Rothbard, Reflections on Mary McCarthy, the Ayn Rand Cult (Liberty, March 1989)

by PFS on July 20, 2026

From the vault: Murray N. Rothbard, various entries in the Reflections section, Liberty (March, 1989): 9, 11, 22.

This is issue also contains Rothbard’s article “Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy”¹ and a rebuttal to Rothbard’s earlier piece [Rothbard, Greenhouse defects (Liberty, Jan. 1989)], Daniel M. Karlan, “An Environmentalist Contra Rothbard,” Liberty (March 1989): 35–36.

Re “pomposo” remark in the McCarthy piece: re his use of “seriosos” in other contexts: Rothbard, “The December Surprise,” in The Irrepressable Rothbard (Feb. 1993); Kinsella, KOL493 | Rothbard’s Greatest Hits: A Personal Mix Tape (Porto, Portugal); Kinsella, Lawyer apology
Rothbard, The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult (2), LewRockwell.com, September 12, 2002
Peter Schwartz, “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty,” in Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (Meridian, 1990) and the “Libertarians” entry in The Ayn Rand Lexicon (http://aynrandlexicon.com)
Rothbard’s Objectivist Influences
Objectivism Schism Form Letter; I break for Randians; Breaking, Broken, Broke: Silly Objectivist Tendencies
Flynn, Daniel J. (2025). ”Murray Rothbard’s Lost Letters on Ayn Rand.” J. Libertarian Stud. 29, no. 2: 35–50

Here are the reflections.

McCarthyism for moderns – It was a pleasure to read Karen Shabetai’s review of the Mary McCarthy biography in the January Liberty. I would like to add an emphasis on Mary McCarthy’s elegant, lucid, spare, and highly witty style, and also my heartfelt belief that the style deeply reflects the mind of the author: “the style is the man.” As Ms Shabetai observes, Mary McCarthy’s famous conflict with Lillian Hellman was not simply ideological; there is an even greater contrast in their qualities of mind. And I think the issue goes beyond the simple matter of “honesty vs. dishonesty.” What Mary McCarthy has reacted against all her life is the pretentious, humorless, flatulent, pomposo style of authors like Hellman and Arthur Miller. Her rejection of those twin twentieth century despotic intellectual fashions, Freudianism and Marxism, reflect the same rational, crystal-clear, satiric, anti-pretentious cast of mind, a mind that repudiates bad writing and murky thinking. -MNR

The movement that satirizes itself – In the January Letters, Frank Bubb chides me, in ‘The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult” for raking over old bones, and claims, only on the strength of listening to some Peikoff tapes, that the Bad Old Days of the RandCult are dead and gone. Balderdash! The RandCult, even though decimated from the glory days of the 60s, still lives. Read Peter Schwartz, or better yet, talk to an orthodox Randian in the flesh, and in five minutes, the veneer of good fellowship disappears, and the old “how-dare-you-talk-to-me-that-way-about-the-greatest-person-of-all-time” RandCultist emerges in full flower. Sad to say, similar personality traits pop up even in the more numerous group of disillusioned ex-Randians. Even those who recognize and repudiate unfortunate aspects of the RandCult will still proclaim, at the drop of a hat, that “Ayn Rand is the greatest (novelist, philosopher, woman, person) of all time.”

Mr. Bubb assumes that I exaggerated the grotesque features of the RandCult. I don’t blame him. No one who was not a RandCultist, especially in New York City, the Randian Heartland, can grasp the full depths of that movement. Besides, as any veteran libertarian ought to realize, in our beloved movement, you don’t have to exaggerate for dramatic or comic effect: a mere recital of the facts will do. -MNR

Chester Alan Arthur and the 1988 campaign – Congratulations to Chester Alan Arthur [R.W. Bradford. —SK] for a thoughtful and comprehensive article on the Libertarian Party and the 1988 campaign [“High Noon for the Libertarian Party?”, Jan. 1989. —SK]. The time after a Presidential campaign is the time for Libertarians to assess and reevaluate their strategy and tactics, and decide what to do from now on. Arthur’s article deserves to be read by every libertarian, in or out of the Party.

