This article appeared in the November 20, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The return of the `Forgotten Man'
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
November 6, 1998
Barring a few fine points, the tabulated results of the recent, November 3rd U.S. mid-term voting are in. The questions are: does some adducible political principle underlie those results? Why had this principle been largely overlooked by the leadership of both major-party organizations, during the weeks going into the elections? What do these considerations signify for the shaping of present and future U.S. domestic and foreign policy?
The tabulated results, may be fairly summarized as follows.
While the net result of the total vote cast, momentarily stunned and weakened the Clinton-hating variety of Republicans in the Congress, it did not reach to the level of what the Democrats could have achieved, had high-ranking circles in the Democratic Party machines not willfully bungled many of their own party's election campaigns. The most important net result of the election as a whole: The voter-constituency patterns in the votes cast, have shattered the pre-election "popular opinion" mythologies of both the "Gingrich Revolution" and the so-called "Third Way."
Gingrich's cabal lost all bets; but, more significant are the warnings which African-American, Hispanic-American, Catholic, and trade-union constituencies clearly signalled to the Democratic Party leadership. Through the role of these and other constituencies, those party pollsters and campaign-managers, who relied largely upon the kinds of advertising slogans consistent with current "Third Way" doctrine, were confronted by a painful reminder of what a 1932 Democratic candidate for President, Franklin Roosevelt, had identified as the issue of "the Forgotten Man" (see box).
The Democratic National Committee's so-called "strategy" for the Year 2000 Gore Presidential campaign, must now be pulled off the launch-pad, and sent back to the drawing-boards.
While the November 3rd results were still very far from the sweeping outright victory of President Roosevelt's 1932 election-campaign, there is the smell of a potential political revolution just around the corner. Once again, Roosevelt's "Forgotten Man" is pounding at the doors of government.
Despite Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's desperate vision of a false dawn, in his wildly promoted video promotion of this past week, the financial crisis is moving toward a new, early round of hurricane winds, worse than anything Wall Street and London have experienced until now. Despite such wishful delusions as those expressed by both Greenspan and the White House, there never was a recovery, but only a hyper-inflationary, short-term boost to speculators' financial markets, a boost whose only net result will be to multiply the magnitude of the losses next time around. The Wall Street ushabti's fervent prayers, could never bring about the longed-for, miraculous recovery of their pharaohs' mummies. Alan Greenspan's version of what he calls the "free trade"-style in "globalized" forms of "capitalism," is as doomed, and nearly dead today, as the Soviet system was, near the close of 1989.
In this global financial and strategic setting, the mid-term election marks the beginning of a change in direction of politics in the U.S.A., and, soon, in western Europe, too. The U.S. constituencies are reflecting the beginning of a new, depression-driven, growing trend of profound political change, which will continue into the coming months, and probably for a long time to come. Roosevelt's "Forgotten Man" has returned.
That deep, longer-term significance of those otherwise slight gains, is seen more clearly when we focus upon the internal details of overall tallies, focussing upon those shifts within the composition of constituencies which produced the total vote. Anyone who recalls Roosevelt's 1932 victory, the triumphs of the later "New Deal," and Harry Truman's November 1948 victory, sees the return of FDR's "Forgotten Man," in the constituency patterns of this past November 3rd.
The way in which this most recent vote took the Democratic National Committee by surprise, is illustrated by seeing the recent election-results against a background of the efforts of certain leading sections of the Democratic Party to throw the election, by demanding the dumping of the President, during the period immediately following President Clinton's appearance for the Kenneth Starr-rigged grand jury. It is fairly judged, that the Democratic Party slate's gains, were won despite the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council] and national Democratic Party machines nationally, and despite some state organizations, such as Arizona's. Those deviant Democrats of late August and early September, who said that the President should resign to save the Democrats' congressional races, were clearly not living in the real world. Looking at the results, it is now clear, that it was they, and their sympathizers in the DLC and the Democratic National Committee, whose efforts, and morally corrupting influence prevented the Party from achieving an outright victory.
So, the fact of the matter is, that especially from late August onward, the national party organization either sat on its campaign funds, or even sabotaged some of the campaigns. Without that foot-dragging inside leading circles of the Democratic Party organizations, a clear Democratic majority would, almost certainly, have been won in the lower house.
All in all, the voting patterns in the elections show, that it was both the "Third Way" Democrats and Gingrich's "New Right," who were administered a set-back, a hard body-check delivered through the intervention into the election by Roosevelt's "Forgotten Man," most notably individual African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and trade-unionists.
