THE NEW CULTURAL PARADIGM-SHIFT
Where Does Europe Go Now?
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
May 31, 2005
Just one week after the U.S. Senate had successfully resisted a virtually rabid Vice President Dick Cheney's intended coup d'état against the U.S. Constitution, a wide majority of the participating 70-odd percent ration of eligible French voters rejected the proposed European Constitution. Meanwhile, during the entirety of that intervening week, the leading European press, with the most notable exception of Switzerland's Neue Zürcher Zeitung, had kept a strict silence on the Earth-shaking implications of the U.S. Senate's actions in resisting Cheney's intended, almost Hermann Göring-like—or, should we prefer "Carl Schmitt-like," or "Leo Strauss-like"—coup. The connection between the French election-campaign and the week-long silence of the European press on the U.S. Senate actions should now be obvious among the thinking variety of leading European circles.
When the world is sliding, at a presently accelerating rate, into its worst general monetary-financial crisis since the 1930s, with a mounting social crisis to match, political crises such as those which recently erupted in the U.S.A. and Europe will not be far behind. The rising pattern of visible resistance to the proposed European Constitution among relevant French circles during the weeks immediately prior to the election already demonstrated the fact that a "reversed cultural paradigm-shift" against what France calls its "Bo-Bo" ("bohemian bourgeois") generation has now either reached "critical mass," or is on the verge of doing so. This is not a specifically French social phenomenon; the same pattern is evident, if often in other forms, in other places, not only in Europe, but also in the U.S.A. Obviously, given the results of the French vote this past weekend, any honest reporting on the successful U.S. Senate resistance to Cheney's intended coup d'état would have reinforced the rising opposition to the present draft European Constitution throughout much, if not most, of the people of Europe today. The motivation for the suppression of that news within Europe, is now empirically clear beyond doubt.
Now, those Senate actions and the French vote have occurred. Therefore, what next: not only for the U.S. and France, but the world more widely, especially the Americas and Europe as a whole? What omens are to be read from the rumble of the approach of history's new sounds of the rolling tumbrils, approaching the date with history which is in the making for tomorrow, as for today?
Then, and ...
Since the moment of the death of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, the world has been in the grip of a generations-long cyclical pattern, a pattern marked by the role of what has been, in fact, a new fascist social movement. It is an existentialist movement which has been typified by intervening decades of antics by an intellectual rabble associated with the U.S. Congress for Cultural Freedom, the immediate postwar period's Paris Review of the U.S.A.'s Venetian-style figure John Train et al., and so forth. The children born in the Americas and Western Europe during or shortly after 1945, were heavily impacted by the massive countercultural indoctrination which was fully underway by the beginning of the 1950s. The indoctrination of those children, under the terrifying, "brainwashing-like" conditions of the threat of general nuclear warfare and the massive countercultural warfare in the fields such as art and education, produced what became known as "the 68er generation" and its "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" and kindred features.
As a result of that international countercultural campaign, with its effects on education, especially on the education of the growing suburban "middle class" of the 1950s and 1960s, the world in general underwent what is known today as the "great cultural paradigm-shift," of what was named either the Nietzschean or post-Nietzschean ideology which produced such phenomena as what France knows as its "Bo-Bos." Typical were the influences of such "Frankfurt School" ideologues as Martin Heidegger who emerged as a leading, anti-Semitic Nazi philosopher at Freiburg, and his cronies, such as his intimate associates Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, whose birth certificates, unlike that of Heidegger, disqualified them from prospective careers under Hitler's regime, but who otherwise represented the same dionysiac, existentialist cultural virus which gave the world its Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hitler, and their like. This "Frankfurt School" and kindred recruits to the Anglo-American shock-troops of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, were just as passionately filled with hatred against the Classical culture of Europe and the U.S.A. as any Nazi. The brand-labels and flavor differed, but the poison was ultimately the same existentialist hatred of modern European civilization which all shared with truth-hating Hannah Arendt and with Angela Davis's mentor, Herbert Marcuse.
The common denominator of all this cultural corruption was hatred against the memory and practice of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Nowhere has that set of connections been shown as dramatically as within the U.S.A. itself, even within the relevant, "Bo-Bo"-comparable generation of the Democratic Party itself. Nowhere has this historical fact been shown so clearly as in the recent eruption of an opposite trend, in the return of the Democratic Party to its FDR tradition over the course of the 2004 election-campaign, and the present aftermath of the Nov. 2, 2004 election.
