Former U.S. Presidential Candidate Lyndon LaRouche
EIR LEAD EDITORIAL SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 9, 2023
Sept. 8, 2023 (EIRNS)—A Report by Former U.S. Presidential Candidate (Lyndon) LaRouche on the Motives and Perspectives of His Public Life, March 31, 1985 (Excerpts)
The following, a commemoration on September 8, the 101st birthday of the late economist and statesman Lyndon H. LaRouche, provides insight and clarity as to the intellectual and moral requirements demanded of viable candidates for the Presidency and other high offices of the United States, as well as high office in other “Western” governments. They, upon assuming office, in counterposition to the perpetual warfare practices now characteristic of the present “Anglophile” governments, must successfully enlist the assistance of the BRICS-Plus nations to help overcome decades of failure in domestic and foreign policy on the part of the trans-Atlantic world. What qualities of leadership must they develop, or already command, prior to that day?
“…Since my earliest school years, until about 10 years ago, prevailing opinion among those who knew me alleged that my fatal personal flaw was my lack of serious commitment to goals of personal wealth and promotion to higher-ranking positions. Occasionally, to attempt to please my family or friends, I would try for time to stick to tasks of improving my income and position, but my heart was never in it; something I deemed more important soon intervened, and I reverted so to the genteel, threadbare state bestowed perennially upon me through aid of my more natural inclinations. I do not know fully the manner in which the circumstances of my childhood and youth bestowed this alleged ‘personal flaw’ upon me….
“See this trait of mine, as you may choose to do so; it is what I am. In place of desire for money and formal position, my only reliable motive for accomplishing work of any kind, is the pleasure of ‘getting things done.’ I were more likely to build a house, and build it better, did I choose to do it without thought of compensation, than were I richly compensated in being employed to do so. It is the ‘intangible psychological reward’ of building something according to some moral purpose, which substitutes for pecuniary incentives in my work motivations….
“Until the 1974-1975 period, it was against my nature to consider standing for election to any public office. To exert a peripheral influence on the making of policy, was consistent with my self-image as a scientific worker in related matters; to be a public figure in any other sense, was contrary to my nature.
“My views on this began to be changed by the combination of Communist Party goons attacking my associates during 1972 and 1973, and a 1972-1973 operation against my European associates by East Germany branches of the Soviet KGB. The second and decisive factor prompting the change, was the discovery, during the second half of January 1974, that ‘Watergate’ had been orchestrated against a chiefly unwitting President Nixon by Henry A. Kissinger and the Liberal Establishment. My associates’ participation in the effort to bring the truth about the ‘Watergate’ operation to public notice, during the Spring and Summer of 1974, gave us a rather precise insight into the pathetic condition of our Federal government and of both major political parties; on the one side, it was clear that the ‘moderate conservatives’ of both the Republican and Democratic Parties were well-intentioned and often capable personalities, but that they generally lacked both the knowledge and leadership needed to make their good will effective. Without adding a new element of leadership to the existing institutions of both Republican and Democratic moderate conservatives, it was almost certain that the United States would be unable to respond adequately to the successive global and domestic crises of the decade or so ahead. Chiefly as a result of this experience of 1972-1974, at the beginning of 1975, I decided that l must run for U.S. President in 1976, in order to introduce the need for international monetary reform, more effectively, onto the agenda of U.S. policy shaping.
“By November 1975, as official U. S. government records corroborate this, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was personally involved in using capabilities of the United States government for dirty, covert operations against me and my friends, both inside the United States, and around the world. By late July 1977, I was a target of assassination by the terrorist ‘Baader-Meinhof Gang’ and other terrorist groups. By May 1978, as a result of my associates’ War on Drugs campaign, the international drug-traffickers’ interests joined Kissinger in the attacks on me and my associates, unleashing the Heritage Foundation and the drug-trafficker-linked Anti-Defamation League (ADL), as part of international campaigns of lying vilification and dirty covert operations against us. Such are the nuisances which any internationally prominent public figure must expect these days.
“So, beginning approximately the beginning of 1974, my fifty-two years as a private citizen came to an end, and I became a public figure.
