Murray N. Rothbard, “The ‘Watershed’ Election” (1993)

This file is a single polemical political essay: a January 1993 post-election diagnosis of Clinton’s victory, the collapse of official conservatism, and the strategic tasks Rothbard assigns to a revived Old Right. Its thesis is that the 1992 election was indeed a watershed, but not as the media claimed: it marked the triumph of a managerial-media elite and the exposure of hollow conservative leadership.

The media call this a “watershed” election, the election of “change,” and it is, although not quite in the way they are celebrating.

Rothbard’s first conceptual move is to treat “change” as ideological manufacture. Clinton’s victory, in his account, was not a spontaneous democratic mandate but the product of media consecration, elite coordination, and establishment signaling. The essay’s structure then moves from this diagnosis to obituaries, myths, numbers, and strategy: first the death of the conservative movement, then a speculative account of Bush’s passivity, then attacks on the “Year of the Woman” and “landslide” narratives, and finally a program for rebuilding.

Particularly wrought by this election were two significant political deaths: that of the modern conservative movement, and of the Libertarian Party.

The most developed obituary is for post-1955 conservatism. Rothbard contrasts the National Review–Reagan movement with the pre-Buckley Old Right. Modern conservatism, he argues, had substituted anti-Communism, support for Israel, and reverence for Reagan for a deeper anti-statist program. Once the Cold War ended, its organizing principle disappeared, revealing opportunism among “Official Conservatives” and neoconservatives who, in his telling, accommodated or quietly preferred Clinton.

But of course the Old Right was founded on a program of rolling back the Leviathan State to nineteenth-century levels, a far more far-reaching and revolutionary objective than simply keeping the Soviet Union at bay.

A central passage rejects the idea that a bad Clinton administration would help the Right by discrediting statism. Rothbard insists that “the worse the better” is both empirically false and morally corrupt: publics adapt to government expansion, causes are obscured, and bad policy can become entrenched rather than punished. He distinguishes this from his own view that statism generates crises that radicals should predict and explain, not desire.

In most cases, the worse the worse.

His attack on Bush is more conjectural and theatrical. Rothbard asks why Bush repeatedly retreated from effective attacks, repudiated negative campaigning, abandoned “family values,” and seemed cheerful on election night. The Rockefeller hypothesis is framed as possibility and satire rather than proof, but it supports the essay’s broader claim that visible electoral conflict often conceals elite convergence.

The later sections dismantle electoral mythmaking. Against the “Year of the Woman,” Rothbard argues that incumbency, not gender, better explains most results. Against the “landslide” narrative, he stresses that Clinton won only 43 percent of votes cast and less than a quarter of voting-age Americans. The point is not merely statistical; it is an attack on the manufacture of legitimacy by media language and the Electoral College spectacle.

Hold on to this truth: 24 percent ain't no mandate!

The conclusion turns from denunciation to reconstruction. Rothbard refuses any Clinton “honeymoon” and calls for a new paleoconservative-Old Right movement aimed at rolling back the state and restoring the “Old Republic.” The Democratic Party is written off, while the Republican Party is treated as a vehicle to be recaptured, with third-party efforts useful as pressure against establishment Republicans. The strategic priority is intellectual: principles and reliable allies must precede mass organizing.

We must build a new movement from under the rubble of the old.

The essay’s relevance lies in its fusion of libertarian anti-statism, paleoconservative cultural politics, and intra-right factional warfare at the moment after the Cold War. Rothbard reads 1992 not simply as Clinton’s victory, but as a revelation that the old conservative coalition had exhausted itself. Its enduring conceptual move is to redefine defeat as an opportunity for purification: discard opportunism, expose false mandates, and rebuild around a more radical anti-Leviathan program.

Organizing without first deciding on principles and people can only end in another, and more rapid, disaster.