This article appears in the April 13, 2018 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
‘The Campaign To Win the Future’ Means Ending the Party Politics of the Past
[Print version of this article]
EIR asked Susan Kokinda, a leading organizer for the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee in the Midwest, to provide an account of the inspiration for, and response to LaRouche PAC’s strategy for the 2018 elections. We thought it would be of interest to our readers. Here is Susan’s response to our request.
April 8—In September 2012, during the run-up to a presidential election that featured a criminal Barack Obama and a hapless Mitt Romney, Lyndon LaRouche delivered a speech at his 90th birthday celebration in which he called for the end of the party system that had coughed up those awful “choices.” But, more than that, he presented the principles by which the nation should and could be governed, and by which American presidents should be selected.
LaRouche’s speech presaged the political upheaval of 2016, which elected Donald Trump. The political upheaval of 2016 is a foreshadowing of the political and economic revolution which can free the nation from the British empire—this time permanently. “LaRouche PAC’s 2018 Platform: The Campaign to Win the Future” is the instrument to accomplish that. The “preamble” to the Platform reads as follows:
Our future could be determined by the 2018 Congressional elections. Neither party has a program to advance the nation, let alone ensure our short-term survival. Therefore, we advance the following platform, and launch an independent expenditure campaign to make it happen. We will campaign on the platform below, endorsing or opposing candidates, and creating large blocks of voters and candidates demanding this platform in critical Congressional Districts.
Presently, both major political parties are controlled by Wall Street. Both parties adhere to the post–World War II geopolitical system that has produced decades of perpetual war, and now threatens World War III by attacking China and Russia. The Democrats intend to use these elections to impeach the President. The Republicans, while nominally supporting the President, fanatically adhere to Wall Street’s economic ideas which will destroy his Presidency. . . .
The LaRouche platform has two flanks:
• End the coup against the President and prosecute those responsible.
• Implement LaRouche’s Four Laws for Economic Recovery of the United States and join China’s great Belt and Road Initiative for economic development. This will create millions of productive jobs, and ensure the United States joins a new paradigm of global collaboration on great infrastructure projects advancing the common aims of mankind.
Implicit in the 2018 Platform campaign is the realization of Lyndon LaRouche’s 2012 explicit demand to eliminate the political parties. In fact, that campaign cannot be fully grasped without returning to, and examining LaRouche’s earlier speech.
I remember the day the speech was delivered. A large group of LaRouche’s closest associates were gathered on a Virginia hillside, overlooking valleys and the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. Greetings and congratulations from around the world, remembrances, and music had filled that late summer afternoon. Then LaRouche took the podium and sobered the gathering with a warning of the danger of thermonuclear war. He located that danger as coming from a dying British imperial system, and its control of the United States through its Wall Street spawn, its evil puppet Obama, and its hapless puppet Romney. The middle part of the speech soared, as he declared:
Human beings, as a species must be defended, because of the creativity that we represent, which means that we must defend that creativity, but we must also promote it. . . . And it means that mankind has within its power, the power to do things which are beyond the imagination. We can explore the universe. We can explore, particularly, the Solar System. We know that we have the potential ability, innate in the nature of things, that mankind can begin to take over the Solar System. . . . These things are innate in the nature of mankind, the nature of mankind which many politicians have no sense of whatsoever. But we, as we live and die, as persons, must have the right to access to a meaningful course of life, to the ability to do something with our lives, which we can rest upon as we die, and know has something to do of permanent value for the human species. And that is what must be protected and defended.
Having had the privilege of listening to Lyndon LaRouche speak for over four decades, I expected the speech to stop on that beautiful note. But no, he was not done. At that point, he turned to “the politics of Earth, the politics of the United States,” and went on to call for the elimination of the party system. “The party system was a travesty, which has corrupted, and, in part, destroyed the United States, by itself—by means of itself—over much of our nation’s history. The idea of the party system is a form of degeneration which must be eliminated, if we are going to be able to cope with the real challenges, which mankind should be occupied with . . . now.”
The Trump election was a de facto rejection of the party system. Trump ran against the entire Republican establishment, and won election in key states with almost no help from the official Republican Party apparatus. The stunning lack of support for Trump as President from Republicans in Congress for his initiatives toward China and Russia and for federal funding for infrastructure, underscore the fact that, while he hijacked the Republican Party to get elected, he has no Republican support for the very policies which got him elected. Little need be said about the disintegration of the obstructionist Democratic Party, as evidenced by the mass migration of blue collar workers, especially in the Midwest, into the Trump camp.
Yet, as we head into the 2018 mid-term elections, the very people who caused this political realignment are lining up on the barricades of the party politics from which they broke from in 2016. As we talk to Trump supporters, who are mobilizing for local, state, and national Republican campaigns, and confront them with this reality, they immediately agree that the Republican Party is hostile to Trump, and the best they can hope for is that maybe they can elect a few candidates in the primaries who are loyal to him. Meanwhile many of the blue collar workers who voted for Trump are definitively not going to vote for a budget-cutting, single-issue-spouting Republican, and will instead turn to the Democratic primaries in hopes of finding a few sane Democrats, who will at least pay lip service to defending the working class.
If the American people stay in that box, then come November, they will end up with the choice of a bunch of Wall Street Democrats running against a bunch of Wall Street Republicans.
LaRouche addressed this in the 2012 speech: “But we don’t want the top-down rule of a party system, which is controlled by the money sent to them, by financial interests which control money which gives one party advantage over the other! You want the bare citizen, as a citizen, to have an equal right, and independent of this party system.”
That is the intention of LaRouche PAC’s Platform fight: to organize the movement which rejected war and Wall Street in 2016, into an effective force demanding the economic and strategic policy which will fulfill the mandate of 2016, one completely divorced from party politics. In Michigan, LaRouche PAC organizers are bringing the Platform to every point of the political spectrum—to Democrat and Republican campaigns and political events, to Tea Party meetings, to trade unions, to the State Legislature. They are finding that the dividing line is not one of party; it is one of reality versus ideology. There are ideologues in both parties, who are living in the world of CNN or Fox TV or the Wall Street Journal or the Huffington Post.
There are those, however, who do respond with the recognition that, within the existing economic paradigm, no one has a solution to the underlying economic crisis, especially to the yawning infrastructure hole that the nation faces, let alone to a complete leap of the economy to a higher economic platform. When those responsive layers are presented with the dramatic transformation of China over the past 25 years, accomplished using the principles that are embodied in LaRouche’s Four Laws, there is immediate resonance.
This is what LaRouche called for in 2012:
And why should we be spending our time selecting a government of two parties, neither of which is fit to be our government. Why don’t we have a national government selected in the way that George Washington, for example, President George Washington, had intended? We would not have that mess! And the citizen would be called upon, not to decide whose butt he wants to kiss, but rather what the issues and programs are that this citizen wishes to express. We want to engage the citizen in the dialogue! We don’t want to take the competition between groups of citizens. We want the citizen to force the reality that he or she is voting for the government. And what the citizens do in voting for a government, will determine the fate of the nation.
We want to confront the citizen, with his or her responsibility for being accountable for what government is, and what it becomes. We have to force responsibility upon the individual citizen, as a citizen, not as a sucker, playing into some kind of game.
That is the purpose of the LaRouche PAC 2018 campaign: to confront the citizen with his or her responsibility for policy-making, and to provoke that process long before he or she walks into a voting booth. By doing so, the political realignment that emerged in the 2016 election will be coupled with the necessary revolution in economic policy.
