The Political Ideology of the LaRouche Movement

The Prototype of 21st Century American Populism

Lyndon LaRouche is a figure in American politics whose impact has potentially been overlooked and underestimated. His worldview embodied what might be described as the “paranoid style,” and this has meant that he has been decidedly correct roughly as often as he has been completely wrong. Over the course of his extensive political career, LaRouche and his following have had a disproportionately significant impact for how often they are dismissed as a marginal force, wielding a considerable amount of influence in the world of “conspiracy theories” and even having their hand in shaping major government policy. As such, a prospective student of deep politics, or anyone interested in “weird” ideologies should be familiar with the history and beliefs of the so-called LaRouche Movement.

    Lyndon LaRouche was born into a New Hampshire Quaker family in 1922, working in the Civilian Public Service during World War II as a young man due to his conscientious objector status. LaRouche’s time with the CPS would serve as both the origin of his intense opposition to the British monarchy, having become sympathetic to the Indian Independence movement during his time there serving as a medical unit, and his introduction to the ideas of Marxism, joining the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party in 1949. LaRouche would move to New York City in 1953, being employed as a management consultant over a decade while remaining a member of the SWP. It would not be until around 1966 however, when LaRouche’s political trajectory would deviate from a more orthodox leftism after he failed to take control of a schismatic faction in the party and was booted from the SWP.

    In 1967, the ever ambitious LaRouche would become a lecturer on Marx at the Free School in New York City, putting him in contact with the emergent “New Left” student movement and allowing him to attract a small following with his extensive knowledge of Marx’s Capital. Soon he began organizing these students in an attempt to take control of the Columbia University chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society, one of the key organizations in the left-wing student movement. LaRouche’s circle of Columbia University student leftists would form the nucleus of his new National Caucus of Labor Committees, which by 1973 had reached six hundred members across a number of American and European cities. As he cultivated his tight-knit following, LaRouche began to emphasize a more conspiracy-minded approach to understanding politics than the more orthodox Marxist approaches of his contemporaries, detailing how the Rockefeller family used the CIA to control almost every aspect of society.

As part of his efforts to ensure the absolute loyalty of the NCLC membership, LaRouche employed the tactic of “ego-stripping,” hammering the need for absolute ideological conformity and depriving members of food and sleep in an effort to prove they had been brainwashed to participate in assassination attempts on their leader’s life. These sessions would serve as the prelude to the NCLC’s Operation Mop-Up and the beginning of outright warfare with different left-wing groups. LaRouchites would attack Communist Party and Socialist Worker Party meetings with brass knuckles and nunchucks, a hostility that marked a movement from Marxist factionalism to violent opposition.

It was around this time that LaRouche began associating with far-right organizations and individuals on the basis that they represented the “anti-Rockefeller” faction of the right wing, and those groups under the Rockefeller’s control (mainstream conservatives, liberals, and Marxists) were the paramount enemy that needed to be combatted. In 1974, the NCLC was going out of its way to form an alliance with the far-right white nationalist Liberty Lobby, united by their shared identifications of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, Henry Kissinger, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Zionists as their foremost enemies. It was through their alliance with the Liberty Lobby that LaRouche would acquire the services of Mitchell WerBell III as a security advisor.

Mitch WerBell is a fascinating individual, having served as an operative for the OSS during World War II, working alongside infamous spooks like E. Howard Hunt in China and Burma where he was paid in opium. WerBell would go on to serve as a contractor for the CIA, advising the Batista regime in Cuba and Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic, as well as founding the firearm suppressor manufacturer SIONICS. As such, WerBell made a curious choice of associate for someone so paranoid about the threat posed by the Rockefeller-controlled CIA, necessitating that LaRouche clarify the agency was split between “pro-humanist” and “anti-humanist” factions, the former being composed of individuals like WerBell and the latter being the minions of the Rockefeller family. Around the same time, LaRouche would also recruit Roy Frankhouser, who had served as Grand Dragon of the Pennsylvania KKK, an organizer of the Minutemen, and a member of the American Nazi Party, Liberty Lobby, and White Citizens’ Council among other organizations, as well as an informant for the FBI. LaRouche was aware of Frankhouser’s role as an FBI informant and believed that his intelligence connections could be useful to the NCLC - for his part, Frankhouser exaggerated his intelligence connections to the point of inventing “Mister Ed,” a high ranking anonymous official in the CIA he was supposedly taking orders from.

