“Max Lerner: Again?!” — Summary

This file is a brief single-author political polemic. Rothbard’s April 1992 essay responds to Max Lerner’s “Civilization Watch” column and uses Lerner as a figure for the interventionist consensus linking FDR-era “collective security,” the Marshall Plan, post-Soviet aid, and U.S. support for Israel. Its main thesis is that Lerner’s appeal to bipartisan foreign-policy responsibility is really a demand for Wilsonian-Hamiltonian statecraft: moralized global management, centralized power, subsidies, and the exclusion of any genuine “America First” alternative.

But the guy simply doesn’t know when he’s licked.

The opening insult is not incidental; it establishes the essay’s method. Rothbard does not answer Lerner as a neutral analyst but as an old antagonist of New Deal and Cold War internationalism. When Lerner casts himself beside FDR and Acheson against isolationists and Marshall Plan critics, Rothbard counters by placing himself deliberately on the other side of that entire lineage.

All those battles that you and the other lesser guys, like FDR and Acheson, fought together, I was there too, every time, on the other side, trying my best to kick you in the shoulder.

The conceptual center of the piece is Rothbard’s rejection of Lerner’s preferred synthesis, “the fusion of Wilsonian idealist ends with realistic Hamiltonian means.” For Rothbard, Wilson and Hamilton are not complementary statesmen but rival candidates for “the single most evil politician in American history.” He answers Lerner’s fusion with an inversion that defines the essay’s political program: anti-interventionist ends joined to decentralized constitutional means.

Myself, I prefer a counter-fusion: isolationist ends (Borah? Nye? Lindbergh?) joined to Jeffersonian means.

From there the essay moves from history to the post-Cold War moment. Rothbard treats Lerner’s call for both parties to embrace the same foreign-policy line as an attack on democratic choice. The bipartisan ideal, in his reading, is not civic seriousness but managed politics, in which the electorate is denied a real alternative on war, aid, alliances, and nationalism.

That’s it, Max: above all, the dice must be loaded in this wonderful “democratic” game you’re always prating about: make sure that the dumb American masses get no choice. Right?

Rothbard’s next move is translation: Lerner’s “heroic alliance measures” for the new post-Soviet states become, in Rothbard’s gloss, “massive subsidy and control.” The issue is not simply foreign aid but the purpose behind it: suppressing “Russia first” nationalism in the name of a neoconservative New World Order. Rothbard sharpens the point by asking whether such an openly anti-nationalist global mission could survive popular consent.

Can this foreign policy doctrine be sold, in all its candor and clarity, to the American public? Is Max willing to take a democratic vote on this issue?

The final substantive section turns to Israel. Rothbard argues that Lerner’s hostility to nationalism is selective: America First and Russia First are sinister, while Israeli nationalism demands maximal U.S. backing. This produces the essay’s starkest formulation.

All nationalisms must be stamped out, it seems, but one.

Rothbard then reads Lerner’s complaints against Bush, Shamir, Baker, and Democratic candidates as evidence that the desired bipartisan consensus is fraying. The essay’s relevance lies in its compressed diagnosis of the early-1990s realignment: after the Cold War, Rothbard sees interventionists redirecting U.S. power toward global anti-nationalism and Middle East commitments, while Buchanan-style America First politics threatens that consensus. The closing returns to comedy, refusing Lerner’s posture of civilizational wisdom with one last pop-cultural demotion.

Frankly, I prefer the wisdom of Mel Brooks’s 2000-year-old man. Any day in the week.