By Murray Rothbard
Ludwig von Mises Institue
2006


Postscript

The November Revolution . . . and What to Do about it

Note: Murray Rothbard wrote this essay one week after the
November 1994 election. It circulated privately as a
Confidential Memo. This is its first public appearance.
In a famous lyric of a generation ago, Bob Dylan twitted the
then-dominant "bourgeois" culture, "it doesn't take a
weatherman to know the way the wind blows." Indeed, and the
significance of this phrase today has nothing to do with the
group of crazed Stalinist youth who once called themselves
"the Weathermen." The phrase, in fact, is all too relevant to
the present day.

It means this: you don't have to have to be a certified media
pundit to understand the meaning of the glorious election of
November 1994. In fact, it almost seems a requirement for a
clear understanding of this election not to be a certified
pundit. It certainly helps not to be a member of Clinton's
cadre of professional spinners and spinsters.

The election was not a repudiation of "incumbents." Not when
not a single Republican incumbent lost in any Congressional,
Senate, or gubernatorial seat. The election was manifestly not
simply "anti-Congress," as George Stephanopoulos said. Many
governorships and state legislatures experienced upheavals as
well. The elections were not an expression of public anger
that President Clinton's beloved goals were not being met fast
enough by Congress, as Clinton himself claimed. All too many
of his goals (in housing, labor, banking, and foreign policy,
for example) were being realized through regulatory edict.

No, the meaning of the truly revolutionary election of 1994 is
clear to anyone who has eyes to see and is willing to use
them: it was a massive and unprecedented public repudiation
of President Clinton, his person, his personnel, his
ideologies and programs, and all of his works; plus a
repudiation of Clinton's Democrat Party; and, most
fundamentally, a rejection of the designs, current and
proposed, of the Leviathan he heads.

In effect, the uprising of anti-Democrat and anti-Washington,
D.C., sentiment throughout the country during 1994 found its
expression at the polls in November in the only way feasible
in the social context of a mass democracy: by a sweeping and
unprecedented electoral revolution repudiating Democrats and
electing Republicans. It was an event at least as significant
for our future as those of 1985-1988 in the former Soviet
Union and its satellites, which in retrospect revealed the
internal crumbling of an empire.

But if the popular revolution constitutes a repudiation of
Clinton and Clintonism, what is the ideology being repudiated,
and what principles are being affirmed?

Again, it should be clear that what is being rejected is big
government in general (its taxing, mandating, regulating, gun
grabbing, and even its spending) and, in particular, its
arrogant ambition to control the entire society from the
political center. Voters and taxpayers are no longer persuaded
of a supposed rationale for American-style central planning.
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.

What Are the Prospects?

Should we greet the November results with unalloyed joy?
Partly, the answer is a matter of personal temperament, but
there are guidelines that emerge from a realistic analysis of
this new and exciting political development.

In the first place, conservatives and libertarians should be
joyful at the intense and widespread revolutionary sentiment
throughout the country, ranging from small but numerous
grassroots outfits usually to moderate professionals and
academics. The repudiation of the Democrats at the polls and
the rapid translation of general popular sentiment into
electoral action is indeed a cause for celebration.

But there are great problems and resistances ahead. It is
vital that we prepare for them and be able to deal with them.

Rolling back statism is not going to be easy. The Marxists
used to point out, from long study of historical experience,
that no ruling elite in history has ever voluntarily
surrendered its power; or, more correctly, that a ruling elite
has only been toppled when large sectors of that elite, for
whatever reasons, have given up and decided that the system
should be abandoned.

We need to study the lessons of the most recent collapse of a
ruling elite and its monstrous statist system, the Soviet
Union and its satellite Communist states. There is both good
news and at least cautionary bad news in the history of this
collapse and of its continuing aftermath. The overwhelmingly
good news, of course, is the crumbling of the collectivist
U.S.S.R., even though but tressed by systemic terror and mass murder.

Essentially, the Soviet Union imploded because it had lost the
support, not only of the general public, but even of large
sectors of the ruling elites themselves. The loss of support
came, first, in the general loss of moral legitimacy, and of
faith in Marxism, and then, out of recognition that the system
wasn't working economically, even for much of the ruling
Communist Party itself.

The bad news, while scarcely offsetting the good, came from
the way in which the transition from Communism to freedom and
free markets was bungled. Essentially there were two grave and
interconnected errors. First, the reformers didn't move fast
enough, worrying about social disruption, and not realizing
that the faster the shift toward freedom and private ownership
took place, the less would be the disturbances of the
transition and the sooner economic and social recovery would take place.

Second, in attempting to be congenial statesmen, as opposed to
counter- revolutionaries, the reformers not only failed to
punish the Communist rulers with, at the least, the loss of
their livelihoods, they left them in place, insuring that the
ruling "ex"-Communist elite would be able to resist
fundamental change.

In other words, except for the Czech Republic, where feisty
free-market economist and Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus was able
to drive through rapid change to a genuine free market, and,
to some extent, in the Baltic states, the reformers were too
nice, too eager for "reconciliation," too slow and cautious.
The result was quasi-disastrous: for everyone gave lip-service
to the rhetoric of free markets and privatization, while in
reality, as in Russia, prices were decontrolled while industry
remained in monopoly government hands.

As former Soviet economist and Mises Institute senior fellow
Yuri Maltsev first pointed out, it was as if the U.S. Post
Office maintained its postal monopoly, while suddenly being
allowed to charge $2 for a first-class stamp: the result would
be impoverishment for the public, and more money into the
coffers of the State. This is the reverse of a shift to free
markets and private property.

Furthermore, when privatization finally did take place in
Russia, too much of it was "privatization" into the hands of
the old elites, which meant a system more like Communist rule
flavored by "private" gangsterism, than any sort of free
market. But, crucially, free markets and private enterprise
took the blame among the bewildered Russian public.
Betraying the Revolution

The imminent problem facing the new American Revolution is all
too similar: that, while using the inspiring rhetoric of
freedom, tax-cuts, decentralization, individualism, and a roll
back to small government, the Republican Party elites will be
performing deeds in precisely the opposite direction. In that
way, the fair rhetoric of freedom and small government will be
used, to powerful and potentially disastrous effect, as a
cover for cementing big government in place, and even for
advancing us in the direction of collectivism.