... Now
Nowhere is this latter change shown so clearly as in the hatred of me personally by the Bush White House and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, even to the point that those circles soar toward the heights of paranoia in blaming me personally for all of the troubles which the second George W. Bush Administration has suffered over the course of 2005 to date. I have been there, so to speak, all along. Naturally, my policies are received more favorably under today's conditions than a year earlier; but, although my policies do reflect my collaboration with relevant Democratic Party official circles today, the root of those policies is the same as a year earlier, and over decades before that. The essential change which has frightened current White House circles to such a state of fury against me personally as we see today, is a trend toward a cultural paradigm-shift which reverses the effects previously associated with the mid-1960s rise of the "68ers." This is the rising trend which horrifies the Bush Administration. This is the change we witnessed as reflected in France's election this past weekend.
Nowhere has this recent reversal been shown so clearly as in comparing the role of my youth movement inside the U.S.A. with certain relevant developments within Europe itself, including the personal hatred against me and that youth movement, as exhibited, among suggestible circles in France and elsewhere, by the international efforts by leading official circles of the current British government of that Liberal-Imperialist Fabian ("Limp") war-monger and Bush crony, Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The 2000 collapse of the U.S. IT bubble coincided with the appearance of the potential for a new quality of youth movement in the U.S.A., a new youth ferment whose existence reflected a certain special quality of opposition to the cultural legacy and life-style of their "Baby Boomer" parents' generation. These young-adult layers of youth, centered in the 18-25-year-old stratum, saw themselves as having been dumped by their parents' generation into a "no future" world. This was not only my personal assessment of the evidence; certain official circles in the U.S.A. had assembled the evidence which led them to similar conclusions at about the same time.
On the basis of clinically convincing patterns of cultural evidence to that effect, I responded to the approaches of a relevant portion of such youth by agreeing to sponsor a new youth movement appropriate to their desires. The new movement was, as it had to become, also a movement in higher education, in which the two typical benchmarks were Carl Gauss's 1799 dissertation on what he himself had later named the subject of the fundamental theorem of algebra, and J.S. Bach's motet Jesu, meine Freude. These benchmarks defined a program of emphasis on combined physical-scientific and Classical-cultural education, the combination of the two most essential elements of the study of history as a means for finding the meaning of a young adult's present existence today.
The initial, pivotal emphasis on Gauss's 1799 dissertation as a point of young-adult entry into the study of modern science, meant a tracing of the history of European physical science's development from the pre-Aristotelean, anti-Sophist Greece of Thales, Pythagoras, and Plato, through benchmark examples including Nicholas of Cusa, Pacioli, Leonardo, Kepler, Fermat, Leibniz, the Ecole Polytechnique, Gauss, Dirichlet, and Riemann. It meant the study of history as the history of ideas, as these examples from the history of discoveries in physical science typify the proper meaning of the term "ideas."
It meant the study of the comparable ideas specific to artistic composition and performance. This meant an emphasis on reference points such as Fifteenth-Century Classical Florentine bel canto singing pivotted on the natural and traditionally Classical value of C = 256, through J.S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, and poets and historians such as Shakespeare, Lessing, Schiller, and the history of the U.S. Constitution, from the Winthrops and Mathers, Franklin, Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt.
A half-decade after all this began, the intellectual ferment, and zest for mastering the Classical principles of choral singing, among these young men and women, would shame most universities by comparison. They share the inclusive passion for discovery and truthfulness, in science, in art, in history, and in current political life, toward which any self-respecting university would respond with kindly envy.
The progress of this program has shown me something of special importance in understanding those individual young adults. They must be recognized as representing a scientifically crucial, if still, presently, small sample of the potentialities of the much larger body of a new and oncoming generation of young adults moving in their footsteps. They provide us the vantage-point for understanding what happened in France this past weekend. They provide us a point of advantage for insight into what is both necessary and possible for the world as a whole today.
