This file is a single-authored polemical essay: a short October 1992 political intervention, later appearing in The Irrepressible Rothbard. Its immediate occasion is the American presidential campaign, but its scope is larger: Rothbard tries to explain why left-liberals, in his view, respond with extraordinary intensity when conservative politics appears not merely to delay progressive causes but to reverse them.
Rothbard begins from a puzzle about George H. W. Bush, whom he calls politically “innocuous,” and then reaches back to earlier moments of liberal outrage: the Spanish Civil War, Chile under Allende and Pinochet, McCarthyism, abortion politics, feminism, gay rights, and Pat Buchanan’s 1992 culture-war rhetoric. His central move is to treat liberal emotion not as ordinary partisan attachment but as a reaction produced by a philosophy of history.
I submit that The Answer to the mystery is as follows: the left are, in their bones, “progressives,” that is, they believe, in Whig or Marxoid fashion, that History consists of an inevitable March Upward into the light, toward and into the Socialist Utopia.
The key term is “inevitable.” Rothbard argues that the left’s deepest commitment is not simply to specific policies but to a providential story in which history moves toward egalitarian, bureaucratic, therapeutic social democracy. In that frame, a successful counterrevolution is more than a political defeat; it is evidence against the faith.
They believe in the myth of inevitable progress; that History is on their side.
The essay’s structure is diagnostic. Rothbard first rejects alternative explanations: anti-fascism does not, for him, explain the intensity of liberal feeling about Franco; abortion does not explain the whole pattern; grief over communism does not explain the response to Chile, since the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European communism did not produce comparable anguish. He then distinguishes communism from social democracy. Communism represents hard revolutionary expropriation and open dictatorship; social democracy, for Rothbard, preserves markets and pluralism only as managed instruments of a bureaucratic “New Class.”
The Social Democrat goal is not “class war,” but a kind of “class harmony,” in which the capitalists and the market are forced to work and slave for the good of “society” and of the parasitic State apparatus.
This contrast produces one of the essay’s sharpest formulations: the modern liberal order is described as therapeutic, cultural, and managerial rather than openly terroristic.
In other words: Brave New World instead of 1984.
Rothbard’s main conceptual move is therefore to redefine “liberal hysteria” as fear of rollback. Conservatives who merely consolidate earlier liberal gains are tolerable; reactionaries who promise to undo them are intolerable. This explains, in his account, why Franco, Pinochet, McCarthy, and Buchanan provoke special fury.
They become hysterical when they perceive a rollback, or the threat thereof, of the Inevitable March of History.
The essay is also important as a document of early-1990s paleolibertarian and paleoconservative rhetoric. Rothbard adopts Buchanan’s “religious war” language and radicalizes it: the contest is not over technocratic policy but over rival sacred histories. Liberalism becomes a secularized eschatology, and reaction becomes the necessary counter-faith.
It is a religious worldview toward which there must be no quarter; it must be opposed and combated with every fiber of our being.
The concluding section turns diagnosis into strategy. Rothbard argues that the right must stop seeking approval from respectable media and embrace the language of taking back institutions, culture, and country. The relevance of the piece lies less in its account of Bush than in its theory of culture war: political conflict becomes existential when one side believes history must advance and the other side seeks restoration.
It is a life-and-death struggle for our very souls, and for the future of America.
The essay ends by naming the enemy not as one policy coalition but as the dream of a perfected social order administered through egalitarian state power. Its rhetoric is deliberately militant, and its final demand is not compromise but eradication of that dream.
For eventually we must drive the wooden stake through the heart of the Enemy, to kill once and for all the monstrous dream of the Perfect Socialized World.
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