The archive.

Bill Clinton's 1993 swearing-in arrives here not as constitutional ritual but as cultural regime change, a week-long "Jacobin Festival" in which Rothbard watches the left-liberal coalition take public possession of America. Skimming newspapers for dissent and avoiding television except for Limbaugh, he ridicules the pageant's celebrities and its official piety: Barbra Streisand, Betty Friedan, Lauren Bacall, and above all Maya Angelou's inaugural poem, which he likens to the wartime Communist "Ballad for Americans." Fran Lebowitz's contempt for the cant confirms his suspicion that the ceremony has turned quasi-religious. Yet the invective closes on a populist wager rather than despair, weighing whether a debased public might still storm its way back to sanity. A compact specimen of Old Right culture-war polemic.

It was an Inaugural from Hell.

Ranging satirically across Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Ingush, and Chechens, this 1993 commentary insists that Western observers badly underestimate how tangled the post-Soviet Caucasus really is. Eduard Shevardnadze appears less as a democratic reformer than as a media favorite rewarded for converting from Communism to Social Democracy, and much of the region's violence is laid at the door of Stalin's arbitrary nationalities policy, the Ossetian lands deliberately split between republics to wreck an insufficiently Stalinist people. The point is not that ethnic claims are frivolous but that they are historically serious and beyond any outsider's competence to resolve. The closing "sorting out" is pure irony, mocking the interventionist fantasy that half a million troops under UN direction might straighten the region out in twenty years.

OK, got it straight? Now all we need is for the United States to send about 500,000 troops to the Caucasus—under UN direction, of course—and in about twenty years we should be able to straighten it all out.

There is no anti-war left left anymore, Rothbard declares, watching former peace activists back U.S. and UN intervention against the Serbs in Bosnia, proof, he charges, that their real loyalty was to world government rather than peace. Written during the Bosnian War, the essay holds that moderate intervention is a fiction, since timid first steps make escalation irresistible, and it swaps the language of recognized borders for that of ethnonational claims. Bosnia, on his account, is no more a nation than North Dakota, only a territory holding rival Serb, Croat, and Muslim communities among whom all sides practice ethnic cleansing when they can. His remedy is partition rather than federal reconciliation: dissolve the fictive state, lift the sanctions, and let local peoples fix their own borders while Washington keeps out entirely.

The answer, as repugnant as it is to this meddling age, is to stay the Hell out.

Barely more than a squib, this very short 1993 polemic seizes on a reported irregularity in Bill Clinton's parentage, his father allegedly still married to another woman when he wed Virginia Cassidy, and turns bigamy into an instrument of political delegitimation. Rothbard's method is compressed escalation: the announcement of "confirmation," the leap from bigamy to bastardy, then comic speculation about unknown half-siblings and paternal promiscuity. There is no argument in constitutional law here, only abrasive anti-Clinton invective that collapses the dignity of high office into a scandalous family narrative. Taboo-breaking and anti-reverence toward the presidency furnish the whole rhetorical force, the genealogical joke hardening at the last into an impeachment slogan. A specimen of the insult-driven paleo-libertarian style Rothbard cultivated in his final years.

Do we want a bastard in the White House? Impeach Clinton!

Political correctness, in Rothbard's telling, is a regime of linguistic surveillance, and the public condemnation of Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott in 1993, for racial and ethnic slurs and Nazi memorabilia, is his exhibit. He recasts Schott as victim rather than culprit, reclassifies slurs as jokes and memorabilia as harmless collecting, and reads hate-speech norms as the new obscenity law, successor to the 1960s "Filthy Speech" taboos. His most characteristic move is linguistic economy: the anti-Japanese epithet of the title is redescribed as mere American contraction, a birthright of syllabic efficiency. Extending the argument to the shifting accepted terms for Black Americans, the essay collapses state censorship, workplace discipline, and press criticism into one narrative of persecution, and pointedly declines to ask why the words at issue actually wound.

Marge Schott’s sin, so unforgivable as to be beyond redemption, was to use a few Incorrect Words and phrases.

Less an arena of ideas than a theater of ethnic balancing, patronage, and racial antagonism, that is how Rothbard reads the 1993 New York mayoral cycle in this abrasive August election essay. Primaries, he argues, dissolved the old bosses' smoke-filled-room compromises and left group conflict naked, and Dinkins survives as favorite chiefly for lack of an attractive alternative. The sharpest analysis follows consultant David Garth's revival of the New York "fusion" tradition, attaching Giuliani to Liberal and Republican lines and balancing the ticket by borough, religion, and ethnicity through Susan Alter and Herman Badillo, against a fragmented Democratic side with no coordinated slate. Roy Innis appears as a black conservative useful for saying what Giuliani cannot, and the Crown Heights fight over "riot" versus "pogrom" becomes the essay's emblem of symbolic classification displacing real dispute.

