LAROUCHE ISSUES OPEN LETTER
To the DNC and the
Presidential Candidates
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.This open letter to the Democratic National Committee was issued from candidate Lyndon LaRouche's Presidential committee, LaRouche in 2004, on Dec. 24, 2003, with the nation's first Democratic Presidential primary, in Washington, D.C., three weeks away.
There are five leading crises immediately facing the nation, and, therefore, the present leadership of the Democratic Party:
- The world is sliding over the crumbling brink of a global breakdown of the present floating-exchange-rate monetary and financial system, a breakdown worse in its practical implications than that of 1928-33.
- Since the January 2002 State of the Union Address, the United States has been plunging toward a spreading global pattern of asymmetric warfare, only typified by the deteriorating situation in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
- As a result of the continued toleration of the policies of "preventive nuclear warfare" associated with Vice-President Cheney and the neo-conservatives, the foreign relations of the United States have deteriorated at a rate and in a way not seen in the memory of any of us. This state of affairs has undermined the capabilities of our nation to secure the kinds of cooperation demanded by the combination of presently accelerating world economic crisis and the worsening state of military and related affairs.
- As a result of the continuing shift of the character of the U.S. economy and social structures, away from our former world leadership as a producer society, to our decadent state of internal affairs as a "post-industrial" consumer society, the political system of the United States has been undermined by a worsening estrangement of the households of the lower eighty percentiles of our family-income brackets, from the thinking and ranks of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
- The Democratic Party's bungling of the 2000 general election, and the 2002 mid-term election, especially the preceding and present Presidential campaign, threatens to plunge the nation into a protracted period of Republican, one-party rule, in fact. Under present domestic and world-crisis conditions, a continuation of that trend of the 1996 and 2000 campaigns through 2004 would, in point of fact, threaten the continued existence of our system of constitutional self-government.
There are also correlated problems to consider. The following are only typical.
The case of the currently leading position of the obviously politically fragile Governor Howard Dean, would not have been possible unless the Democratic National Committee's handling of its approved list of Presidential candidates had not created the political vacuum into which the inherently unstable Dean candidacy was virtually sucked in.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party leadership's practice of even ordinary electoral mechanics loses the party campaign after campaign, on the state and local, as well as, in 2000, the national level. Whereas, the Florida Republican Party had done its homework in preparing for the processing of the write-in ballots for the 2000 election; the Democrats, with their negligence, flubbed the Florida campaign for, largely, that and kindred reasons. This is not to speak of the Gore-Lieberman campaign's failing to win the national Electoral College in the readily available Arkansas, which would have made the issue of the Florida tally irrelevant. The same negligence of elementary campaign mechanics showed up in the California recall campaign, and in the way in which the debates featuring approved candidates have tended to murder the party's constituents with sheer boredom.
Behind that set of issues and correlated considerations, there are two long-standing problems which have produced the result that only one Democratic President, Bill Clinton, has served two full terms since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. Failure to understand the two problems which are responsible for that pattern of nearly six decades, would mean the early death of the Democratic Party's leading role in national politics. The common feature of both these counts, is that the party has moved, since 1944, to distance itself from the image of being FDR's party. Unless that trend is now reversed, the party is virtually finished as a leading force in national politics.
The first downturn came during the last months of World War II, between approximately August 1944 and the totally unjustified nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The second downturn began in full force during the middle to late 1960s, with the launching of the shift, away from our world-leading role as a producer nation, toward the present decadence of being a parasitical, post-industrial, consumer society, living on the product of cheap labor from the relatively poorest nations of the world. Thus, under the combined effects of these two trends, from the mid-1960s on, we had the decadence of the Republican Party leadership launched by President Nixon's "Southern Strategy"; and the subsequent, echoing, "Southern Strategy"-like, "suburban" orientation of the Democratic Party, as the latter was typified by the influence of the now waning Democratic Leadership Council.
Examine those two factors of the downturn as follows.
Enter the `Utopians'
The Democratic Party's present trouble came to the surface during the Summer 1944 Democratic nominating convention, when a turn to the "right" came to the surface at precisely the point the events of June-July 1944 had sealed the impending early defeat of Adolf Hitler's forces. At this point, a factional quarrel erupted between the representatives of two opposing factions on the matter of military policy. On the one side, there were the military traditionalists, typified by Generals MacArthur and Eisenhower. On the other side were the followers of Britain's H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, the so-called "utopians," whose military goals were the establishment of an Anglo-American world government through the use of nuclear-weapons arsenals to terrify the world into submission. This utopian policy was otherwise known as "preventive nuclear war," as Russell elaborated that doctrine in the September 1946 edition of his The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. British scientist Lindemann's bestial policy of strategic bombing of civilian populations, as associated with Britain's "Bomber Harris" and the fire-bombing of Tokyo, were emblems of the same policies for which nuclear weapons were intended by the utopians.