LaRouche on the Political Spectrum
“If anyone asks you, ‘What is Lyndon LaRouche?’ the short answer is that I am primarily an economist and a philosopher: an economist in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton, and a philosopher in the tradition of Solon, Plato, St. Augustine, and Leibniz. Both as an economist, and in political philosophy, I am situated within American history in the footsteps of Cotton and Increase Mather, Franklin, and the nineteenth century’s Clay-Carey Whigs. Like all of that tradition before me, I am a devout adversary of British Liberalism and European positivism and neo-positivism. In that sense, and only in that sense, I am politically ‘conservative.’
“My only membership affiliations during recent years are the Democratic Party, the National Democratic Policy Committee, and an international philosophical association called the International Caucus of Labor Committees. My only formal title of executive responsibility is that of Chairman of the U.S. branch of that philosophical association….
“It is fair to describe me as the world’s leading economist today, an accomplishment which reflects more the lack of competent competitors for that rank than any special achievements of my own. A recently published textbook, So, You Wish To Learn All About Economics? presents the elementary features of my standpoint and contributions to that science. Economic science was founded by Leibniz, between the years 1672 and 1716; Leibniz’s economic science was later best known, during the nineteenth century, as ‘The American System of political-economy,’ which incorporated all of the leading contributions of France and Germany to economic science. During the twentieth century, economic science is no longer taught in any university of Europe or North America, nor are the principles of economic science even known to most professed economists. What is mistaken for ‘economics’ in universities and among most professionals today, is a mere monetary theory popularized chiefly by British Liberalism, plus a radical version of that monetary theory based on the Lausanne School of fascist economics, of Walras et al., and promoted by the late John von Neumann’s prescriptions for ‘econometrics.’ Although I have made one fundamental contribution to economic science, the rest of what I teach and practice is essentially a revival of the American System. Otherwise, politically, I am a ‘republican,’ with a small ‘r,’ a ‘democratic republican.’
“In the past 2,500 years of European history, ‘republican’ signifies a tradition traced to the constitutional reforms of Solon of Athens. Any society based upon republican principles is properly classed as a ‘republic,’ whether the form of state is constitutional monarchy, or other. ‘Democratic republican,’ signifies a form of constitutional republic based on the political equality of persons before the law, and equality of citizens to qualify to stand for election and to vote, and prohibition of any social distinctions but those derived from merit: the new form of modern sovereign nation-state republic established with the adoption of the U.S.A.’s 1787 Federal Constitution.
“Although I have an amiable and collaborative view of many Republicans, including our President (Reagan), I have preferred the Democratic Party because of the included role of labor, farmers, and minorities within that Party. As for the taint of radical Liberalism within the Democratic Party, the Republican Party also endures the same contamination. I abhor impassioned partisanship, which I regard as introducing an irrationalist, counterproductive element to the political process; I am bipartisan by impulse, but attached to the heritage of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic Party because the social composition of the party is consistent with democratic-republican practice.
“It should be stressed that I reject the broader usage of the term ‘conservative’ often found in Western Europe and the Americas today. As the authority on Nazism, Dr. Armin Mohler of the Siemens Foundation, has accurately documented this fact, the term ‘conservative’ is used widely in Europe to signify various branches of philosophical fascism, a variety of ‘conservativism’ consistent with the authorship of the 1815 Treaty of Vienna. Henry A. Kissinger is a self-professed fascist of this variety. This usage of the term, ‘conservative,’ was introduced to identify pro-feudalistic opponents of the American Revolution and 1787 U.S. Constitution. The post-Hitler form of fascism popular among pro-feudalist currents in Europe today is called ‘universal fascism,’ meaning that the proponents are both fascists and proponents of some variety of ‘world federalism.’ Because of the unpopularity of the term ‘fascist’ today, mass-based fascist movements prefer to identify themselves publicly as ‘neo-conservatives.’
“The ‘neo-conservatives’ wish to go back to the feudal tradition. Republican ‘conservatives,’ like myself, wish to free our nation of British Liberalism’s contaminations, to resume democracy under the American Revolution’s tradition of constitutional law.
