“Gang-Stabbing the President: What, Who, and Why” — Summary

The supplied file is a single September 1992 polemical political essay, printed within a Rothbard collection rather than presented here as a multi-author volume. Its scope is the 1992 conservative revolt against George H. W. Bush: Rothbard asks why “movement” conservatives who had defended Bush against Pat Buchanan suddenly urged Bush or Quayle to withdraw once Bill Clinton surged.

Rothbard’s opening move is theatrical and accusatory. The “gang-stabbing” is not merely disagreement over strategy but, for him, a revelation of the hollowness of official conservatism. He frames conservative leaders, think tanks, and media figures as opportunists abandoning a weakened patron.

At the very least, it's an unlovely spectacle: rats scurrying off a sinking ship.

The immediate puzzle is ideological: why would conservatives treat a Clinton victory as tolerable, even desirable? Rothbard emphasizes the strangeness of a right-wing establishment becoming relaxed about Democratic liberalism.

Good God, who in their right mind would have thought that it would ever be deeply controversial for a libertarian or a conservative to oppose the ascension to power of Bill Clinton?

The essay’s structure proceeds by layers of explanation. First comes Sam Francis’s “venality” thesis: conservative organizations depend on presidential access when Republicans govern, but on fundraising panic when Democrats govern. A Democratic president can revive direct-mail appeals and institutional relevance. Rothbard accepts this but deepens it into a theory of elite blocs.

The “Franciscan” analysis carries its penetrating power from the crucial assumption that movement conservatism is driven almost exclusively by cynical and corrupt careerism rather than by any vestige of conservative principle.

Rothbard’s second conceptual move is to shift from personal betrayal to power-elite analysis. He argues that party labels are secondary to durable establishment interests. The first of these is what he calls the “Rockefeller World Empire,” an Eastern Establishment alliance favoring managed capitalism, welfare-state internationalism, foreign aid, oil policy, and supranational economic governance.

The most important such interest group in American politics is, and has been for a half-century, the “Rockefeller World Empire,” that is, the corporate and financial Eastern Establishment headed, since World War II, by the Rockefeller interests and their allies.

Rothbard then reconstructs postwar politics through this lens: the New Deal, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Carter, Reagan’s accommodation with George H. W. Bush, and Clinton’s acceptability to establishment internationalists. The polemical point is that elections are less decisive than elite continuity.

We can rest assured that the power elite, the crucial special interest groups we have been analyzing, have no sentimental attachment to party labels.

The third layer is the neoconservative role. Rothbard treats neoconservatives as a small but strategically powerful group in media, foundations, and conservative institutions. Domestically, he portrays them as welfare-state managers with supply-side preferences; internationally, he argues, their overriding concern is Israel and an interventionist “New World Order.”

But what animates the neocons first and foremost is foreign policy.

The essay’s climax is the claim that Rockefeller internationalism and neoconservatism converge enough to make Clinton safe. Bush’s conflict with Yitzhak Shamir and his resistance to loan guarantees for Israel, Rothbard argues, helped push neoconservative elites toward Clinton. Thus the conservative abandonment of Bush is explained as a combination of fundraising incentives, media-foundation pressure, and foreign-policy alignment.

It is clear that the RWE and the neocon visions, while motivated by very different principles and goals, are congruent almost all the way.

The relevance of the essay lies in its compressed display of Rothbard’s late political method: libertarian anti-statism joined to elite theory, anti-neocon polemic, and a contemptuous sociology of conservative institutions. Its rhetoric is harsh, conspiratorial in style, and highly factional, but its central thesis is clear: the 1992 conservative turn against Bush was not principled resistance to statism but the visible result of institutional self-interest and elite realignment.

Knowing the real story of the conservative mugging of President Bush may not stop the Clinton juggernaut, but at least our readers will know why it’s happening.