The November Memorandum....

[redcliffsw]

Murray Rothbard wrote this essay one week after the November 1994 election.
Well worth the read.......even for Republicans and liberal Democrats.  

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.

read more:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard155.html

[Patriot]

November 2010.... Second verse, same as the first!

Good article, redcliffsw.