On the November election and its aftermath, there's wonderful news and there's terrible news. The wonderful news, of course, is that the great right-wing grass roots revolution against Big Government, a revolution we at Triple R had been heralding since last summer, struck the Democrat Party in November everywhere it could, and swept it out of power. The terrible news is that it took less than twenty-four hours for that revolution to be grievously betrayed. From his own perspective, Ralph Nader put it very well: that most Congressional revolutions are betrayed no sooner than the following January, whereas this one was sold down the river in December. Nader was speaking, of course, about the most glaring example of that betrayal: Dole, Gingrich, Armey and the rest of the new Republican leadership leaping to collaborate with the hated and repudiated Clinton to bring back the discredited lameduck Democrat Congress to ram Gatt down the throats of the American people.

Bringing back the defeated Foley, Sasser, and the rest of the gang was a direct slap in the face by the Republican elites of the very voters who had just put them into power. In England, there is a custom at meetings for the rank-and-file of organizations to shout "Shame!" and "Resign!" when their leaders do something particularly odious. There should have been such an outcry from every rooftop in America at this act of treachery by the quisling Gingriches and Doles.

Why couldn't the Republicans wait a few weeks for their own Congress? The argument that the new Gatt-WTC was supposed to begin this January is absurd; most countries haven't even ratified Gatt yet. The real reason is that the unconstitutional "fast track" provision expired at the end of 1994; in that rule, which applied only to trade agreements like Nafta and Gatt, Congress agreed to tie its own hands, and eliminate all possible voting on amendments, so that Congress could only vote "yes" or "no" on an agreement handed to it by the president. But couldn't Gatt then have been "amended to death"? Yes, and that's the whole point. Just like any other important measure, including the annual budget. That's what representative republican government, in contrast to dictatorship and its stooge parliaments, is supposed to be all about.

The news of the betrayal of the revolution is appalling but unfortunately not surprising. And Gatt is only the most immediate and evident example of the looming across-the-board treachery. Both parties, the Republican as well as the Democrat, have long been run by an effectively bipartisan Big Government elite that is strongly opposed to the interests and the values, economic, moral, cultural, and religious, of the vast majority of the American people. This bipartisan elite is in the minority, but it has managed to control public policy for a half-century because it is strong in wealth (important sectors of Big Business and high-finance – summed up in the old phrases "Rockefeller Republican" and "Eastern Establishment") and in the opinion-moulding classes and institutions: e.g., writers, technocrats, policy wonks, planners, and bureaucrats. A combination of vast wealth and numbers of writer-intellectuals means that the respectable and influential big media – the press and television – endorse and push for the statist, Big Government cause.

A quick rundown of the crucial issues that helped ignite and propel the November revolution, and where all elites, including the new Republican Party leaders, strongly oppose the public will:

Open Borders: Everyone agrees that the public wants to crack down on illegal immigrants and restrict immigration per se; the elites say no.

Foreign Aid: Everyone also agrees that the American people are against foreign aid, especially now that the Cold War is dead and gone. But all the Republicrat elite are hysterically opposed to any whittling down of foreign aid.

Foreign Intervention: Now that the Cold War is over, why does the United States have to intervene everywhere; why do we have to push every other country around for its own alleged good, and at vast expense to the American taxpayer? Everyone agrees that the American public couldn't care less about the fate of Bosnia, or Rwanda, or Somalia, or Haiti. And yet the only criticism the Doles and Gingriches are leveling at Clinton's foreign policy is that he is not slaughtering enough Serbs.

Welfare: The American people want to abolish welfare altogether. The Gingrich-Armey "reform" only wants to add expensive government-financed orphanages to Clinton's own phony welfare reform. The key point to look at is that all of these so-called reforms would add to the taxpayer financing of welfare, not sharply reduce or abolish it.

Victimological Regulations: The American people want to get rid of affirmative action, all sorts of "civil rights," and other victimological special privileges that oppress the majority of Americans, injure the consumers and cripple businesses. The Gingrichian response? Zero. The elites want to keep the current system, and at most only tinker with it around the edges.

Gun Control: A crucial spark for the November Revolution was the intensifying tyranny of gun control. The current Republican response? Virtually zero. The bipartisan ruling elite loves gun control, and the Gingrichians only oppose it in rhetoric, not in deeds. Has any Republican leader called for repeal of the Brady Bill?