What does it all mean? Why did it happen as it did? What is really going on in the political process, something which foretells a diminishing role for that assortment which, until most recently, triumphantly bridged both Newt Gingrich and the deviant Democrats of the DLC? What politically fatal oversight had "Third Way" guru "Dick" Morris committed?
A lesson from ancient Rome
We begin to understand the profound changes in political life inside western Europe and the U.S.A. today, the moment it dawns upon us, that, during the recent thirty-odd years, we, in these parts of the world, have undergone a political change comparable to the internal political and moral degeneration of ancient Rome, that over the period from the defeat of the Gracchian reforms, into the first hundred-odd years following the accession of Octavian to the position of Emperor Caesar Augustus.
The politics of "bread and circuses" under the ancient Caesars of Rome, or such lunacy of later Byzantine politics as national political contests between sporting clubs, are, indeed, forerunners of the process of step-by-step, moral degeneration of national political parties, which we have experienced freshly in western Europe and the United States, during the course of slightly more than three recent decades.
"Yes, Mehitabel: If you had gone to school at an earlier time, when history and the Classics were still being taught, you would probably have recognized that Imperial Rome's politics of `bread and circuses,' was the forerunner of what is called `The Third Way' today. If you had gone to a decent public school system, in a former time, when such schools educated bright pupils to become actually literate, you would have been able to recognize immediately, as soon as you read the first election tallies, on the Wednesday morning after, what has just popped up as an apparent new trend in the most recent, U.S. mid-term election."
People whose right to such an education has been denied them, are now faced with learning the lesson of Roosevelt's "Forgotten Man." They should be told what a famous Harvard sage once said: those who fail to learn the lessons of history, are compelled to repeat them. So, the relevant illiterates of today, Gingrich, the "Third Way" faddists, and the "New Agers" generally, have just relived a bit of the relevant experience of earlier generations; but, have they learned the lesson their parents' experience should have taught them? Whatever they have learned, or still refuse to study, the fact is, that the age of political tyranny by the cult of "information society," just died, on the voting-booth floor.
The underlying, practical political issue here, today, is the fact, that a certain political and economic degeneration of society in (most notably) North America and western Europe, during the recent thirty-odd years, has had the effect of shifting social relations away from the reality-oriented economic practice of the more influential, mass-based constituencies of the pre-1964 period, into the flight from reality exemplified by popularity of the form of irrationalism, of mass hysteria, seen in the popularization of various forms of gambling mania among ordinary citizens, as well as among the certifiable lunatics who manage today's financial markets. It is seen in the recent, post-Kennedy, deep cultural pessimism, which has driven not only "baby boomers," but members of their parents' generation, into that anxiety-stricken state of mind, in which formerly sane citizens adopt lunatic superstitions, a superstitious state of mind, for which ouija-board messages, gambling mania, and reliance on mutual funds, are symptomatic.
This general downshift in the composition of mass behavior, has not yet eliminated, but has greatly diminished the incidence of political rationality within the population as a whole. Even those constituencies which show significant rationality in important portions of their economic, and related political behavior, are strongly affected by mass lunacy spilling over from those other, "suburbanite" constituencies, for example, which are much more the pathetic dupes of an axiomatically irrational, and customarily lying mass media.
To trace the devolution of the population's levels of rationality and morality, especially the immediately political reflections of shifts in these factors, we must emphasize attention to certain specific kinds of constituencies. The relatively more reality-oriented strata of the population, are typified by African-Americans continuing the heritage of Martin Luther King's Civil Rights movement, or by hard-working, family-oriented immigrant strata, such as Hispanic-Americans, or Asian-Americans, by skilled and semi-skilled industrial operatives or technicians, by technologically progressive farmers, by practitioners of hard and biological science, and by those strata of industrial management, whose emphasis is upon the physical side of quality and productivity, as opposed to financial management per se. As the status of the more reality-oriented constituencies, is lowered relatively, and as they become a smaller ration within a population which, as a whole, is dominated by the dementing effects of turning the U.S.A. into a poverty-stricken post-industrial utopia, the irrationality index of the population as a whole, rises.
This latter pattern has been the prevailing trend within the U.S. population as a whole, since about 1966-1968. It was greatly accelerated by the Trilateral Commission policies jammed through during 1977-1981. By the end of 1983, when President Reagan was caged by the Bush-centered cabal inside the administration and Republican Party machine, things plummeted. The plummeting into the ruin of Merton-Scholes madness, following the process of globalization unleashed during 1990-1991, virtually routed the influence of the remaining reality-oriented constituencies, until the shift in the labor movement around the election of Sweeney, and, the counterattack centered, over Spring through October this year, in the McDade-Murtha legislation, and in the fight to save the U.S. Presidency, launched by my associates, this past Labor Day weekend.