“My squabbles with ‘neo-conservatives,’ such as the neo-populists, are more or less identical with my earlier and continuing squabbles with professed ‘leftists.’ Actually, as social-insurgency movements, communism and fascism have identical origins, and more consistency than differences on points of philosophy. Both are outgrowths of eighteenth-century Jacobinism. Jacobinism was created by the Swiss-directed circles around Voltaire, as a mass-based force of chaos and confusion against the forces supporting the principles of the American Revolution. The same Swiss-centered forces behind eighteenth-century Jacobinism, spread the roots of future fascism throughout Europe in the form of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and revived Jacobinism under the titular leadership of Giuseppe Mazzini, as Mazzini’s ‘Young Europe’ and ‘Young America’ conspiracies. Both modern communism and modern fascism are direct outgrowths of Mazzini’s organizations….
“The essential difference between republicanism and fascism-communism, is typified by the anti-republicanism of Karl Marx’s law professor, Karl Savigny. Republicanism is based upon those principles of natural law famously associated with Solon, St. Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, and Leibniz: the laws of the universe determine what is right and wrong behavior of societies and persons, a knowledge of right and wrong properly embodied in constitutional law. Savigny was a leading figure of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, and a direct precursor of the doctrines of law adopted and practiced by the Nazi state. Savigny insisted that natural law did not exist, and that only the momentary ‘will of the people’ (Volksgeist) should determine what the prevailing law should be. This argument of Savigny’s was the basis for Marx’s ideas of ‘historical materialism’ and ‘class-rule society’; the same argument was adopted as the ‘völkisch’ (populist) principle of Nazi law….
“Natural law is God’s law, which it is man’s duty to discover ever more perfectly. Societies are not truly free to do as they choose; a society which chooses policies in defiance of natural law’s prescriptions, is a society which is morally unfit to survive, and is a society which will be destroyed sooner or later as penalty for attempting to place the arbitrary will of the people above natural law. Under the constitutional law of republics, a people contracts to subordinate its impulses to natural law, to deny itself the power to choose any policy or practice which is in defiance of natural law. The communist and fascist, like their populist cousins, wickedly misdefine ‘freedom’ as the right to do whatever one chooses, in defiance of the authority of natural law. Natural law, which includes the properly defined laws of physical science, can not be violated without incurring the same penalties as defiance of the ‘law of gravity’: you are not ‘free’ to believe that you can leap naked from the top of a skyscraper and willfully fly to safety. When a society practices wrong policies, in defiance of natural law, because of ‘popular opinion,’ that society invites destruction as surely as the deluded nut who leaps from a skyscraper imagining his ‘free will’ might transform him into ‘Superman.’
“The principle of true freedom is exemplified by the power to effect valid scientific discoveries. True freedom is the power to discover the laws of the universe more perfectly, and the political freedom to act on the basis of such discoveries. The ideal of true freedom in economy is the independent farmer and independent industrial entrepreneur, who enjoy the liberty to employ the creative powers of their minds in search of benefit to the general good, and who risk the outcome of that exercise of liberty on confidence in their own powers of reason. That aspect of economy is an expression and fostering of true political freedom in service of the general good; that is the dignity and power of labor, as this principle of labor is celebrated recently both in Pope Paul VI’s 1967 ‘Populorum Progressio,’ and in Pope John Paul Il’s ‘Laborem Exercens.’…
“My practice as an individual person, is informed by Plato’s exemplary treatment of the efficient connection between the activities of the individual (the microcosm) and the universal (the macrocosm). This is also the standpoint in method of all the great predecessors whose work informs my conscience today. Any public figure, most emphatically, is a poor specimen, unless he or she guides immediate individual practice by looking ahead, to estimate the consequences of that choice of practice, two, three, or more generations ahead. The moral nature of the connection between the microcosm and macrocosm, is seen as we inquire how our microscopic individual deeds of today might benefit mankind two or three generations to come. Imagine the eyes of future generations, looking back to us, future generations, knowing what we have bequeathed to them. Let that be your constituency, and you will become a true statesman; choose a different, more ephemeral, constituency of the present, ignoring the future, and you are a poor specimen.”
