This file is a single-author political essay and strategic memorandum. Written one week after the 1994 Republican sweep, it interprets the midterms as a “November Revolution” against Clintonism and the Leviathan state. Rothbard dismisses anti-incumbency and anti-Congress explanations, stressing that Republican incumbents survived and that the revolt extended through governors and legislatures. The mandate, as he reads it, is both economic and cultural:
On the positive side, the public is vigorously and fervently affirming its desire to re-limit and de-centralize government; to increase individual and community liberty; to reduce taxes, mandates, and government intrusion; to return to the cultural and social mores of pre-1960s America, and perhaps much earlier than that.
The essay first asks whether such a mandate can survive its passage into institutions. Rothbard uses the Soviet collapse as a warning: legitimacy can vanish suddenly, but reform can be lost if it proceeds slowly and leaves the old ruling strata in place. His lesson is speed, dispossession of entrenched elites, and refusal of “reconciliation” with managers of the old order.
Rolling back statism is not going to be easy.
The central historical claim is that Republican elites normally capture anti-state energy and convert it into preservation of the state. Reagan is treated as the paradigmatic case: radical free-market rhetoric became a cover for continuity in taxes, spending, regulation, and intervention. Rothbard extends this into a theory of postwar two-party politics:
Since World War II, and especially since the 1950s, the function of the Republican Party has been to be the "loyal," "moderate," "bi-partisan," pseudo-opposition to the collectivist and leftist program of the Democratic Party.
Rothbard’s sociology of power explains how this arrangement persists. The ruling coalition joins corporate privilege-seekers, bureaucrats, media and academic opinion-makers, welfare constituencies, and officially recognized “victim” groups. The middle sections on Clinton and Proposition 187 apply this model: Clinton’s open leftward drive disrupts elite moderation, while Prop. 187 shows, for Rothbard, how media, business, professional, neoconservative, and libertarian establishments can lose at the polls yet regain power through courts.
The keys to any social or political movement are money, numbers, and ideas.
The judiciary discussion gives the essay its constitutional edge. Rothbard does not sacralize democracy; he values it instrumentally, as a peaceful way for popular will to take effect. Courts, lame-duck votes, and treaty procedures such as GATT/WTO are dangerous because they block that effect and return power to unaccountable elites.
Democracy is simply a process, a means of selecting government rulers and policies.
His remedy is correspondingly radical: Congress should strip federal judicial jurisdiction, abolish lower federal courts if needed, and use appropriations to defang judicial supremacy. The final sections convert the “revolution” into tests for Republican leaders: real tax and spending cuts, immediate deregulation, privatization, abolition of agencies, repeal of racial preferences and gun control, sound money, and rejection of foreign aid, managed trade, the WTO, and international bureaucracies. Hope lies less in Gingrich or Dole than in pressure from voters and independent education, especially the Mises Institute.
But nothing can be done without education.
As a late Rothbardian document, the essay fuses Austrian economics, anti-managerial populism, constitutional radicalism, and culture-war revolt. Its thesis is that 1994 opened a genuine anti-Leviathan opportunity, but that party elites, courts, and respectable opinion would absorb it unless a principled movement forced institutional rollback.
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