Murray N. Rothbard, “The Clintonians: ‘Looking Like America’” (1993)

This February 1993 polemic treats the Clinton transition as a test case in the politics of “looking like America.” Rothbard’s immediate object is cabinet and sub-cabinet selection; his larger argument is that the diversity standard converts appointment from a question of competence into a public ledger of race, sex, ethnicity, and symbolic appeasement. The press appears in the essay not as Clinton’s mere admirer but as guardian of this new representational rule.

Let Willie slip once, and his media worshippers are on his neck in a minute, howling about betrayal.

Rothbard’s narrative of the appointments is organized as a series of pressures and concessions. Women’s groups, Hispanic activists, environmentalists, and sympathetic journalists are said to demand visible evidence that power has been redistributed. The repeated demand for demographic recognition is, for him, more revealing than any single appointment: it shows an administration compelled to prove legitimacy through categories before it proves capacity through policy.

At the normative center of the essay is a contrast between the older official language of merit and the newer public celebration of proportional visibility. Rothbard does not claim that past governments actually embodied pure meritocracy; he stresses that even the “lip-service” has been abandoned. This is why he treats the Clinton episode as a rupture rather than as routine patronage.

This was an unprecedentedly repellent case in American history. Up till now, at least lip-service was paid to finding the best person for each job, to the old American ideal of position according to merit. All this has now frankly been tossed overboard.

The essay’s main argumentative technique is reductio ad absurdum. Rothbard accepts the premise that a cabinet should mirror the population and then drives it toward ever finer classifications. If “white male,” “woman,” or “Hispanic” are decisive political labels, then ethnicity, religion, region, skin shade, hair color, height, and innumerable other traits can also become the basis for claims. The satire aims to show that demographic accounting has no principled stopping point and that every count can be reorganized to yield a new grievance.

OK, so let’s play the bean counter game. If you want a cabinet “looking like America” you’re not going nearly far enough. The beans are not classified with near enough precision. What is this “white male” nonsense? This portmanteau group must be disaggregated, and fast.

This category proliferation lets Rothbard invert surface appearances. A group described broadly as dominant can be subdivided until other patterns emerge; what first looks like “white male” control can be reframed as regional, ethnic, religious, or institutional imbalance. The force of the argument is polemical rather than statistical: it attacks the malleability of identity arithmetic itself.

The article then pivots from visible representation to elite continuity. Rothbard argues that sex and ethnicity are less important than the networks shaping foreign and national-security policy, especially those he associates with Rockefeller influence, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In this move, diversity politics becomes a distraction from the deeper structure of rule: a change in faces does not necessarily imply a change in governing interests.

The closing parody extends representational entitlement beyond recognized affirmative-action categories to short people, tall people, redheads, and even the mediocre. The essay’s significance lies in its compact expression of Rothbard’s late polemical style: abrasive satire, hostility to egalitarian liberalism, suspicion of media discipline, and a habit of reading pluralist symbolism as compatible with entrenched elite power. Its governing motion is escalation: the slogan of inclusion becomes, in his rendering, endless competitive bean-counting rather than democratic accountability.