EDITORIAL

This Election
Will Not Be 2016 Done Over—
We’re Way Beyond That Now!

by Tony Papert

[Print version of this editorial]

Oct. 7—Those like Hillary Clinton who have never understood what happened in the 2016 election, naturally expect (and hope) that the 2018 midterms will mark a return to “normal” U.S. elections. They make nonsense predictions, like their claim that a statistic—the one that says that on average, Presidents have usually lost in midterm elections—ensures Trump will lose the House of Representatives. But nothing could be more ludicrous than to believe that any statistic from the past could control what Americans do now. It could only influence them if they were stupid enough to believe such an argument. But now, in fact, Americans generally are a lot less stupid than they were two years ago—or even two months ago. That is the real story of this election—although it is one that Hillary Clinton may never be able to understand.

The name for this phenomenon is “the mass strike,” as Lyndon LaRouche constructed this argument exactly 50 years ago, basing himself on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unfinished A Defence of Poetry of 1821, and Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions of 1906. Great works by two of humanity’s greatest leaders of the modern era. LaRouche most frequently cited a section towards the end of Shelley’s work, assuming his hearers were familiar with the writing as a whole. Describing historical periods preceding or accompanying “a great and free development of the national will” of England, Shelley wrote, “At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.”

The spread of this “power” is not precisely voluntary, and is often unnoticed by the recipients. Its immediate causes in one or another case are usually unknown—as is seen both in Shelley’s and in Luxemburg’s arguments. Indeed it most resembles a perception rather than a thought—but not a perception by the usual organs of sense. Shelley continues from the sentence quoted above, to write “The persons in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul.”

If we can prevent the disaster of a Democratic House of Representatives, which would destroy the country by impeaching the President; if we can shut down Britain’s regime-change operation and put conspirators Obama, Mueller, Brennan and others in jail; and if we can use this mass-strike period to win hegemony for LaRouche’s “Four New Laws” and New Bretton Woods system—then, under those conditions, the whole world is now entering a new period of deep-going, far-reaching positive reform, comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but far broader in its implications. National sovereignty is being brought back from the dead, at the same time that sovereign nations fully engage together to win the “common aims of mankind,” as LaRouche’s collaborator the late Dr. Edward Teller put it.

What is all this—a forecast of the future? (“Never make predictions, especially about the future,” said Casey Stengel.) But its effects are already here today, in what Shelley called “the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” You can call it the future if you like, but it is already shaping the 2018 elections, as it has been for some time before we noticed it. The “power” Shelley was writing about, we might call intensely awakened individual creativity—which is intrinsically social at the same time that it is individual. It is the only conscious power of negative entropy we know of in the universe. Its effects are seen in the volunteers joining Kesha Rogers’ flagship Independent campaign in Texas’ 9th Congressional District, but also equally in thousands of other ways which may seem to have nothing to do with each other.

How does it work? Americans (and not only Americans) are experiencing the most diverse kinds of effects, minute-to-minute, of all the indirect ramifications of the fact that the long nightmare which reached the deepest level of Hell under George W. Bush and Obama, may finally be coming to an end. (There are many other valid ways to phrase this as well.) This reflects itself, unawares, in changed personal relationships, in cultural factors, and other areas too numerous to name. People, even if unaware of it, at the same time are changed by a perception, as it were, of something “gigantic” of which they are unaware.

A sort of reasoning is going on in their minds which is often implicit, rather than conscious. (Rosa Luxemburg’s Mass Strike explores this aspect very fully.) Take, as an example, the effects of the Kavanaugh hearings. What is their meaning for tens of millions of Americans, even if they themselves may not be aware of that meaning? “Think where we’d be now had Hillary won in 2016. What an open sewer!” And where we will be if she claws her way back.

The major “Russiagate” documents which are being declassified by President Trump and Congressional committees will, over the next few days, intersect this mass-strike process.

The mass strike is occurring in the forcing-medium of the oncoming election. What does it mean for the “election per se”? Not only will this not be a “normal” pre-2016 election geometry. It will not be a rerun of 2016 either—we’re now in a completely different world from where we were in 2016. Among many other effects, the mass strike means that unique creative interventions will be made, by ourselves and others, and ourselves with others, to “turn the adversary’s flank,” and such interventions will re-echo and inspire all sorts of others, increasingly as Nov. 6 approaches.