A Strategy for the Right

A Strategy for the Right should be read as a Rothbard-centered edited collection, not simply as the title essay. Rothbard’s chapter supplies the polemical spine, but the surrounding editorial, interview, and memoir material turns the book into a dossier on the American right’s lost genealogy. Rothbard appears as strategist, historian, memoirist, and subject; where other contributors enter, they act chiefly as editors and interlocutors, drawing out recollection, cultural judgment, and factional controversy. The volume asks how anti-New Deal constitutionalists, libertarians, anti-interventionists, and traditionalists were displaced by Cold War conservatism and neoconservative gatekeeping.

The terms old and new inevitably get confusing, with a new “new” every few years, so let’s call it the “Original” Right, the right wing as it existed from 1933 to approximately 1955.

The title chapter defines this “Original” Right as radical rather than merely conservative: it opposed the New Deal state, centralized bureaucracy, executive war power, and the fusion of domestic statism with foreign crusading. Rothbard’s historical contrast is that the New Deal had already transformed the regime; the right’s task was therefore restoration and rollback, not defense of the existing order. Garet Garrett’s warning becomes a key interpretive emblem:

There are those who still think they are holding a pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the night of depression, singing songs to freedom.

The companion chapters broaden the argument from doctrine to milieu. They show that the Old Right was not a party platform with fixed cultural planks so much as an inherited world of habits, loyalties, and assumptions later made explicit by crisis and defeat.

There was no particular position, because everyone was imbued with, and loved the old culture.

The memoiristic material also complicates any simple story of anti-communism as social distance from the left. Rothbard’s recollections place his later libertarian and anti-communist commitments amid immigrant, Jewish, labor, and Communist-adjacent family networks.

The older uncle was an engineer who helped build the legendary Moscow subway; the younger one was an editor for the Communist-dominated Drug Workers Union, headed by one of the famous Foner brothers.

The later strategic chapters return to movement politics. Rothbard argues that ruling classes govern through intellectual legitimacy as well as coercion, so libertarians and conservatives cannot win merely through respectable policy gradualism or elite persuasion. The decisive issue is identifying a social base outside managerial institutions.

The Marxists, who have spent a great deal of time thinking about strategy for their movement, always pose the question: who is the agency of social change?

The volume’s answer is a right-wing populism directed against bureaucrats, media elites, subsidized interests, and foreign-policy managers. Its factional chapters read Buckleyite conservatism and National Review as having narrowed the right by purging isolationists, libertarians, and other dissidents while admitting anti-Soviet ex-leftists and neoconservatives. McCarthy and Buchanan matter less as theorists than as examples of political figures who bypass polite gatekeepers. The collection’s cumulative claim is that the post-Cold War right could recover an older anti-state and anti-imperial tradition only by combining libertarian theory, cultural memory, and populist confrontation.