This systematic betrayal was the precise meaning and function
of the Reagan administration. So effective was Ronald Reagan
as a rhetorician, though not a practitioner, of freedom and
small government, that, to this day, most conservatives have
still not cottoned on to the scam of the Reagan administration.

For the "Reagan Revolution" was precisely a taking of the
revolutionary, free-market, and small government spirit of the
1970s, and the other anti- government vote of 1980, and
turning it into its opposite, without the public or even the
activists of that revolution realizing what was going on.
It was only the advent of George Bush, who continued the trend
toward collectivism while virtually abandoning the Reaganite
rhetoric, that finally awakened the conservative public.

(Whether Ronald Reagan himself was aware of his role, or went
along with it, is a matter for future biographers, and is
irrelevant to the objective reality of what actually happened.)

Are we merely being "cynical" (the latest self-serving
Clintonian term), or only basing our cautionary warnings on
one historical episode? No, we are simply looking at the
activity and function of the Republican elites since World War

II.

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.
Unlike the more apocalyptic and impatient Bolsheviks, the
Mensheviks (or social democrats, or corporate liberals, or
"responsible" liberals, or "responsible" conservatives, or
neo-conservatives--the labels change, but the reality remains
the same) try to preserve an illusion of free choice for the
American public, including a two-party system, and at least
marginal freedom of speech and expression.

The goal of these "responsible" or "enlightened" moderates has
been to participate in the march to statism, while replacing
the older American ideals of free markets, private property,
and limited government with cloudy and noisy rhetoric about
the glories of "democracy," as opposed to the one-party
dictatorship of the Soviet Union.

Indeed, "democracy" is so much the supposed overriding virtue
that advancing "democracy" throughout the globe is now the
sole justification for the "moderate," "bi-partisan,"
Republicrat policy of global intervention, foreign aid, and
trade mercantilism. Indeed, now that the collapse of the
Soviet Union has eliminated the specter of a Soviet threat,
what other excuse for such a policy remains?

While everyone is familiar with the bi-partisan,
monopoly-car-tel foreign policy that has been dominant since
World War II, again pursued under various excuses (the Soviet
threat, reconstruction of Europe, "helping" the Third World,
"free-trade," the global economy, "global democracy," and
always an inchoate but pervasive fear of a "return to
isolationism"), Americans are less familiar with the fact that
the dominant Republican policy during this entire era has been
bi-partisan in domestic affairs as well.

If we look at the actual record and not the rhetoric, we will
find that the function of the Democrat administrations
(especially Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson), has been to
advance the march to collectivism by Great Leaps Forward, and
in the name of "liberalism"; while the function of the
Republicans has been, in the name of opposition or small
government or "conservatism," to fail to rollback any of these
"social gains," and indeed, to engage in more big-government
collectivizing of their own (especially Eisenhower, Nixon,
Reagan, and Bush). Indeed, it is arguable that Nixon did even
more to advance big government than his earthy Texas predecessor.

The Illusion of Choice

Why bother with maintaining a farcical two-party system, and
especially why bother with small-government rhetoric for the
Republicans? In the first place, the maintenance of some
democratic choice, however illusory, is vital for all
varieties of social democrats. They have long realized that a
one-party dictatorship can and probably will become cordially
hated, for its real or perceived failures, and will eventually
be overthrown, possibly along with its entire power structure.
Maintaining two parties means, on the other hand, that the
public, growing weary of the evils of Democrat rule, can turn
to out-of-power Republicans. And then, when they weary of the
Republican alternative, they can turn once again to the eager
Democrats waiting in the wings. And so, the ruling elites
maintain a shell game, while the American public constitute
the suckers, or the "marks" for the ruling con-artists.

The true nature of the Republican ruling elite was revealed
when Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for
President in 1964. Goldwater, or the ideologues and
rank-and-file of his conservative movement, were, or at least
seemed to be, genuinely radical, small government, and anti-
Establishment, at least on domestic policy. The Goldwater
nomination scared the Republican elites to such an extent
that, led by Nelson Rockefeller, they openly supported Johnson
for president.

The shock to the elites came from the fact that the
"moderates," using their domination of the media, finance, and
big corporations, had been able to control the delegates at
every Republican presidential convention since 1940, often in
defiance of the manifest will of the rank-and-file (e.g.,
Willkie over Taft in 1940, Dewey over Taft in 1944, Dewey over
Bricker in 1948, Eisen hower over Taft in 1952). Such was
their power that they did not, as usually happens with open
party traitors, lose all their influence in the Republican Party thereafter.

It was the specter of the stunning loss of Goldwater that
probably accounts for the eagerness of Ronald Reagan or his
conservative movement, upon securing the nomination in 1980,
to agree to what looks very much like a rigged deal (or what
John Randolph of Roanoke once famously called a "corrupt bargain").

The deal was this: the Republican elites would support their
party's presidential choice, and guarantee the Reaganauts the
trappings and perquisites of power, in return for Reaganaut
agreement not to try seriously to roll back the Leviathan
State against which they had so effectively campaigned. And
after 12 years of enjoyment of power and its perquisites in
the executive branch, the Official Conservative movement
seemed to forget whatever principles it had.

The Parasitic Elite

So is our message unrelieved gloom? Is everything hopeless,
are we all in the ineradicable grip of the ruling elite, and
should we all just go home and forget the whole thing?

Certainly not. Apart from the immorality of giving up, we have
so far not mentioned the truly optimistic side of this
equation. We can begin this way: even given the necessity of
the elite maintaining two parties, why do they even have to
indulge in radical rightist, small-government rhetoric?
After all, the disjunction between rhetoric and reality can
become embarrassing, even aggravating, and can eventually lose
the elites the support of the party rank-and-file, as well as
the general public. So why indulge in the rhetoric at all?

Goldwater supporter Phyllis Schlafly famously called for a
"choice, not an echo"; but why does the Establishment allow
radical choices, even in rhetoric?

The answer is that large sections of the public opposed the
New Deal, as well as each of the advances to collectivism
since then. The rhetoric is not empty for much of the public,
and certainly not for most of the activists of the Republican
Party. They seriously believe the anti-big government
ideology. Similarly, much of the rank-and-file, and certainly
the activist Democrats, are more openly, more eagerly,
collectivist than the Democrat elite, or the Demopublican
elite, would desire.