The Historical Fact of Sunday
The resumption of the role of the U.S. Democratic Party for the missions of today, is frankly the echo of the Democratic Party brought together under President Franklin Roosevelt. What has been embedded within the core of the culture and experience of the U.S. population, its immigrants, and its national institutions, over more than two centuries, is coming back to the surface again today. The "Bo-Bo" generation of France, the U.S.A., and elsewhere, is in the process of becoming massively self-discredited in a way which portends the feasibility of a "reversed cultural paradigm-shift" of return of European civilization toward the kind of optimism which the critical role of the U.S.A. in defeating Hitler prompted in the closing phase of what is called by most "World War II."
This precondition for this "reversed cultural paradigm-shift" was ironically implicit in the falseness of widespread acceptance of the delusion that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the entry of the world into something which should have reminded us of Adolf Hitler's doomed proclamation of "A Thousand-Year Reich." In this case, Hitler's post-1989 plagiarists spoke, as did neo-conservative fanatic Francis Fukuyama, of an "End of History," a phrase intended to convey a Hobbesian's systemically brutish notion of "human nature," a notion of a U.S. caricature of the ancient Roman Empire, an empire ruling over what is often termed today "a globalized world society."
It is now nearly 16 years since that celebrated "Fall of the Wall" which prompted "The End of History" delusion. Then, a "Bo-Bo" born after May 1945 would have been 44 or fewer years old, but approaching 60 today. The over-confidence of the time of President George H.W. Bush's Presidency, has grown tired and fearful under a persisting, presently accelerating sheer rot in the economies of the Americas and Europe, especially so since the 2000 collapse of the "IT" bubble and the defeat of Al Gore's Presidential candidacy that same year.
And, Therefore ...
The "Bo-Bos" of today have retreated to behind the battered walls of an aging consumerist's debt-ridden obsession with defense of an increasingly illusory "life-style" existence, hoping that death will come to them silently, unannounced, and without prescience or pain. They are immune to the "Let us have a future" protests from today's young-adult generation. "Who are you?!" the Bo-Bos and their like protest; "This is our world, which must continue to be the world our chosen life-style demands for us." When the last illusion collapsed, with the Spring 2000 popping of Alan Greenspan's "IT" financial bubble, the Bo-Bos' already waning credibility with the young generation began to evaporate.
This widening, post-2000 cleavage between the "Baby Boomer" (e.g., "Bo-Bo") generation and their young-adult successors, has two principal dimensions. First, there are the relatively higher income-brackets of the Baby Boomers, who are either in the dwindling upper 20% of household income-brackets, or still cling to a family life-style otherwise associated with such brackets, and, at the same time, the growing cleavage of the young-adult generation from the dominant life-style of the self-defined as less poor among the older generation. Second, the young adults, whose hostility to the Baby Boomer ideology is tempered by optimism about the possibility of a better future for mankind, now tend to converge in a sense of common interest with those from the lower-income brackets. For the young adult, there are those of the lower-income brackets, such as skilled machine-tool designers, who still embody the mixture of a continued personal cultural optimism with a sense of immediate great peril under any continuation of the current tendencies of the upper-income strata of what the French call their Bo-Bos.
In the reported patterns of France's voting, this past weekend, on the European Constitution issue, there are some apparent exceptions which prove the rule. Overall, otherwise, the broad tendencies expressed are clear. What is expressed, chiefly, is the effect of a reversed cultural paradigm-shift, as expressed among young adults, which has found resonance with those broader layers of the population which find the shop-worn utopian delusions of "globalization" insufferable. The reported pattern of the weekend vote in France conforms to the known pattern of that "sociology" in current trends.
Outside France itself, we meet a comparable phenomenon in the apparently irreversible break-up of the so-called "Red-Green coalition" of Germany's current parliamentary government. In both cases, as elsewhere, including the U.S.A. itself, the rising tendency today is toward new political coalitions based on the tradition of the promotion of the general welfare, against right-wing currents. This portends a difficult but unavoidable reassortment of electoral and related combinations around much of the world, most clearly in the Americas and Europe. It is also clear, that these combinations will pivot on the role of those "youth movements" from among young-adult strata, movements which tend to echo the role which my own LaRouche Youth Movement typifies, youth movements which contribute a keystone role in leading the shift away from the decadence of the "68ers" on both sides of the Atlantic.