Under President Harry S Truman, the Democratic Party was led into support of a utopian doctrine of "preventive nuclear war," which persisted until the combined effects of the Korean War and the Soviet priority in detonating a thermonuclear weapon, caused the United States to pull back from the preventive-war doctrine. These developments led to the election of a leading opponent of the preventive nuclear doctrine, traditionalist President Dwight Eisenhower, for two terms. At the end of his terms, Eisenhower warned the nation against the threat to our society from "a military-industrial complex," meaning the utopians who had authored and pushed the "preventive nuclear war" doctrine during the middle through late 1940s. It was the fatal, utopian flaw embedded in the party by the Truman Administration policies of the 1940s, which undermined the party's ability to lead the Executive Branch for any significant period of time.
The Clinton Administration was, in that respect, an historical anomaly brought into being through crucial assistance from Ross Perot's attack on the incompetent economic policies expressed by the George H.W. Bush, Sr. Administration—which could not be repeated under a continuation of the same policy-shaping trends.
The election of President John F. Kennedy had brought us a young President committed to restoring the legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt. But, then, President Kennedy was confronted by the utopian resurgence, with the Bay of Pigs, the 1962 Missile Crisis which sent many Americans to seek God in barrooms, and the assassination of the President himself. The President dead, the utopians, using Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, pushed ahead with the project for a supposedly "easy war" against North Vietnam.
The utopians were bluffing again, as Truman had bluffed his bungling, utopian way into the Korean War. As with China's response in the Korean War, the United States was mired in asymmetric warfare in Indo-China. China did not respond to the U.S. attack in Vietnam, but the Soviet government did, after its own choice of fashion, turning Southeast Asia into a quagmire for the United States, as Cheneyacs have turned Afghanistan, and now Iraq, into a quagmire of asymmetric warfare for the U.S. forces, once again.
Meanwhile, between the Pugwash conferences of the 1950s and early 1960s, the principal powers of the world settled into an uneasy avoidance of the actual fighting of general thermonuclear warfare. The world had entered a demi-world, trapped between the outer limits of so-called traditional warfare and thermonuclear assured destruction. With the 1989-1991 collapse of Soviet power, circles including Republican Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, proposed an immediate return from a detente doctrine based upon a notion of Mutual and Assured (thermonuclear) Destruction (MAD), to a doctrine of world government through preventive nuclear warfare, conducted below what must have been presumed to be the level of general thermonuclear response.
The immediate problem here, as is typified by former Democrats who have since gone over to be Cheney's accomplices as neo-conservatives, is that the Democratic Party has an included component with its own deeply embedded commitment to support for utopian preventive nuclear warfare. This has had continuing support from among some of the party's leading figures. Thus, despite the sanity, personally, among many leading Democrats on these issues, the Democratic National Committee has refused to commit itself to that kind of effective political opposition to Cheney's war-making antics which would have been considered as divisive by some within the party's ranks. Thus, even Democratic pre-candidates who are personally opposed to Cheney's antics have appeared to have lost their nerve when given the opportunity, as candidates, to present hard evidence known to them on this matter of Cheney's frauds. Their silence has become their complicity, both in fact, and in the eyes of our disgusted traditional friends and allies among leading nations abroad.
Should the Forgotten Man Be Counted?
The 1920s policies of President Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon created the U.S. "crash" of 1929; the "fiscally conservative" policies of President Herbert Hoover and Mellon turned that financial collapse into the mortal agony of the 1929-1933 collapse of U.S. national income by approximately one-half. Had President Franklin Roosevelt not been elected to supersede Hoover, the U.S. would have been swept in the same direction which the Great Depression carried 1933-1934 Germany.
Roosevelt, a true descendant, biologically and politically, of Alexander Hamilton ally Isaac Roosevelt, drew upon that patriotic tradition to save the United States and our Constitutional form of government. He accomplished this by devotion to our Constitution's principle of natural law, devotion to the promotion of the general welfare. This meant leading attention to the plight of that often destitute citizen who had been robbed by the cruel follies of the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations. Roosevelt's campaign for election became his defense of "the forgotten man." That devotion to the "forgotten man" became the expressed soul of the victorious Democratic Party.
These and related actions led by him, built up the Democratic Party as a great force for good. The accomplishments of that party under his leadership were truly titanic. As we neared the close of our war against the fascist Synarchist International's predatory dictatorships of the 1922-1945 interval, a United States which had been wrecked by approximately half in the shoals of the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations, emerged, toward the close of the war, as the greatest productive power on this planet.