Deficits and Government Spending: The liberal Democrats may be hypocritical about deficits, but they have a point. The supply-side alibi, except for such comparatively minor areas as capital-gains taxes, is clearly wrong. Deficits are bad, as the public realizes, and to cut them requires extensive, far-reaching slashes in government spending. And that means real cuts, not phony "cuts" in rate of government growth, cuts in projected future government expenses, or "caps." And it also means big cuts in federal government functions, as well as abolition of entire departments and agencies. The public demands such action. But there have been no budget cuts proposed in any Gingrichian program, and no mention of abolishing the Departments of Education and Energy, let alone other agencies.

Instead, all we are offered is the Gingrichian balanced-budget amendment which not only slows the reform process to a crawl of many years through the amendment procedure, but is also an unenforceable hoax and a sham. Why can't Gingrich and Dole avoid this posturing and simply present their own balanced budget this winter as an alternative to Clinton's? Because they too favor Big Government and centralized power in Washington, D.C., that's why.

Money: Any serious people's revolution would do something to curb or abolish the inflationary government-banker cartel, the Federal Reserve. The American people are far more opposed to the Fed than are the Republican elites, who virtually worship the Fed and whoever its chairman happens to be. The people not only distrust and dislike the Fed, they also believe correctly that the only genuine money is gold. Why does no Republican leader call for return to the gold standard, a truly free-market money?

There is an acid test that every leader can apply for himself for the next two years, about the Republicans in Congress, be they the Doles or the Gingriches. At each stage forget the rhetoric and ask yourself: what did they do? Did the Republicans, did the conservative Republicans, singly or together actually reduce, substantially and sharply, the scope and impact of Big Government? Did they roll back – really roll back – the power of Washington, D.C., over your lives and your property?

I should emphasize that I don't believe that all is hopeless, or that we might as well retire to some island. On the contrary, the good news is not only that the mass of the public have become fierce opponents of government intrusion and enemies of Leviathan; the good news is also that some of the freshmen Congressmen and Senators, especially in the House, are dedicated, fiery right-wing populist conservatives and libertarians, who are true embodiments of the November Revolution. They are beholden to their principles and to their constituents, not to the perks and power that might be handed out by Newt Gingrich and his cohorts. Many of them only became Republican candidates because the party elite had no idea that they would win. There are many hardcore paleos in Congress, and other sympathizers who are open to persuasion, either by conviction or because they realize that this is what their constituents demand. One of the leading Republicans in the Senate, for example, was converted against Gatt by reading the Mises Institute's sparkling booklet, The WTO Reader. Such impact can be multiplied many-fold.

Of the many worthy freshmen in the House, two can be singled out. One is Jack Metcalf, a new representative from Washington State. I have met Jack several times. A former State Senator, Metcalf is a veteran paleo-libertarian activist, an Old Rightist champion of the Tenth Amendment and strict constitutional government, a knowledgeable advocate of the free-market gold standard, and an implacable foe of the income tax and of the Federal Reserve. A promising young newcomer to the House is the Texan Steve Stockman, who, with very little money, toppled the powerful liberal Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks. Stockman, who featured a poster "FIGHT CRIME, SHOOT BACK," stressed three magnificent themes in his campaign: (l) an accountant, he has dedicated himself to the abolition of the dread Internal Revenue Service; (2) he hammered away at Brooks's sellout to the gun-control forces in voting for the ban on "assault" weapons; and (3) he played on TV, over and over again, spots of the Janet Reno-BATF holocaust of the Branch Davidians at Waco, interspersed with Rep. Brooks's cruel pronouncement: "those people got what they deserved." No Jack, you got what you deserved on November 8.

The important thing now is for the mass of the public not to be lulled, not to think that the war is over, now that Gingrich has been elected, and that we all might as well go home. On the contrary, the first battle has been won, but many others remain in this glorious but protracted struggle. The next vital step is to keep alert, study the continuing record of this Congress, and to keep putting the pressure on the Republican party and its elites. In short, to help the paleo-type populists in the House and Senate, the militant backbenchers and their sympathizers, to assist them in putting pressure on the reluctant elites of their own party. Keep their feet to the fire; never let up. And let us all remind the new Masters of the Universe, in their arrogance, that what the people have given them, the people can and will take away. They have two years to put up, to shape up, or be shipped out. And if a threat of a viable third party, whether Perotvian or some other, begins to loom large for '96, so much the better. If Slick Willie and his rotten collectivists gang are doomed, as it certainly appears, great. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving crew. But the Republicans should be constantly put on notice that, if they don't get with the Revolution, they will soon follow Slick Willie into the ashcan of history.