Murray N. Rothbard, “A New Strategy for Liberty” (1994) — Summary

This file is a single-authored political-strategy essay: an October 1994 polemic in which Rothbard reassesses libertarian and conservative tactics after what he presents as a dramatic anti-Washington turn in American political life. Its main thesis is that liberty can no longer be pursued through Beltway “respectability,” marginal policy reform, donor cultivation, and access to officials. Instead, Rothbard argues that libertarians should align with, clarify, and radicalize a decentralized grassroots revolt against federal power.

The great and inspiring new development is that, for the first time in many a moon, a genuine grassroots right-wing people's movement is emerging throughout the country.

The essay’s structure is simple but forceful. Rothbard first contrasts this new movement with what he calls the “Official Conservative and Libertarian movement”: think tanks, public-interest firms, and direct-mail institutions clustered around Washington. These organizations, he argues, speak the language of principle while practicing a politics of proximity to state power. Their real function is not ideological education but donor reassurance, publicized access, and minor reform.

For a long time, these Washington organizations have not been part of the solution, however gradual or minor; they have been part of the problem: the domination of American life by Washington.

Rothbard’s core conceptual move is to redefine “access” as corruption. What Beltway conservatives treat as influence he treats as surrender: to seek credibility inside Washington is already to accept Washington’s centrality. Against this, he praises a disorderly but authentic insurgency rooted in resentment of federal authority, bureaucracy, taxation, gun control, monetary control, land regulation, and national political management.

These heartland rebels are close to the spirit, not of blow-dried Beltway think-tankers, but of the patriots of the American Revolution.

The middle of the essay catalogues movements Rothbard sees as evidence of a broader revolt: county militias, sheriff resistance to the Brady bill, Tenth Amendment campaigns, the Committee of the 50 States, secessionist efforts, land-rights activism, anti-immigration organizing, and hostility to the Federal Reserve. He does not present these as ideologically complete; their value lies in their anti-centralist instinct. His strategic task for intellectuals is therefore not to command the movement from above but to discover, interpret, and systematize it.

To these great people, having “access” to tyrants means that you are aiding and abetting tyrants.

Rothbard then explains the movement’s emergence through the political atmosphere of the Clinton years. The essay’s rhetoric is intensely partisan and personal, but the analytical point is broader: he claims that hatred of the Clintons fused personal disgust with ideological rejection of federal activism. This “nuclear fusion” of character judgment and anti-socialist sentiment, in his view, created a mass politics more radical than the Perot movement and more threatening to the conservative establishment than to liberal Democrats alone.

As the Marxists used to say, "the masses are in motion," and our first task is to stay with them and try to help their movement be more systematic.

The strategic conclusion follows directly. Since the conservative masses no longer want merely to fund Washington-based experts, libertarian institutions must stop addressing themselves to politicians and start addressing themselves to rebels. Rothbard’s preferred strategy is educational and agitational rather than lobbying-oriented: proposals should be radical, anti-federal, and designed to strengthen existing hostility to Leviathan.

Bless them, these heartland rebels don't want access; they want to sweep the whole Moloch away.

The essay’s relevance lies in its candid articulation of late Rothbardian paleo-libertarian strategy: the fusion of libertarian anti-statism with right-wing populist anger. It is also a revealing 1990s document, registering militias, secessionism, states’ rights, anti-Fed sentiment, and anti-Beltway politics as parts of a single field of revolt. Rothbard’s final claim is that strategy and doctrine have converged: in the new circumstances, moderation is both morally wrong and tactically obsolete.

More than ever before, principle and strategy are fused, in behalf of the victory of liberty.