“We shall repeal the twentieth century.”
In January 1992, libertarian economist Murray Rothbard delivered a rousing speech before a group of prominent rightwingers gathered in a hotel near Washington, DC. It was a momentous occasion. Something was brewing on the far right. The radical wing of the Republican Party was uniting behind self-identifying “paleoconservative” Pat Buchanan and gearing up for a revolt against the establishment. Buchanan had just announced he was challenging President George H.W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in the upcoming GOP primaries. He was the guest of honor and the keynote speaker for the event. But that night near DC, this was Rothbard’s crowd.
Murray Rothbard was a fairly obscure figure for most of his life. He was too extreme for institutions that had any ambition to reach the mainstream, and so he lingered on the fringes. But as the paleo-revolt gained momentum, Rothbard rose with it as one of its intellectual mentors and one of Buchanan’s close advisors.
Rothbard often described himself as a “paleo-libertarian” – but most importantly, he was not a “conservative.” That label he rejected. In fact, he despised the conservative establishment and the formerly liberal neo-conservatives almost as much as he hated what he called the “loony left.” Rothbard was a man of the “radical right,” he insisted, a “radical reactionary.”
In the speech he delivered that night – later published in essay form under the title “A Strategy for the Right” – Rothbard outlined his truly radical vision and what he imagined as the pathway to implement it. The problem, as Rothbard saw it, was that the “loony left” (the liberals, social-democrats, socialists, Marxists, Communists… they were basically all the same to him) had taken over America and destroyed everything that was worth conserving. To undo the damage, Rothbard demanded the “total abolition of the New Deal state”; he also wanted to abolish modern democracy and the civil rights order – which he considered an outrageous federal overreach in service of an ideology of “victimology.”
The problem, Rothbard explained, was that the leftists and liberals had completely taken over all elite institutions, and those liberal elites were now controlling the masses with the help of intellectuals and professors. In response, the Right needed to unite behind a “charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly.” Once such a leader was found, anything was possible. Rothbard felt inspired by the fall of the Soviet Union which had officially dissolved mere weeks before he gave his speech: It seemed to indicate that even the evilest systems could indeed be brought down. As Rothbard’s speech reached its crescendo, he revealed his vision of counter-revolutionary change: “We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the twentieth century.”