The fight to bring reality, and sanity, back into U.S. politics and policy-shaping, is on. It is still very much an up-hill fight, with just barely enough success, so far, as on this past election-day, to demonstrate that the fight is, at least, a winnable one.
In this process of lowered levels of rationality within the population as a whole, and as pleasure or pain replaces performance as a measure of personal identity, politics is shifted away from issues of the real economy, into irrational forms of mere role-playing at "living theater." U.S. popular culture and major-party political-campaigning today, can be fairly summed up as evermore "less bread, more circuses." The "Third Way" is a product and symptom of precisely that kind of degeneration of the morals and rationality of, especially, those so-called "suburbanite," and like constituencies whose daily practice and sense of personal social identity, are located outside the more reality-oriented constituencies we have identified, by illustration, above.
In such a situation as that, major cultural shocks tend to demolish popularized, e.g., "Third Way," delusions, and, so, tend to polarize society sharply. Those who are closer to reality, tend to turn away from "Third Way" and kindred types of delusions; those who can not make that turn back to sanity, tend to go berzerk (e.g., they tend to scream a lot), providing the raw material for mass-based fascist, anarchist, and related types of movements "of the middle class" (e.g., today's "suburbia," a.k.a. Dick Morris' "sub-blurbia").
Such a polarization under stress of reality-shocks, is typified by the virtual splitting of today's British Labour Party, between the clearly fascistic, "neo-Ramsay MacDonald-style" Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the more traditional, trade-union and constituency currents of the same Labour Party. The same pattern is shown by those U.S. constituencies which gave strength to the November 3rd Democratic vote, in contrast to the fascist-leaning, deviant Democrats of the DLC and like-minded circles.
The "Third Way," so viewed, is the form of European "classless," fascist, plebeian tradition, which can be traced from origins in the political systems of imperial Rome, Caesarian Bonaparte's Code Napoléon, and Mussolini's and Hitler's fascists, or the "universal fascism" of both the Nazi Allgemeine SS and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's Michael Ledeen. The latter is that so-called "universal fascism," the globalized, "world federalist" form of fascism, in whose advocacy the Blair of today indelibly mimics both Ledeen and Ledeen's Nazi predecessors. In all these cases, an irrational mythos replaces the healthy interactions among the often differing perceptions of actual reality, the latter as expressed by reality-oriented types of political and quasi-political constituencies. It is the replacement of mass-based-constituency politics, of the pre-1966 type, by the mediocrity of Orwellian mass-homogenization, which typifies, and underlies those phenomena, in recent history, which the best historians have often rightly identified as either Bonapartist or fascist.
In that sense, the "turn factor" in the November 3rd election-results, was the appearance of reality-oriented, anti-fascist constituencies, as a ponderable factor against those varieties of convergence upon fascism, the which are currently represented in such varieties as both the outgoing Mr. Newton Gingrich and the "Third Way."
To show how these political mechanisms work, more precisely, focus upon the actual social dynamics--the definable, characteristic principle of action in the small--operating to produce a Gingrich-like, or "Third Way"-like, mass phenomenon.
What every dog knows about its master
Instead of "Third Way," say: "techniques for minimizing undesired resistance from the human livestock, in herding them either into their nightly pens, or, back into the fields in the morning."
So, in ancient Rome, when the imperial bureaucracy of Caesar Augustus had deprived the subject population of all power of efficient resistance to the policies of the ruling imperial oligarchy, politics was degraded into the farce of "bread and circuses," with emphasis upon mass entertainment, in the form that already existed long before the modern, oligarchy-controlled mass electronic and print media.
Today's "Third Way" is, quite literally, a Freudian's perversion of the methods for training and handling of circus performing animals (or, of human entertainment-media "stars"), household pets, and other livestock, all applied to purposes of modern mass control over large masses of human beings.
The source of the principle of animal behavior, which is used, perverted, to conduct efficient forms of training and control over the behavior of masses of human cattle, is copied from the pivotal feature of the natural, healthy form of man-beast relations referenced by Nicholas of Cusa ("participation of beasts in mankind"), by Friedrich Schiller (Spieltrieb), or, simply, by play of the sort one enjoys with a dog, kitten, or training of a horse in dressage. One does not train an animal by beating it mercilessly; one operates on the animal's sense of pleasure in playfulness.