Furthermore, since government interventionism doesn't work,
since it is despotic, counter-productive, and destructive of
the interests of the mass of the people, advancing
collectivism will generate an increasingly hostile reaction
among the public, what the media elites sneer at as a "backlash."

In particular, collectivist, social democratic rule destroys
the prosperity, the freedom, and the cultural, social, and
ethical principles and practices of the mass of the American
people, working and middle classes alike. Rule by the statist
elite is not benign or simply a matter of who happens to be in
office: it is rule by a growing army of leeches and parasites
battening off the income and wealth of hard-working Americans,
destroying their property, corrupting their customs and
institutions, sneering at their religion.

The ultimate result must be what happens whenever parasites
multiply at the expense of a host: at first gradual descent
into ruin, and then finally collapse. (And therefore, if
anyone cares, destruction of the parasites themselves.)
Hence, the ruling elite lives chronically in what the Marxists
would call an "inner contradiction": it thrives by imposing
increasing misery and impoverishment upon the great majority
of the American people.

The parasitic elite, even while ever increasing, has to
comprise a minority of the population, otherwise the entire
system would collapse very quickly. But the elite is ruling
over, and demolishing, the very people, the very majority, who
are supposed to keep these destructive elites perpetually in
power by periodic exercise of their much-lauded "democratic"
franchise. How do the elites get away with this, year after
year, decade after decade, without suffering severe
retribution at the polls?

The Ruling Coalition

A crucial means of establishing and maintaining this
domination is by co-opting, by bringing within the ruling
elite, the opinion-moulding classes in society. These
opinion-moulders are the professional shapers of opinion:

theorists, academics, journalists and other media movers and
shakers, script writers and directors, writers, pundits,
think-tankers, consultants, agitators, and social therapists.

There are two essential roles for these assorted and
proliferating technocrats and intellectuals: to weave
apologies for the statist regime, and to help staff the
interventionist bureaucracy and to plan the system.
The keys to any social or political movement are money,
numbers, and ideas. The opinion-moulding classes, the
technocrats and intellectuals supply the ideas, the
propaganda, and the personnel to staff the new statist
dispensation. The critical funding is supplied by figures in
the power elite: various members of the wealthy or big
business (usually corporate) classes. The very name
"Rockefeller Republican" reflects this basic reality.
While big-business leaders and firms can be highly productive
servants of consumers in a free-market economy, they are also,
all too often, seekers after subsidies, contracts, privileges,
or cartels furnished by big government. Often, too, business
lobbyists and leaders are the sparkplugs for the statist,
interventionist system.

What big businessmen get out of this unholy coalition on
behalf of the super-state are subsidies and privileges from
big government. What do intellectuals and opinion-moulders get
out of it? An increasing number of cushy jobs in the
bureaucracy, or in the government-subsidized sector, staffing
the welfare-regulatory state, and apologizing for its
policies, as well as propagandizing for them among the public.

To put it bluntly, intellectuals, theorists, pundits, media
elites, etc. get to live a life which they could not attain on
the free market, but which they can gain at taxpayer
expense--along with the social prestige that goes with the
munificent grants and salaries.

This is not to deny that the intellectuals, therapists, media
folk, et al., may be "sincere" ideologues and believers in the
glorious coming age of egalitarian collectivism. Many of them
are driven by the ancient Christian heresy, updated to
secularist and New Age versions, of themselves as a cadre of
Saints imposing upon the country and the world a communistic
Kingdom of God on Earth.

It is, in any event, difficult for an outsider to pronounce
conclusively on anyone else's motivations. But it still cannot
be a coincidence that the ideology of Left-liberal
intellectuals coincides with their own vested economic
interest in the money, jobs, and power that burgeoning
collectivism brings them. In any case, any movement that so
closely blends ideology and an economic interest in looting
the public provides a powerful motivation indeed.

Thus, the pro-state coalition consists of those who receive,
or expect to receive, government checks and privileges. So
far, we have pinpointed big business, intellectuals,
technocrats, and the bureaucracy. But numbers, voters, are
needed as well, and in the burgeoning and expanding state of
today, the above groups are supplemented by other more
numerous favored recipients of government largess: welfare
clients and, especially in the last several decades, members
of various minority social groups who are defined by the
elites as being among the "victims" and the "oppressed."

As more and more of the "oppressed" are discovered or invented
by the Left, ever more of them receive subsidies, favorable
regulations, and other badges of "victimhood" from the
government. And as the "oppressed" expand in ever- widening
circles, be they blacks, women, Hispanics, American Indians,
the disabled, and on and on ad infinitum, the voting power of
the Left is ever expanded, again at the expense of the
American majority.

Conning the Majority

Still, despite the growing number of receivers of government
largess, the opinion-moulding elites must continue to perform
their essential task of convincing or soft-soaping the
oppressed majority into not realizing what is going on. The
majority must be kept contented, and quiescent. Through
control of the media, especially the national, "respectable"
and respected media, the rulers attempt to persuade the
deluded majority that all is well, that any voice except the
"moderate" and "respectable" wings of both parties are
dangerous "extremists" and loonies who must be shunned at all costs.

The ruling elite and the media try their best to keep the
country's tack on a "moderate . . . . vital center"--the
"center," of course, drifting neatly leftward decade after
decade. "Extremes" of both Right and Left should be shunned,
in the view of the Establishment. Its attitudes toward both
extremes, however, are very different.

The Right are reviled as crazed or evil reactionaries who want
to go beyond the acceptable task of merely slowing down
collectivist change. Instead, they actually want to "turn back
the clock of history" and repeal or abolish big government.
The Left, on the other hand, are more gently criticized as
impatient and too radical, and who therefore would go too far
too fast and provoke a dangerous counter-reaction from the
ever-dangerous Right. The Left, in other words, is in danger
of giving the show away.

The Advent of Clinton

Things were going smoothly for the vital center until the
election of 1992. America was going through one of its
periodic revulsions from the party in power, Bush was
increasingly disliked, and the power elite, from the
Rockefellers and Wall Street to the neo-conservative pundits
who infest our press and our TV screens, decided that it was
time for another change. They engaged in a blistering
propaganda campaign against Bush for his tax increases (the
same people ignored Reagan's tax increases) and excoriated him
for selling out the voters' mandate for smaller government (at
a Heritage Foundation event just before the election, for
example, an employee carried a realistic and bloodied head of
Bush around on a platter).