Today, behind the mask of inherently and monstrously fraudulent Federal Reserve System doctrines of "hedonic values," the effects of the recent forty years' long march, away from our role as a great agro-industrial producer-nation, into the labyrinth of post-industrial utopianism, are to be seen in the deepening poverty of the lower eighty percent of our family-income brackets, as combined with the virtual national financial-monetary bankruptcy represented today by our tragic national current-accounts deficit and a plummeting value of the dollar under the current Bush Administration. Meanwhile, our Constitution is being gutted, since the inauguration of Attorney General John Ashcroft, by measures which stink of those abhorred trends we witnessed from the 1922 rise of Mussolini and Spain's Franco, through the end of Adolf Hitler.
Our economic welfare and our freedoms are in peril, chiefly because the leadership of the Democratic Party has lately failed, so far, to mobilize those measures of reform which we should have learned to apply from the lessons of the achievements of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. The obvious lesson to be learned, is that the Democratic Party must return to the principled features of that FDR tradition today. We must, once again, rally the revival of the principles of representative government through a pivotal commitment to the defense of today's forgotten men and women.
The Lesson To Be Learned
It is now about forty years, since Defense Secretary Robert McNamara succeeded in pushing the United States into the bottomless abyss of a protracted war in Indo-China. During the decades which have followed, our republic underwent a transformation, from the world's leading producer nation, and the world's richest nation, to the decadent, imminently bankrupt form of consumer society we have become today.
No single election, no one particular piece of legislation, has caused this forty-year-long downslide. Looking back over those years, we must recognize that the particular decisions and other actions which have pushed us along this downward course, were themselves the expression of a governing, long-term cultural-paradigm-shift. We made our decisions, chiefly, as that harness, that cultural-paradigm-shift, determined the way we made choices. It was not a succession of individual legislative and kindred decisions which generated the forty-year long-term trend; it was the influence of the long-term cultural-paradigm-shift over decision-making, which generated the resulting trend. Over the recent four decades, this cultural-paradigm-shift determined, more and more, that succession of steps which have brought us to the verge of ruin today.
This long-term sweep of that cultural-paradigm-shift, has been the principal force of change in values which has shaped those long-term trends in personal values which have generated the steps toward the present ruin of our nation, step, by step, by step. The leadership of the party must not continue to evade that ominous fact. It has not been isolable issues; it has been a long-term trend, typified by the shift from traditional to utopian military doctrines, by a right-wing turn against the FDR legacy, and by indifference to the malicious effects of recent trends in national policy-making upon the conditions of life of what Roosevelt, in his time, described as "the forgotten man."
That is an example of the work of that Classical principle of tragedy which enables us to understand, and master the challenge of the rise and fall of great cultures and nations of the past and present. Wrong turns in cultural paradigms, such as Athens' launching of the Peloponnesian War, continued over a generation or more, reduce once-great powers to a ruin they bring upon themselves. If we understand that principle, and recognize the need to change in time, our nation can not only survive the presently ominous strategic and economic crises, but return toward prosperity and security, as Franklin Roosevelt led our nation in a similar time of despair.
It is time to change. Will you be able to recognize and adopt that change in time?
I have provided you the record of my present campaign for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination, as typified by the content of my campaign's website. This is my record in which you, as party members, should take some pride, a record which has stood the test of the years to date, and which affords the party a resource by aid of which a needed victory might be crafted.
I add this.
The time came, when I was drawn from other ways of personal life, into a political role in our society, by witnessing the successive events of the Bay of Pigs, the 1962 Missile Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy and others during the 1963-68 years, the launching of the Indo-China War, and my foresight that the then-current trends toward economic-cultural change must ruin our nation if continued over the longer term. I have, as it is said, "stuck to my guns," when most of the party was taking the wrong road, away from our character as a producer society, to the savagely deregulated, post-industrial ruin which we have become today. The issues I have addressed on this account, over these years, are—obviously malicious misrepresentations of my policies and actions put aside—matters of record. I have been right and foresighted when the majority of the party's leadership was mistaken on crucial issues of economic, social, and strategic policies. In particular, the record of the recent three years, since Nov. 7, 2000, is fulsome and clear.
It is characteristic of the history of cultures, that they often stray into habituated trends in policy-shaping which lead toward some awful crises. During much of those times, the well-advised individuals who recognize the danger are consigned to the role of a rejected minority. Then, the time comes when the need for change can be avoided no longer, as now. The importance of those who had proposed such change earlier is not merely that they had been right, when the majority was mistaken, but that the validity and tenacity with which their correct perception of trends was pursued, shows us persons who are proven to have efficiently understood the roots of the crisis when the majority had been wrong. It is not merely that they had been right, but that this quality of rightness represents a proven capability for leadership at the time urgent changes must be adopted.
The next President of the United States must be chosen, not to build a ruling dynasty, but for his or her dedication to an efficient, rather short-term mission, on which any success of our nation which might be desired to follow, is made possible. That is my personal mission here and now.