Once the animal accepts the authority of the human trainer, or pet-owner, the principle of pleasure in what the animal senses as play, becomes the pleasurable form of the master-slave relationship. It is not simply the use of rewards and withholding of rewards; it is making the use of these, a matter of the kind of play the animal will enjoy. The animal submits happily, as long as the human-controlled responses to the animal's recurring demand for play-pleasure coincide with the animal's demand, "Come, play with me!"
The British Royals misuse this natural dynamic of relations between man and beast, when they make human cattle of the ranks of moms, nannies, tads, and blokes, by turning the Royal Household out en masse for a full dress parade of the monarchy before the subject political livestock. This pathetic, often repeated ritual, is an apt illustration of the way in which submission is apprehended as pleasurable by the deluded victims, the human cattle, the so-called "subjects."
In human behavior (as in the doctrines of the so-called "behaviorists" in psychology and sociology), this application of principles of animal training, to bestialization of human relations, is typified by such forms as Imperial Rome's bread-and-circuses, today's mass-spectator sports, or currently popular, commercial forms of mass-audio-visual entertainment. This is the underlying premise for the dogma called "The Third Way" today.
Modernist fads expressed as misdirection of a stage presentation of Classical tragedy, or Classical opera, offer a clinically precise example of the difference between human entertainment (e.g., Classical drama) and the same nominal material slightly altered, to be reduced to the popularized, modernist, or post-modernist forms of animal entertainment. In short, the cognitive aspect of the artistic composition is suppressed, and replaced by forms of symbol-driven emotionalism, better suited to the denatured kind of theater audience which has been induced to think and feel as simulated beasts.
To examine these connections more closely, take as an example the difference between the rural serf and the modern, technologically active, highly productive farmer. The European serf lived the brutal life of "zero-technological growth" decreed by the imperial Code of the Emperor Diocletian. It was the Diocletian Code's social policy of "zero-technological growth," which caused the internal, demographic collapse of Byzantium in face of foreign invasions, as slavery had brought about the earlier collapse of Rome in the west. The same code of Diocletian became the dominant feature of the "one-worldist," anti-nation-state faction of European feudalism. The revival of this cult of "zero-technological growth" trends, since 1964-1972, is responsible for the functionally identical form of ongoing, demographic collapse of western civilization today.
Especially since the revolution in political-economy introduced by France's King Louis XI, until the term of U.S. President Carter, during all the best periods of European civilization, the modern farmer has often been encouraged and assisted in realizing U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's emphasis upon increasing the per-capita and per-square-kilometer physical-productive powers of labor. In contrast, the condition and culture of the feudal serf, approaches the condition of a lower species, a virtual beast, virtual human cattle, as François Quesnay's pro-feudalist dogma of laissez-faire prescribes such brutalization of the serf. The productive farmer is a key part of the process of willfully increasing our species' power over nature; thus, he represents a higher species than the feudal serf is usually permitted to be. The serf is born with the human potential expressed by the productive modern farmer, but is not permitted to assert, or develop that potential as a matter of right.
The same human quality of productivity, is expressed by the modern industrial operative, the production technician, and the production side of management, or by the owner-manager of a firm specializing in machine-tool design. These social strata (e.g., "constituencies") within society, represent typifications of man's active power over nature, and of the requirements which must be satisfied to allow them to perform that functional role. These are constituents with an objective interest both in protecting the technologically characteristic features of progress in their work, and in expressing the interest associated with both the nature and the general social importance of that quality of work.
It is that relationship to productive change, which defines these constituencies as relatively much more reality-oriented, and, as strata, far more moral, instinctively, than other types of social strata. Theirs is a moral impulse, for truth and justice. These relatively, morally healthier constituencies, in that degree, reject the utterly immoral, Thrasymachus-like, rhetorician's brutishness, as typified by the specious, slime-ball sophistries of today's Office of the Independent Counsel (OIC), or the wildly irrationalist, anarchoid "Contract with America" rant of outgoing Newt Gingrich. They also resist that mere pretense of being aseptic, the pretense which expresses the aseptically amoral ("I was only doing my job"), pettifogging, logic-chopping formalism of a modern Glaucon.
Not only do these, relatively more reality-oriented strata, represent both a constituency interest, and, also, often, a conscious such interest. In fact, the mental and moral health of the society relies upon their relative social weight, as expressing that interest within the political processes of society as a whole, an expression which is necessary for the stability and progress of the society as a whole. Thus, the relationship of such constituencies to the entire society, is never in the nature of a "social contract;" the relationship is functional, not contractual.