Even more crucially, the elites assured the rest of us that
Bill Clinton was an acceptable Moderate, a "New Democrat," at
worst a centrist who would only supply a nuanced difference
from the centrist Republican Bush, and, at best, a person whom
Washington and New York moderates and conservatives and Wall
Street could work with.

But the ruling elite, whether Right- or Left-tinged, is
neither omnipotent nor omniscient--they goof just like the
rest of us. Instead of a moderate leftist, they got a driven,
almost fanatical leftist administration, propelled by the
president's almost maniacal energy, and the arrogant and
self-righteous Hillary's scary blend of Hard Left ideology and
implacable drive for power.

The rapid and all-encompassing Clintonian shift leftward upset
the Establishment's applecart. The sudden Hard Left move,
blended with an unprecedented nationwide reaction of loathing
for Clinton's persona and character, opened up a gap in the
center, and provoked an intense and widespread public
detestation of Clinton and of big government generally.
The public had been tipped over, and had had enough; it was
fed up. An old friend reminds me that the Republicans could
well have campaigned on the simple but highly effective slogan
of their last great party victory of 1946: "Had Enough? Vote
Republican!" In short, the right-wing populist,
semi-libertarian, anti-big government revolution had been
fully launched.

What is the ruling elite to do now? It has a difficult task on
its hands--a task which those genuinely devoted to the free
market must be sure to make impossible.

The ruling elite must do the following. First, it must make
sure that, whatever their rhetoric, the Republican leadership
in Congress (and its eventual presidential nominee) keep
matters nicely centrist and "moderate," and, however they
dress it up, maintain and even advance the big-government program.

Second, at least for the next two years, they must see to it
that Clinton swings back to his earlier New Democrat
trappings, and drops his Hard Left program. In this way, the
newly triumphant centrists of both parties could engage once
again in cozy collaboration, and the financial and media
elites could sink back comfortably into their familiar
smooth-sailing, steadily advancing collectivistic groove.

Thwarting Democracy

It is no accident that both of these courses of action imply
the thwarting of democracy and democratic choice. There is no
doubt that the Democratic Party base--leftists, minorities,
teacher unions, etc.--as well the party militants and
activists, are clamoring for the continuation and even
acceleration of Clinton's Hard Left program.

On the other hand, the popular will, as expressed in the sweep
of 1994, by the middle and working class majority, and
certainly by the militants and activists of the Republican
Party, is in favor of rolling back and toppling big government
and the welfare state. Not only that, they are fed up, angry,
and determined to do so: that is, they are in a revolutionary mood.

Have you noticed how the social democratic elites, though
eternally yammering about the vital importance of "democracy,"
American and global, quickly turn sour on a democratic choice
whenever it is something they don't like? How quick they then
are to thwart the democratic will, by media smears, calumny
and outright coercive suppression.

Since the ruling elite lives by fleecing and dominating the
ruled, their economic interests must always be in opposition.
But the fascinating feature of the American scene in recent
decades has been the unprecedented conflict, the fundamental
clash, between the ruling

liberal/intellectual/business/bureaucratic elites on the one
hand, and the mass of Americans on the other. The conflict is
not just on taxes and subsidies, but across the board
socially, culturally, morally, aesthetically, religiously.
In a penetrating article in the December 1994 Harper's, the
late sociologist Christopher Lasch, presaging his imminent
book, The Revolt of the Elites, points out how the American
elites have been in fundamental revolt against virtually all
the basic American values, customs, and traditions. Increasing
realization of this clash by the American grass roots has
fueled and accelerated the right-wing populist revolution, a
revolution not only against Washington rule, taxes, and
controls, but also against the entire panoply of attitudes and
mores that the elite are trying to foist upon the recalcitrant
American public. The public has finally caught on and is rising up angry.

Prop. 187: A Case Study

California's Proposition 187 provides a fascinating case study
of the vital rift between the intellectual, business, and
media elites, and the general public. There is the massive
funding and propaganda the elites are willing to expend to
thwart the desires of the people; the mobilizing of support by
"oppressed" minorities; and finally, when all else fails, the
willingness to wheel in the instruments of anti-democratic
coercion to block, permanently if possible, the manifest will
of the great majority of the American people. In short,
"democracy" in action!

In recent years, a flood of immigrants, largely illegal, has
been inundating California, some from Asia but mainly from
Mexico and other Latin American countries. These immigrants
have dominated and transformed much of the culture, proving
unassimilable and swamping tax-supported facilities such as
medical care, the welfare rolls, and the public schools. In
consequence, former immigration official Harold Ezell helped
frame a ballot initiative, Prop. 187, which simply called for
the abolition of all taxpayer funding for illegal immigrants in California.

Prop. 187 provided a clear-cut choice, an up-or-down
referendum on the total abolition of a welfare program for an
entire class of people who also happen to be lawbreakers. If
we are right in our assessment of the electorate, such an
initiative should gain the support of not only every
conservative and libertarian, but of every sane American.
Surely, illegals shouldn't be able to leach off the taxpayer.

Support for Prop. 187 spread like wildfire, it got signatures
galore, and it quickly spurted to a 2:1 lead in the polls,
although its organized supporters were only a network of
small, grass-roots groups that no one had ever heard of. But
every single one of the prominent, massively funded elite
groups not only opposed Prop. 187, but also smeared it unmercifully.

The smearbund included big media, big business, big unions,
organized teachers, organized medicine, organized hospitals,
social workers (the latter four groups of course benefitting
from taxpayer funds channeled to them via the
welfare-medical-public school support system), intellectuals,
writers, academics, leftists, neo-conservatives, etc. They
denounced Prop. 187 grass-roots proponents as nativists,
fascists, racists, xenophobes, Nazis, you name it, and even
accused them of advocating poverty, starvation, and typhoid fever.

Joining in this richly-funded campaign of hysteria and smear
was the entire official libertarian (or Left-libertarian)
movement, including virtually every "free-market" and
"libertarian" think tank except the Mises Institute. The
Libertarian Party of California weighed in too, taking the
remarkable step of fiercely opposing a popular measure that
would eliminate taxpayer funding of illegals, and implausibly
promising that if enough illegals came here, they would
eventually rise up and slash the welfare state.

