This file is a January 1995 political polemic by Murray N. Rothbard on the 1994 midterm elections, the Republican takeover of Congress, and what he presents as the immediate betrayal of a grassroots anti-government revolt. Its central thesis is stark: the election expressed a real popular uprising against “Big Government,” but Republican leaders quickly subordinated that revolt to the bipartisan governing class by helping pass Gatt through a lame-duck Congress.
The terrible news is that it took less than twenty-four hours for that revolution to be grievously betrayed.
Rothbard’s first target is procedural as much as ideological. He treats the recall of defeated Democrats to pass Gatt as proof that Republican elites feared the very electorate that had empowered them. The issue is not only trade policy but representative government itself: fast-track authority, by preventing amendment, becomes for Rothbard a mechanism by which Congress abdicates deliberation.
Bringing back the defeated Foley, Sasser, and the rest of the gang was a direct slap in the face by the Republican elites of the very voters who had just put them into power.
From this opening case, the essay broadens into a diagnosis of American politics as rule by a cross-party establishment. Rothbard’s core conceptual move is to separate “the people” from both party leaderships, arguing that Democratic and Republican elites share a commitment to centralized power, managerial expertise, media influence, and interventionist policy. The November election matters because it exposed the gulf between popular anti-statism and elite consensus.
This bipartisan elite is in the minority, but it has managed to control public policy for a half-century because it is strong in wealth (important sectors of Big Business and high-finance—summed up in the old phrases "Rockefeller Republican" and "Eastern Establishment") and in the opinion-moulding classes and institutions: e.g., writers, technocrats, policy wonks, planners, and bureaucrats.
The essay’s middle section is structured as a rapid inventory of issues on which Rothbard claims the public has moved decisively rightward while Republican leaders refuse serious action: immigration restriction, abolition of foreign aid, nonintervention after the Cold War, welfare abolition, rejection of affirmative action and “civil rights” regulation, repeal of gun control, spending cuts, abolition of federal departments, and monetary reform against the Federal Reserve. His standard is not symbolic opposition but actual rollback.
And that means real cuts, not phony “cuts” in rate of government growth, cuts in projected future government expenses, or “caps.”
Rothbard therefore rejects the balanced-budget amendment as delay and theater. For him, constitutional language and conservative rhetoric are meaningful only if they reduce the state’s practical power. This produces the essay’s “acid test,” a demand that readers evaluate congressional Republicans by consequences rather than posture.
At each stage forget the rhetoric and ask yourself: what did they do?
Despite its anger, the essay is not merely denunciatory. Its final movement identifies hope in freshmen Republican representatives whom Rothbard sees as paleoconservative, libertarian, constitutionalist, and directly tied to the voters rather than to party hierarchy. Jack Metcalf and Steve Stockman become examples of a possible insurgent bloc inside Congress: anti-Fed, pro-gold, anti-IRS, pro-gun, anti-Waco, and hostile to centralized federal power.
On the contrary, the good news is not only that the mass of the public have become fierce opponents of government intrusion and enemies of Leviathan; the good news is also that some of the freshmen Congressmen and Senators, especially in the House, are dedicated, fiery right-wing populist conservatives and libertarians, who are true embodiments of the November Revolution.
The essay’s relevance lies in its early articulation of a post-Cold War right-populist critique of Republican leadership: anti-globalist, anti-interventionist, anti-bureaucratic, pro-gun, anti-Fed, and suspicious of party elites. Rothbard frames politics as a continuing struggle between an insurgent base and a governing class that can absorb electoral victories unless relentlessly pressured. His closing strategic counsel is movement discipline against partisan complacency.
Keep their feet to the fire; never let up.
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