The same pattern organizes his treatment of regulation, trade, and sectoral policy. Carter-era deregulation complicates the Republican story of market reform; Reagan’s assault on insider trading and protectionist import quotas undermine the claim that Republicans are free traders. The farm program shows intervention compounding, while Bush’s promised education and environmental spending confirms, for Rothbard, that the next administration will not reverse the trend.

The essay’s structural pivot comes when Rothbard turns to global monetary policy. The bipartisan consensus reaches its fullest form in James Baker’s push, under the Reagan-Bush network, toward coordinated central-bank inflation, a European currency unit, and finally a world paper currency issued by a world central bank.

In short, we are seeing, more than ever before, a bipartisan Keynesian consensus, an economic policy to match bipartisan policies in all other spheres of politics.

In this scenario, domestic Keynesianism becomes internationalized. Rothbard’s key conceptual move is to treat monetary coordination as the removal of external checks on inflation. Gold, Bretton Woods, and floating exchange rates each imposed some cost on overissue; a global fiat system would not.

There would be no remaining checks on any country’s inflation except the wisdom and the will of the World Central Bank.

The argument culminates by joining economic and political sovereignty. A world central bank is not just a technical monetary institution but the seed of world government, because coordinated inflation requires coordinated authority.

What this amounts to, of course, is economic world government, which, because of the necessity of coordination, would bring a virtual political world government in its wake.

The conclusion gives the essay’s only practical distinction between the candidates. Dukakis is not ideologically preferable; he may simply lack Baker’s connections and momentum.

Whoever Dukakis would appoint to his Cabinet would not have the powerful financial connections, or the track record of the last four years, and so the only real difference I can see in a Dukakis victory is that it would significantly slow down, and perhaps totally derail, the menacing drive toward Keynesian economic world government.

Thus the essay’s relevance lies in its libertarian-Austrian critique of party politics: Rothbard reads the 1988 election as a case in bipartisan state-building, where electoral opposition masks consensus and the deepest danger is the globalization of fiat-money management.