The once-consistently libertarian Orange County Register
bitterly denounced Prop. 187 day after day, and vilified
Orange County Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who had
long been close to the Register and the libertarian movement,
for favoring Prop. 187. These editorials provoked an
unprecedented number of angry letters from the tax-paying readership.

For their part, the neo-conservative and official libertarian
think tanks joined the elite condemnation of Prop. 187.
Working closely with Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute,
Cesar Conda of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
circulated a statement against the measure that was signed by
individuals at the Heritage Foundation, the American
Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Reason
Foundation, and even the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
The Wall Street Journal denounced the initiative almost as
savagely as did the Establishment liberal Los Angeles Times,
while neo-conservative presidential hopefuls Jack Kemp and
Bill Bennett cut their own political throats by issuing a
joint statement, from the center of the Leviathan, Washington,
D.C., urging Californians to defeat the measure. This act was
self- destructive because Governor Pete Wilson, leading the
rest of the California Republican Party, saved his political
bacon by climbing early onto Prop. 187, and riding the issue
to come from far behind to crush leftist Kathleen Brown.
The case of the think tanks is a relatively easy puzzle to
solve. The big foundations that make large grants to
right-of-center organizations were emphatically against Prop.
187. Also having an influence was the desire for media
plaudits and social acceptance in the D.C. hothouse, where one
wrong answer leads to loss of respectability.

But the interesting question is why did Kemp and Bennett join
in the campaign against Prop. 187, and why do they continue to
denounce it even after it has passed? After all, they could
have said nothing; not being Californians, they could have
stayed out of the fray.

Reliable reports reveal that Kemp and Bennett were "persuaded"
to take this foolhardy stand by the famed William Kristol, in
dynastic and apostolic succession to his father Irving as
godfather of the neo-conservative movement.

It is intriguing to speculate on the means by which Kristol
managed to work his persuasive wiles. Surely the inducement
was not wholly intellectual; and surely Kemp and Bennett,
especially in dealing with the godfather, have to keep their
eye, not simply on their presidential ambitions, but also on
the ex tremely lucrative and not very onerous institutional
positions that they now enjoy.

In the meantime, as per the usual pattern, the ruling elites
were able to mobilize the "oppressed" sectors of the public
against Prop. 187, so that blacks and groups that have been
and will continue to be heavily immigrant, such as Asians and
Jews, voted in clear if modest majorities against the measure.
Voting overwhelmingly against Prop. 187, of course, were the
Hispanics, who constitute the bulk of legal and illegal
immigrants into that state, with many of the illegals voting
illegally as well. Polarizing the situation further, Mexicans
and other Hispanics demonstrated in large numbers, waving
Mexican and other Latin American flags, brandishing signs in
Spanish, and generally enraging white voters. Even the Mexican
government weighed in, with the dictator Salinas and his
successor Zedillo denouncing Prop. 187 as a "human rights violation."

After a massive October blitz by the media and the other
elites, media polls pronounced that Prop. 187 had moved from
2:1 in favor to neck-and-neck, explaining that "once the
public had had a chance to examine Prop. 187, they now
realized," and blah blah. When the smoke had cleared on
election night, however, it turned out that after all the
money and all the propaganda, Prop. 187 had passed by just
about . . . 2:1! In short, either the media polls had lied,
or, more likely, the public, sensing the media hostility and
the ideological and cultural clash, simply lied to the pollsters.

The final and most instructive single point about this saga is
simply this: the elites, having lost abysmally despite their
strenuous efforts, and having seen the democratic will go
against them in no uncertain fashion, quickly turned to naked
coercion. It took less than 24 hours after the election for a
federal judge to take out what will be a multi-year
injunction, blocking any operation of Prop. 187, until at some
future date, the federal judiciary should rule it
unconstitutional. And, in a couple of years, no doubt the
federal judicial despots, headed by the Supreme Court, will so declare.

So Much for "Democracy"!

To liberals, neocons, official conservatives, and all elites,
once the federal judiciary, in particular the venerated
Supreme Court, speaks, everyone is supposed to shut up and
swallow the result. But why? Because an independent judiciary
and judicial review are supposed to be sacred, and supply wise
checks and balances on other branches of government?
But this is the greatest con, the biggest liberal shell game,
of all. For the whole point of the Constitution was to bind
the central government with chains of steel, to keep it
tightly and strictly limited, so as to safeguard the rights
and powers of the states, local communities, and individual Americans.

In the early years of the American Republic, no political
leader or statesman waited for the Supreme Court to interpret
the Constitution; and the Court did not have the monopoly of
interpreting the Constitution or of enforcing it.
Unfortunately, in practice, the federal judiciary is not
"independent" at all. It is appointed by the President,
confirmed by the Senate, and is from the very beginning part
of the federal government itself.

But, as John C. Calhoun wisely warned in 1850, once we allow
the Supreme Court to be the monopoly interpreter of
governmental--and therefore of its own--power, eventual
despotism by the federal government and its kept judiciary
becomes inevitable. And that is precisely what has happened.

From being the instrument of binding down and severely
limiting the power of the federal Leviathan, the Supreme Court
and the rest of the judiciary have twisted and totally
transformed the Constitution into a "living" instrument and
thereby a crucial tool of its own despotic and virtually
absolute power over the lives of every American citizen.

One of the highly popular measures among the American people
these days is term limits for state and federal legislatures.
But the tragedy of the movement is its misplaced focus.
Liberals are right, for once, when they point out that the
public can "limit" legislative terms on their own, as they did
gloriously in the November 1994 elections, by exercising their
democratic will and throwing the rascals out.

But of course liberals, like official conservatives, cleverly
fail to focus on those areas of government that are in no way
accountable to the American public, and who cannot be thrown
out of office by democratic vote at the polls. It is these
imperial, swollen, and tyrannical branches of government that
desperately need term limits and that no one is doing anything
about. Namely, the executive branch which, apart from the
president himself by third-term limit, is locked permanently
into civil service and who therefore cannot be kicked out by
the voters; and, above all, the federal judges, who are there
for fourteen years, or, in the case of the ruling Supreme
Court oligarchy, fastened upon us for life.