Prior to the 1964-1972 cultural-paradigm shift among U.S. university-campus youth, the notion that any person was contributing to a general furtherance of progress, was the standard by which the idea of a "useful person" was measured. Fostering and protecting that individual's contribution, was a matter of principle, a moral principle, a political principle. As the demoralizing effects of the revived ideology of "zero-technological growth," exerted increasing influence over both policy-shaping and public opinion, beginning the 1964-1972 cultural-paradigm shift, the dignity of being a moral, useful person, was denied, increasingly, to the productive and closely related constituencies. The arrogantly "value-free" pretenses of the "Dick" Morris-like, quasi-fascist "sub-blurbanites," came to dominate the ranking circles in the national political culture.
This is manifestly the most crucial problem preventing President Clinton from achieving what his personal instincts would have tended to lead him to accomplish as President. Manifestly, when the President has taken a moral position, as typified by his own initial determination to veto Speaker Gingrich's 1996 Welfare Reform, he later capitulated to pressures to conform to "Third Way" standards, rather than defend his own moral impulse. A second example is relevant. The President had true knowledge and moral instinct, that OIC Starr's demand he appear for a grand jury questioning, was not only unconstitutional, but also a subversive effort to overthrow the clear provisions, on separation of powers, embedded in the body of the Constitution. Yet, under pressure from lawyers and kindred "Third Way" types, he violated his own legal and moral principles, by agreeing to appear before the grand jury.
But, hold that thought, just for a moment! Why did the President capitulate, in those and kindred instances? He capitulated because he had an inner wont to capitulate to the general principle of a "Third Way" agenda.
The immoral, "Third Way"-like element in the Democratic Party's machinery, knew very well where the President's moral corruption lay. They knew, that the President is like the compulsive gambler, who knows that it is immoral to stop by the gambling house on the way home, on pay-day; but, a mere nod from one of his cronies from the gambling set, and he is throwing his week's wages on the croupier's table, once again. Like the otherwise moral preacher who simply can not refuse a tempting slut, or the compulsive gambler who can not reject the lure of a crooked crap game, the President reacted to the screeching tantrum of "Dick" Morris and kindred types of male-bonded cronies, by regarding their demand for his submission to a "Third Way" agenda, as representing a higher authority than anything within the President's own sense of truth and morality. Damn such notions of democracy to Hell, where they belong! The President's policy, on many such occasions, has been to give God and the Devil equal time, to seek the "Third Way" between Heaven and Hell.
Thus, as in the contrast between the President's September address to the New York Council on Foreign Relations, and his later posture during the G-7 meeting in Washington, the President often exhibits a sense of what is true, on the one side, but must, nonetheless, defend the direct opposite publicly. As far as I and others have observed this contradictory behavior by him, this tendency for duplicity is always defended by him, with words to the effect: "What you say is true, or might be true, but I must play by the rules of the game." Whose rules? Thrasymachus' perhaps? Where, then, can a citizen find in his, or her government, at least one agency of government--perhaps the office of the President--in which truth, rather than corruption, makes the crucial decisions bearing upon truth, justice, and national security?
Thus, the only visible chance for President Clinton to become the good President he might become, in time to save the U.S. from the implications of that terrible, global financial disintegration which looms immediately before us all, is to free him from the grip of those influences which prompted him to sodomize his own moral instincts, in such matters as withdrawing his threatened veto of Gingrich's Nazi-like 1996 Welfare Reform.
Thus, given the policies of the so-called "moderate" faction of Republicans around George Bush, given the fanatical lunacies of the "conservative revolutionaries," and, on the Democratic side, "The Third Way," the only hope for saving the United States from Hell, was to discover and mobilize a means by which to turn the situation, a means to set back both the Republicans' conservative loonies and the "Third Way" at the same time.
Despite the President's resistance to any attacks on the "Third Way" itself, a sufficient ration of sundry reality-oriented constituencies said, in effect: "We will no longer be treated politically as human cattle." So, the flanks of both the Gingrichites and the "Third Way" Democrats were turned this mid-term election just passed. In this happy, if marginal success, lies the potential for making this President, at last, a good enough President for the crises immediately threatening the world during the weeks now immediately ahead.
The factor of leadership
Admittedly, the gains actually made in the election are marginal, and still fragile. Their significance lies in the import which that relative success has for the next turn in the situation. For what was accomplished, my associates and I have been justly awarded significant credit among knowing political veterans; this marginal gain could not have been won, had we not initiated and catalyzed it.