Talk of politics as the triumph of symbolism over substance!

Those who once recognized collectivism, socialism, egalitarianism, nihilism, and statism as evil, Rothbard insists in this September 1993 essay, owe a duty to their families, posterity, and country to keep fighting, and neither defeatism nor purity excuses desertion. Against Schumpeter's thesis that socialism is inevitable, he answers that apparent hopelessness is no warrant for surrender, citing the recent collapse of Communism. His central typology names two forms of abandonment: the Beltway "sellout," the young radical absorbed by Washington's incentives until his face and the enemy's grow indistinguishable, and the "retreatist," who flees to Galt's Gulch-style enclaves in search of purity. Both vacate the real battlefield. Drawing on Randolph Bourne to separate country from State, Rothbard demands that liberty be defended in the external world of property and public life, not merely within.

Let’s put it this way: we must not abandon our lives, our properties, our America, the real world, to the barbarians. Never.

From Diocletian's Rome to the French Revolution to Nixon's 1971 wage-price freeze, the same policy keeps returning under the same false promise, and, in Rothbard's telling, keeps failing for the same reason. A legal ceiling set below the market-clearing price cannot cure inflation; it only suppresses the signals that coordinate supply and demand, breeding shortages, rationing, black markets, and coercive enforcement. His central exhibit is the 1946 meat crisis, when controls emptied the butchers' counters and even choked off insulin, only for supply to return within days of decontrol, proof, he argues, that the shortage was manufactured by the controls themselves. Written as the FCC rolled back cable rates and the Clinton administration floated health-care controls, this compact Austrian brief treats prices as social coordinators and ceilings as political violence.

In every age, in every culture, price controls have never worked. They have always been a disaster.

Strip away the slogan and NAFTA is not free trade at all but treaty-based mercantilism, government-directed commerce that builds a supranational apparatus with power over domestic law. Genuine free trade, Rothbard insists, needs no years of negotiation, only the unilateral repeal of the tariffs, quotas, and anti-dumping laws Washington imposed itself. Writing in October 1993, he scolds the free-market think tanks seduced by the phrase, dismisses both the protectionist low-wage-Mexico objection and the libertarian defense, and warns that tri-national commissions charged with harmonizing labor, health, and environmental rules would level them upward toward the welfare state, as in the European Community. The real menace, he argues, is not lower barriers but the march toward regional and eventually world super-government.

What the Establishment wants is government-directed, government-negotiated trade, which is mercantilism not free trade.

When the press crowned Bill Clinton's 1992 victory an election of 'change,' Rothbard read the word as ideological manufacture: not a democratic mandate but the consecration of a managerial-media elite. This January 1993 post-election polemic doubles as an obituary, pronouncing the modern conservative movement dead once anti-Communism, support for Israel, and Reagan-worship lost their glue, and the Libertarian Party dead beside it. He dismantles the 'Year of the Woman' and 'landslide' myths, noting Clinton drew barely 43 percent of votes and under a quarter of voting-age Americans, floats a half-satirical hypothesis that Bush deliberately threw the race for the Rockefeller interests, and rejects the 'worse the better' consolation as both false and corrupt. The closing summons a new Old Right pledged to roll back the Leviathan State.

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

A shoo-in for renomination at the year's start, Elizabeth Holtzman lost the 1993 Democratic runoff for New York City comptroller two-to-one, a collapse Rothbard reads not as an upset but as retribution. He rehearses his case against her: the Watergate prominence, the stern-avenger persona, above all her creation of the Office of Special Investigations, which hunted elderly Eastern European immigrants over half-century-old accusations. Then he traces the mechanics of her fall, from Geraldine Ferraro's lingering fury over Holtzman's 1992 attack ads to Hank Morris's craft in turning the obscure Alan Hevesi into an asset, to the decisively timed Department of Investigation report charging her with gross negligence in the Fleet Bank loan affair. In Rothbard's hands, politics becomes coalition vengeance, ethnic arithmetic, media timing, and the sudden collapse of a manufactured reputation.

It would be difficult to pick, out of an all-too-jammed field, the most repellent politician in American life, but surely Elizabeth Holtzman would run anyone a very close race for that honor.

"Looking like America" was the standard by which Clinton's cabinet was to be judged, and in this February 1993 polemic Rothbard turns it into a reductio ad absurdum. Grant that appointments should mirror the population, he says, and the accounting never stops: if white male, woman, and Hispanic are decisive labels, why not religion, region, skin shade, hair color, and height? Demographic bean-counting, he argues, has displaced even the lip service once paid to merit, converting selection into a public ledger of grievance. Beneath the diversity theater he detects unbroken elite continuity, the Rockefeller networks, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations still shaping foreign policy, so that changing the faces of power leaves its governing interests intact.

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