What we really need is not term limits for elected
politicians, but the abolition of the civil service (which
only began in the 1880s) and its alleged "merit system" of
technocratic and bureaucratic elites; and, above all,
elimination of the despotic judiciary.

Why Democracy Anyway?

Across the ideological spectrum, from leftist to liberal to
neo-conservative to official conservative, "democracy" has
been treated as a shibboleth, as an ultimate moral absolute,
virtually replacing all other moral principles including the
Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. But despite this
universal adherence, as Mises Institute senior fellow David
Gordon has pointed out, "virtually no argument is ever offered
to support the desirability of . . . democracy, and the little
that is available seems distressingly weak." The overriding
imperative of democracy is considered self-evident and sacred,
apparently above discussion among mere mortals.

What, in fact, is so great about democracy? Democracy is
scarcely a virtue in itself, much less an overriding one, and
not nearly as important as liberty, property rights, a free
market, or strictly limited government. Democracy is simply a
process, a means of selecting government rulers and policies.
It has but one virtue, but this can indeed be an important
one: it provides a peaceful means for the triumph of the popular will.

Ballots, in the old phrase, can serve as a peaceful and
non-dis-ruptive "substitute for bullets." That is why it makes
sense to exhort people who advocate a radical (in the sense of
sharp, not necessarily leftist) change from the existing
polity to "work within the system" to convince a majority of
voters rather than to engage in violent revolution.

When the voters desire radical change, therefore, it becomes
vitally important to reflect that change quickly and smoothly
in political institutions; blockage of that desire subverts
the democratic process itself, and polarizes the situation so
as to threaten or even bring about violent conflict in
society. If ballots are indeed to be a substitute for bullets,
then the ballots have to be allowed to work and take rapid effect.

This is what makes the blockage of voter mandates such as
Prop. 187 so dangerous and destructive. And yet, it is clear
that the ruling elites, failing at the ballot box, are ready
and eager to use anti-democratic means to suppress the desires of the voters.

Prop. 187 is only one example. Another is the Gatt treaty
setting up a World Trade Organization to impose global
mercantilism, which was overwhelmingly opposed by the voters.
It was brought to a vote in a repudiated and lame-duck
Congress, by politicians who, as Mises Institute president Lew
Rockwell pointed out, were virtually wearing price tags around their necks.

No doubt that the federal judiciary would find nothing
unconstitutional about this. But it is ready to manufacture
all sorts of constitutional "rights" which appear nowhere in
the Constitution and are soundly opposed by the electorate.
These include the right to an education, including the
existence of well-funded public schools; the right of gays not
to be discriminated against; civil rights, affirmative action, and on and on.

Here we need deal only with the famous Roe v. Wade decision,
in which the Supreme Court manufactured a federal "right" to
abortion; ever since the founding of the Constitution, matters
such as these were always considered part of the jurisdiction
of state governments and the police power. The federal
government is only supposed to deal with foreign affairs and
disputes between states.

As Washington Times columnist and Mises Institute adjunct
scholar Samuel Francis has pointed out, the horror at
anti-abortionists employing violence against abortion doctors
and clinics is appropriate, but misses the crucial point:
namely, that those who believe that abortion is murder and
should be outlawed were told, like everyone else, to be
peaceful and "work within" the democratic system. They did so,
and persuaded voters and legislatures of a number of states to
restrict or even outlaw abortion.

But all of this has been for nought, because the unelected,
unaccountable, life-tenured Supreme Court has pronounced
abortion a federal right, thereby bypassing every state
legislature, and everyone is now supposed to roll over and
play dead. But in that case, aren't such anti-democratic
pronouncements of the Supreme Court despots an open invitation to violence?

In response to violence by a few anti-abortionists, the
pro-abortion movement has come dangerously close to calling
for suppression of free speech: since they claim that those
who believe that abortion is murder are really responsible for
the violence since they have created an ideological
atmosphere, a "climate of hate," which sets the stage for
violence. But the shoe, of course, is really on the other
foot. The stage, the conditions for the violence, have been
set, not by anti-abortion writers and theorists, but by the
absolute tyrants on the Supreme Court and those who weave
apologetics for that absolute rule.

It was not always thus. The truly democratic spirit of the Old
Republic was much better expressed in the famous words of
President Andrew Jackson about the leading big-government man
of that epoch: "Mr. Justice Marshall has made his decision;
now let him enforce it."

What To Do About the Judiciary

An essential ingredient of a truly effective revolution is
that something must be done about the tyrannical judiciary. It
is not enough, though vital, to advocate other essential
legislative measures to roll back and abolish big government
and the welfare state. The federal judiciary must be defanged
for any of these programs to work.

Assuming that public pressure and voting can gain working
control of Congress, it must then proceed against the federal
judiciary. How? Impeachment is much too slow and cumbersome a
process, and can only be done judge by judge. A constitutional
amendment, to be submitted by Congress or the required number
of states, the favorite goal of the term limits and Prop. 187
movements, is better, but is also very slow and can be blocked
by a minority of the people. The swiftest and most direct path
would be for Congress to act, as it can without cumbersome
amendments, to remove virtually the entire jurisdiction of the federal judiciary.

Thus, if it is so desired, Congress can repeal the various
federal judiciary acts and pass a new one returning the
federal courts to their original very narrow and limited
jurisdiction. And while, within the Constitution, Congress has
to pay each Supreme Court member his existing salary, it can,
using its appropriation power, strip the judges of all staff,
clerks, buildings, perquisites, etc.

Furthermore, the Constitution only mandates a Supreme Court;
Congress can abolish the rest of the federal judiciary,
including the district and appeals courts, and thereby
effectively crush the power of the Supreme Court by leaving it
alone to try to handle all the thousands of cases that come
annually before the federal courts. In a war between Congress
and the federal courts, Congress possesses all the trump cards.

Has the Revolution Already Been Betrayed?

It took less than twenty-four hours for the great, peaceful,
democratic, popular revolution against big government and all
its works to be betrayed. Not just by the courts, but most
strikingly by the leadership among Republican Congressmen and
Senators now positioned to thwart the will of the new
Republicans whom the public installed to carry out their
wishes. The leadership was egged on by our old friend William
Kristol, who, at every post- election speech, urged
Republicans not to go on "kamikaze" or "suicide" missions
against big government. Instead, he urged them to focus on
institutional reforms, win symbolic victories against one or
two programs, slowly build public support for new reforms, etc.