We’ve already won several teeny local elections, and while this is great, these victories have hardly invigorated the Party as a whole. No matter how much we all love Podunk, let’s face it, a victory there doesn’t mean a helluva lot outside of Podunk’s marketing area.

One fascinating contrast is Arthur’s assessment of the Larry Dodge campaign with Dodge’s own contribution to the post-election discussion. Whereas Dodge seems ready to liquidate the LP as a political party, Arthur makes the crucially important point that the Dodge campaign succeeded in getting its issues co-opted by the major parties in Montana! It should be emphasized that the LP does not have to actually win elections before it becomes politically significant: with a small fraction of the vote, e.g. Larry’s 5 percent, the LP can have an important effect in pushing the major parties in our direction. Like the Socialist Party in the New Deal era, we would love to have the major parties adopting our programs! And we libertarians don’t have to worry about running out of issues to push: we can always up the ante!

Several old chestnuts are being trotted out in the wake of the disappointing election results. (As Arthur points out, Libertarians are always being disappointed!) For example, the the extreme grass-rootsers (e.g. Means, Dodge), who would have us abandon presidential campaigns and concentrate on a few local elections “which we can really win.” Well, we’ve already won several teeny, local elections, and while this is great, these victories have hardly invigorated the Party as a whole. No matter how much we all love Podunk, let’s face it, a victory there doesn’t mean a helluva lot outside of Podunk’s marketing area. As Arthur and many other people have argued, we can’t expect immediate victory; the fight for liberty is a protracted struggle, and will not be over in a day. The grass-rootsers overlook the obvious fact that the presidential campaign is our centerpiece; not only does it get the national publicity, it energizes ourselves and our own troops. The national ticket defines our party, and, without it, the entire party would disintegrate and collapse into a few local campaigns, and, then, quickly, into oblivion. It is the national ticket that energizes and invigorates the various local campaigns throughout the country.

A disquieting development that Arthur does not mention is how badly our star local Congressional races did this year. The LP had four outstanding congressional races, where credible, articulate, and hard-working candidates got a lot of publicity, raised a lot of money, seemingly did very well, and then … flopped badly, getting the same one to two percent of the vote that our numerous paper candidates earned. More specifically, Jim Hedbor, Vermont, got only 0.75% of the total vote; Don Ernsberger, Pennsylvania, 2.8%; Dick Jacobs, Michigan, 0.76%; John Vernon, California, 1.9%. This, and not the Ron Paul vote total, was the most disappointing aspect of the campaign.

It seems to me that the lesson of the collapse of our star local campaigns is the reverse of that pushed by our grass-rootsers: that salvation for the Party and the cause does not come from the grass-roots. On the contrary, that we must redouble our efforts to wage successful presidential campaigns, because from such campaigns more grass-roots blessings will flow.

And l can’t go for the pap that “votes don’t matter.” Of course, votes matter; getting votes is, after all, the point of running in elections. ln the first place, vote totals are perceived by everyone, including the media and the public, as the crucial test of electoral success. The media and public exaggerate the importance of vote totals, because they don’t understand the goals of an ideological party. But they do have an important point. Vote totals, after all, are the gauge of how many people have bought our message to the extent of pulling the lever for our candidates. There are, to be sure, pace Bergland, many other important criteria for us: e.g. growth in Party membership, and success in spreading our message. But this does not mean we should overlook the importance of votes. And besides, very often, votes will correlate well with party membership and the spread of the message.

In assessing and evaluating our campaigns, we should not suffer from false expectations followed by burnout; but, on the other hand, we should also not be Pollyannas for whom everything is always great, and ignore the accountability of the campaign to volunteers, to contributors, or to the cause of liberty itself.

To conclude: it should be clear from the January issue of Liberty and from our analysis that: the Libertarian Party is alive and well; that it did creditably, though not spectacularly, in the 1988 election; that the Party is vital to the cause of liberty and that all attempts to liquidate it, curtail it, or weaken its message should be repudiated; that LROC should be sent packing and told to peddle their papers to their “libertarian” buddy George Bush; and that we must never lose sight of the centrality of our presidential campaigns. -MNR