This file is a single short political column/polemic. Written after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, it treats the ceremony less as constitutional ritual than as cultural regime change: a media-saturated festival in which Rothbard sees the left-liberal coalition publicly taking possession of America.
It was an Inaugural from Hell.
Rothbard’s opening converts personal irritation into political diagnosis. The problem is not only Clinton but the expansion of ceremony into compulsory national adoration.
The big issue that faced me, now that our Jacobin Festival has burgeoned from Inaugural Day to Inaugural Eve to Inaugural Week, was how to stay sane during this living nightmare.
Calling it a “Jacobin Festival” is the essay’s central conceptual move: the inauguration becomes revolutionary theater, not civic continuity. His coping strategy—skimming newspapers for dissent and avoiding television except for Limbaugh—sets him as a dissenter amid mass enchantment. The TV anecdotes, especially the anchor’s claim that “the magic is back,” show politics becoming sentimental spectacle.
The essay then maps the Clinton inauguration as coalition ritual. Rothbard’s earlier phrase about Bush “holding back the hordes” is reinterpreted through the crowds now gathered in Washington.
They all gathered at the Potomac, this nightmare vision of America, the whole cruddy coalition, from the Lawn-Chair parade to the Gay and Lesbian Band to the millionaire Hollywood leftists to the rap groups.
What he sees is not merely demographic variety but ideological possession: celebrities, feminists, entertainers, and activists celebrating a turn in power.
They all said much the same thing: "Whoopee, now it's our turn."
His mockery of Barbra Streisand, Betty Friedan, Diane English, Lauren Bacall, and others is harshly personal, but its argumentative function is to deny that the event is a neutral generational transition. Clinton’s youth symbolism matters less than the cultural politics attached to it.
But the key of course was ideology not generation, and Lauren (“Betty”) Bacall demonstrated that you didn’t have to be a young fool to be a fool.
The longest sustained object of attack is Maya Angelou’s inaugural poem. Rothbard treats it as the aesthetic emblem of the new order: multicultural enumeration, collectivist uplift, and official piety fused into state ceremony.
The Pome reminded me strongly of the Commie Ballad for Americans, put out during the Communism-is-Twentieth-Century-Americanism period of World War II, sung by Paul Robeson in his most portentous and stentorian tones.
The comparison is not incidental. Rothbard reads the poem’s roll call of groups as a collectivist vision of America, one that recognizes approved identities while omitting the businessman and, following Mona Charen’s point, the British inheritance of American institutions. Aesthetic disgust becomes political analysis: bad public art reveals a bad anthropology of the nation.
Near the close, Rothbard looks for “surcease” and finds it only in Bob Dole’s brief anti-honeymoon joke and Fran Lebowitz’s refusal of inaugural reverence. Lebowitz matters because she is not a conservative ally; she is a left-liberal Clinton voter whose contempt for cant confirms Rothbard’s sense that the ceremony has become quasi-religious.
Miss Lebowitz perceptively dubbed the entire gang “the religious left.”
The essay’s relevance lies in this fusion of cultural criticism, media criticism, and Old Right/libertarian anti-statism. It captures an early-1990s reaction to Clintonism as a symbolic triumph of therapeutic politics, celebrity liberalism, and identity-based national pageantry. Yet the ending does not rest in despair. Rothbard frames the spectacle as a test of whether ordinary Americans remain recoverable.
As we slog our way through the horror of the inaugural, the Big Question keeps popping up. “Is it too late? Are the American people too debased to bounce back? Or will there be a mighty backlash, as the American masses—sound at the core—storm their way back to sanity and health?”
The final note is therefore populist rather than merely misanthropic: beneath the invective is a belief that the ceremony’s excess may provoke reaction.
The returns are not yet in, but I am enough of an optimist to believe that Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Justice will eventually triumph.
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