And what should be the goal of all this tinkering and
maneuvering? The goal, as he told an Empower America audience,
is for Republicans to win back the White House in 1996. To
Kristol and his friends, power for its own sake is the sole
end of politics. What about limited government, liberty,
property, and the like? Those are fine ideas to feed the
conservative masses, but they have no relevance to "governing."

While the rank-and-file of conservatives has long caught on to
Bob "High Tax" Dole, the major and dangerous betrayer of the
Revolution is Newt Gingrich, who often engages in fiery,
revolutionary, rightist rhetoric while actually collaborating
with and sidling up to the collectivist welfare state. In the
eighties, his spending record was not especially conservative
and, indeed, was below average for Republicans. Recall too
that the major legislative victory of this self-proclaimed
"free trader" was the imposition of trade sanctions on South
Africa, which he and Jack Kemp worked so hard for.
Unfortunately, the conservative public is all too often taken
in by mere rhetoric and fails to weigh the actual deeds of
their political icons. So the danger is that Gingrich will
succeed not only in betraying, but in conning the
revolutionary public into thinking that they have already won
and can shut up shop and go home. There are a few critical
tests of whether Gingrich or his "contract" is really, in
actual deed, keeping faith with the revolution or whether he,
or the other Republican leaders, are betraying it.

Taxes. Are tax rates, especially income taxes, substantially
reduced (and, as soon as possible, abolished)? More important,
is total tax revenue substantially reduced? Unfortunately, all
the Republican leaders, including Gingrich, are still firmly
committed to the axiom underlying the disastrous Bush-Democrat
budget agreement of 1990: that any cut in tax revenue anywhere
must be "balanced" by increased taxes, or "fees," or
"contributions," somewhere else. So, in addition to big tax
cuts in income taxes, no new or increased taxes should be
proposed in any other area.

Government Spending. There must be big cuts in federal
government spending, and that means real cuts, "cut-cuts," and
not "capping," cuts in the rate of growth of spending, cuts in
projected increases, consolidations, spending transfers, and
all the rest of the nonsense that has altered the meaning of
the simple word "cut." So far, "revolutionary" Gingrich has
only talked about capping some spending to allow "cost of
living" increases and transferring spending responsibilities
from one agency or level of government to another.

But do I mean, horrors! cuts in defense, cuts in Social
Security, cuts in Medicare, and all the rest? Yes, yes, and
yes. It would be simplest and most effective to pass, say, an
immediate, mandated 30% federal spending cut, to take effect
in the first year. The slash would override any existing
entitlements, and the bureaucrats could work out their
hysteria by deciding what should be cut within this 30% mandate.

Deregulation. Deregulation of business and of individuals
should be massive and immediate. There is no conceivable
worthy argument for gradualism or "phasing in" in this area.
It goes without saying that all unfunded mandates to states or
individuals should be abolished forthwith. All "civil rights,"
disabilities "rights," regulations, etc. should be abolished.
The same goes for any ballot or campaign regulations, let
alone "reforms." Regulations and controls on labor relations,
including the Norris-LaGuardia anti-injunction act and the
sainted National Labor Relations Act, should be abolished.
Privatization. A serious move should be made to privatize
federal government operations, and if not, to turn them over
to the states, or at least, to private competition. A clear
example would be the losing, inefficient, backward Postal
Service. Federal public lands is another excellent example.
Divesting federal assets, in addition to being a great good in
itself, and aiding the Western anti-federal land revolution,
would also help lower government expenditures.

Cutting the Bureaucracy. Again, capping, or slowing the rate
of increase, of government employees, doesn't make a cut.
There must be massive reductions, including abolition of
entire useless and counter-productive government agencies. As
a good start, how about abolishing the Departments of Energy,
Education, HUD, Health and Human Services, and Commerce? And
that means abolishing their functions as well. Otherwise, in a
typical bureaucratic trick, the same functions would be
shuffled to other existing departments or agencies,
Racial Preferences and Gun Control. Every honest pollster has
to admit that these two issues were crucially important in the
election, especially among a segment of the white male
population who had previously evinced little interest in
politics. Any government that denies a person the right to
defend himself against private and public intrusion, and also
prevents students and workers from realizing gains from their
own hard work and study, is not a morally legitimate
government. Yet at the urging of the Republican elite, the
party has said nothing on these two issues. Gingrich himself
has pledged not to repeal the Brady Bill, and the subject of
civil-rights socialism is still banned from public discussion.
Republicans are well positioned to break the ban, but the
leadership is not interested in doing so.

Ending Counterfeit Money. Money is the most important single
feature of the economy, and one way in which the government
finances its own deficits and creates perpetual inflation is
through what is essentially the printing of counterfeit money.

To end this critical and destructive feature of statism and
government intervention, we must return to a sound, free
market money, which means a return to a gold-coin standard for
the dollar and the abolition of another crucial despotic
federal agency not subject to popular or Congressional
control: the Federal Reserve System, by which the government
cartelizes and subsidizes the banking system. Short of
abolition of the Fed, its operations should be "capped" or
frozen, that is, it should never be allowed to purchase more assets.

Foreign Intervention, Including Foreign Aid and International
Bu reaucracies. Here is yet another case where all the
"respectable" ruling elites, be they bureaucrats, academics,
think tanks, big media, big business, banks, etc. are in total
and admitted conflict with the general public. Under cover of
the alleged necessity for "bi-partisanship," the elites have
imposed intervention, foreign aid, internationally managed
trade, and approaches to world economic and even political
government, against the wishes of the great majority of the American public.

In every case, from the United Nations and the Marshall Plan
to Nafta and GATT, the Republican leadership has gone in
lockstep with the Democrats. As a result, Clinton was able to
wheel in every ex-President, regardless of party, to agitate
for each new measure of his. And at each step of the way, the
President and the elites have threatened disaster to the world
if each step is even delayed. And so far they have gotten away
with it, despite the wishes of the public.

Using the above checklist, and sticking to these guidelines,
every reader can easily decide for himself whether Gingrich,
Dole, et al. have betrayed, or have cleaved to, the popular
anti-big government, anti-Washington revolution. Forget such
unenforceable diversions and gimmicks as the balanced-budget
amendment, changing committee names, imposing new laws on
Congress, or such relative trivia as the capital-gains tax
cut, and look to real tax cuts, really balanced budgets,
repealed regulations, and eliminated agencies.