There is a principle involved. That principle is what is termed "showing political leadership." Whether the marginal good accomplished on November 3rd leads to a happy, or a disappointing result down the line, will depend entirely upon both our own ability to show the quality of leadership initiative my associates and I demonstrated beginning the recent Labor Day weekend, and whether, also, others join with us in appropriate, larger-scale applications of that same principle.
Therefore, the most important conclusion to be reached in reflecting on the lessons of the recent election, is to bring together an alliance of forces, including the best Republicans as well as Democrats, which will focus upon understanding the lessons, both given, and otherwise implied, by the most recent intervention from reality-oriented popular constituencies. The lessons involved pertain to constituencies, issues, and also the quality of leadership needed for the world and national situations immediately before us.
Given, the fact, that the natural inclinations--for security and improvement in employment, justice, national physical output, health care, education, and opportunity--are the common features of the constituency-interest reflected in the happier parts of the recent election, victory will not be possible until those constituencies are mobilized to see themselves as an effective political force which can shape the nation's policies to effect those changes which correspond in intent, and also efficient appropriateness, to their natural inclinations. An army which, however numerous, does not see itself as an effectively unified force, is, like the France of 1939-1940, already defeated before the fighting starts.
Three points of leadership are most essential: 1) competence in conception of the war and of what constitutes the road to victory; 2) measures to induce a self-consciousness of one's forces as a powerful organized force, in the gathering together of the relevant forces; 3) an efficient clinical insight into those habituated follies of popular, and other opinion, by which the members of that organized force are likely to defeat themselves. These are the general roles which make effective leadership initiatives indispensable to the success of any great and good cause.
Provided those qualities of leadership are supplied, another is yet even more essential: a leadership which, like General William Tecumseh Sherman marching through Alabama and Georgia, translates the potential for victory into the "hammer" by means of which actual victory is forged. The case illustrates a general principle (which ought also to be a principle of generals), the principle of innovation. Like Sherman, or Douglas MacArthur later, all great commanders, whether as military leaders, political leaders, or leaders of important movements in history, have one commonly distinguishing quality, which distinguishes them as leaders, from persons of different qualities of capabilities. They are able, under fire, to generate appropriate discoveries of principles for action, principles whose manner of generation, as discoveries, meet all of those essential qualifications otherwise associated with an experimentally validatable discovery of a new physical principle, in physical science.
This latter quality must be abetted by a quality of decision-making for which Clausewitz employs a special usage of the German term Entschlossenheit: the quality of committing everything necessary, and perhaps a bit more, to immediate actions whose choice depends entirely upon the validity of some freshly discovered principle for action. It is not sufficient to recognize the existence of a possible course of action; it is necessary to find the sense of moral certainty that this is the course of action which must be implemented without flinching.
This quality in a military commander is shown as the commander's habit of outwitting superior forces which are commanded by well-learned, but intellectually conservative opposing commanders, as Frederick the Great used his greatly weaker forces to rout a well-organized, vastly greater Austrian force at the famous battle of Leuthen. This is what Sherman did to his intellectually inferior opponents, the Confederate commanders, in Alabama and Georgia. This is what General Douglas MacArthur (but, not his rivals in the Navy) did in the Pacific War, as, again, in the Inchon landing. Remove the like of a MacArthur, as Truman did, and the fight mires itself in that siege of mud and attrition, which rehearsed the U.S. military command for the combined bloody diplomatic and military farce of McGeorge Bundy's and Robert McNamara's Indo-China war.
Whether in war, or other expressions of strategic conflict over great issues, a population relies upon justifiable confidence in qualities of leadership which meet the general standards I have just outlined here. In times of great change, a shrewd popular constituency relies on the tested authority of the leader who was consistently right, when virtually all of those otherwise in authority were shown, subsequently, to have been wrong. It is the implication of such a uniquely qualified authority in economic and related matters, which my associates and I represent, that a U.S. and broader leadership can be rallied, to call forth the forces of victory from reality-oriented constituencies, like those which made the difference in the most recent U.S. election.
The most important conclusion to be reached in reflecting on the lessons of the recent election, is to bring together an alliance of forces, including the best Republicans as well as Democrats, which will focus upon understanding the lessons, both given, and otherwise implied, by the most recent intervention from reality-oriented popular constituencies. The lessons involved pertain to constituencies, issues, and also the quality of leadership needed for the world and national situations immediately before us.