The clearest test of whether the revolution has already been
betrayed is to look at the truly outrageous action of Gingrich
and Dole in betraying not only the popular revolution, but
even their own recent victory. For they have scrambled, not
only to pass the Clinton-Bush Gatt/WTO, but also to defy their
own voters by agreeing to rush it through a totally
discredited, Democrat-run, lame-duck Congress. The usual media
outlets were strangely silent on the views of the American
public, but an independent poll showed that 75 % of the people
opposed what as essentially a criminal procedure.

The disgusting spectacle of the defeated and discredited Tom
Foley presiding over the shoving through of Gatt, with the
help of Gingrich and Dole, and with the aid of the
unconstitutional "fast track," was too much to bear. Foley is
now lounging at home on the $123,804 pension he is "entitled"
to for his years of government "service." Even after we kick
them out of office, we can't stop these leeches from voting
for global government schemes and sucking the blood of the taxpayer!

In this shocking and abject surrender to the Executive,
Congress agreed to cut its own throat by depriving itself (and
all its constituents) of the power to discuss and amend this
monstrous treaty and even to collude in calling it an
"agreement," so they can violate the clear constitutional
requirement for a two-thirds vote of the Senate.

The elites can generally count on liberals to support
big-government legislation like Gatt, Nafta, and the rest of
the mercantilist-managerial apparatus of global economic
control. But we must not forget, as the Wall Street Journal
bragged the day of the Senate vote, that "The House GOP has
now provided the bulk of votes for Bill Clinton's two notable
achievements--Nafta and GATT."

The rank and file is not at fault for these travesties of
multinational statism. Many decent Republicans, including the
others from Gingrich's state, voted against the treaty. But
Gingrich will now use his power to punish such dissenters, and
the incident will not be the last plunge taken by the
Republican leadership into the politics of betrayal.

What Should Be Done?

The above assessment does not mean that there is no hope, that
nothing can be done. On the contrary, what can and must be
done is to mobilize the radical and revolutionary sentiment
among the people. We need to translate the public's deeply
held views into continuing pressure upon the government,
especially on the Senators and Congressmen they have recently elected.

Among the freshman Congressmen, in particular, there are many
genuine rightists and populists who sincerely burn to roll
back big government, and who are not beholden to the
Gingriches and the Rockefellers of the Republican
Establishment. The voters and their organizations, aided by
the truly conservative members of Congress, could keep
pressuring the political elites to start putting into effect,
instead of blocking, the will of the very voters that put them
into power. If not, they can be swept away.

But nothing can be done without education. It is the crucially
important task of conservative or libertarian intellectuals,
think tanks, and opinion leaders such as the Mises Institute,
to educate the public, businessmen, students, academics,
journalists, and politicians about the true nature of what is
going on, and about the vicious nature of the bi-partisan ruling elites.

We must remember that the elites are a minority of the
population; they have gotten away with their deceit and their
misinformation because they have been in effective control of
the institutional (media, intellectuals, etc.) channels that
mould public opinion.

Most of the public have already come to a healthy suspicion
and distrust of all the elites, and of their tendency to
deceive and betray. But this mood of healthy distrust is not
enough; the public and the worthy people in the media,
academia, and politics, also have to understand what is really
going on. In particular, they have to realize what measures
would fulfill the popular will and carry through its desired
revolution; what measures could only divert and scuttle the
revolution against big government; and why and how the ruling
opinion moulders have been deceiving them.

The Mises Institute, small as it is, is uniquely positioned to
lead this education revolution. It is not beholden to
government grants, big corporate interests, or even to the
large foundations. That means it cannot be dictated to. Though
relatively poor in overall resources, the Mises Institute
possesses the most important assets of all: clarity of purpose
and independence.

In the 12 years of its existence, Lew Rockwell carefully
guarded these two assets, relying entirely on the financial
support of principled individuals and unconnected businesses,
and he has done this to the astonishment and anger of
Left-liberals, official conservatives, and the legions of
politico-think-tankers and Left-intellectuals on the make.

In all these tasks, the Mises Institute has already been
extraordinarily effective. Standing virtually alone, and with
severely limited resources, the Mises Institute has had a
remarkably strong ideological impact. Just one example: the
Mises Institute was first in print back in January with a
sweeping denunciation of the World Trade Organization that not
only exposed the present attempt to impose global trade
management, but also delved into its history, tracing the WTO
back through the 1970s, the 1940s, and even back to Woodrow
Wilson's "World Trade Tribunal."

That article, along with the rest of the Mises Institute's
work, defined the debate on the Right, Left, and center. Even
one day before the House vote, an Associated Press story, in
its section providing historical perspective, plagiarized from
the Mises Institute virtually word for word.

The Institute didn't win--although it gave Clinton and his
allies in the Republican Party plenty of trouble--but it did
mobilize the American people and make sure that the revolution
against big government will continue and intensify. And at its
intellectual head will be the Institute.

By simply entering the public and intellectual debate from a
principled and consistent libertarian and free-market
perspective, the Mises Institute has already exposed the lies
of that multitude of statists, would-be world planners,
neo-Keynesian economists, left-over Marxists, and pretenders
who dare to use such glorious words as "liberty, . . free
markets," and "free trade" to connive at the exact opposite.
The word "liberal" was stolen from us by the social democrats
a long time ago. Now we are in danger of these other words
being filched from us as well. Only light from those dedicated
to the truth can dispel this fog.

The Mises Institute has already been exerting the greatest
ideological and political leverage per person and per dollar
of any organization in this country. Any increase in its
resources will be multiplied beyond measure in degree of impact.

Those who stress the importance of ideas in society and
politics tend to concentrate solely on the long-run, on future
generations. All that is true and important and must never be
forgotten. But ideas are not only for the ages; they are
vitally important in the here-and-now.

In times of revolutionary ferment in particular, social and
political change tends to be sudden and swift. The elections
of November 1994 are only one striking example. The Mises
Institute has a unique and glorious opportunity to make its
ideas--of liberty, of free markets, of private property--count
right now, and to help take back our glorious America from
those who have betrayed its soul and its spirit.