Despite his paranoia about assassination attempts and the threat posed by intelligence agencies, by the mid-1970s LaRouche was going out of his way to try to forge connections with the FBI and the CIA. NCLC members had begun writing up intelligence reports on different leftist organizations for the FBI and sending information on anti-apartheid activists to the South African government. LaRouche would directly offer the services of the NCLC’s private “intelligence network” to the CIA, partially motivated by the belief that making himself useful to the agency would afford him some protection, and using his association with WerBell to attempt to bring more former and current CIA agents into his orbit. Of course, LaRouche’s frequent attempts to make himself useful to the intelligence community would not be enough to keep him safe from legal trouble. In 1986, LaRouche would be charged with mail fraud and tax evasion after having his offices raided, which he naturally accused of being a plot by his political enemies to frame him. LaRouche would be convicted in 1989, spending five years in prison before being released.

Over the course of his career, LaRouche and the organizations he had created would be responsible for contributing to the popularization of a number of beliefs and claims which remain staples of the world of “conspiracy theory,” ranging from the more grounded to the egregiously false. The LaRouchite publication, Executive Intelligence Review, would be the first to propose the “October Surprise” theory in December, 1980, asserting that Ronald Reagan’s campaign had negotiated with the government of Iran to delay the release of hostages in order to secure the presidential election, in exchange for future weapons sales, anticipating the Iran-Contra scandal. At least as early as 2002, EIR was also supportive of the “inside job” interpretation of the September 11th attacks, which were interpreted as an event similar to the Reichstag fire engineered by neoconservatives in the Bush administration to justify tyrannical seizures of power. Of course, the LaRouchites also indulged in significantly more outlandish claims, such as asserting that HIV could be transmitted through casual contact with infected individuals or even from insect bites, as well as contending that the use of DDT and carbon dioxide emissions have no negative impact on the environment.

    Over the course of his many presidential campaigns from 1976 to 2004, Lyndon LaRouche would lay out his political vision, which by the mid-1970’s had so significantly deviated from his earlier Trotskyist worldview that it was decidedly no longer Marxist. Instead, LaRouche had become a vigorous champion of an interventionist model of capitalism similar to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, calling for a restoration of the Bretton Woods monetary system, restoring the fixed exchange rates and tying currency values to gold, the model which had been in place from 1944 to 1971, as well as an “American System” with a national bank and ambitious infrastructure projects such as a maglev railway across the Bering Strait, the creation of a nuclear energy grid, and the development of fusion energy and particle beam weapons, and the idiosyncratic position of making the “Verdi pitch” of 432 hz the standard for musical instruments instead of the current 440 hz. Altogether, the stated aims of LaRouche’s political movement was a capitalist economy with strong dirigiste elements, and in the supposed interest of achieving these aims LaRouche was happy to indulge in anti-semitic, homophobic, and racist rhetoric when it was convenient and was perfectly content to ally himself with far right groups like Liberty Lobby and avowed neo-nazi Klansmen like Roy Frankhouser.

    This willingness to cozy up with far right elements also derives from the Manichaean nature of the LaRouchite worldview, defining the vast majority of history as a struggle between Plato-influenced humanists including among their ranks Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Ludwig van Beethoven, and of course LaRouche himself, against the sinister forces of Aristotelianism, which manifests in the ideologies and philosophies of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jeremy Bentham and is propagated by an oligarchy of aristocratic British families headed by the House of Windsor. In Aristotelian philosophy, LaRouche saw the source of all forces of “degeneration” in culture, specifically jazz and rock music, homosexuality, and most especially the usage of drugs. With regards to this last point, the LaRouchite Executive Intelligence Review would publish the book Dope, Inc. detailing how the model of drug trafficking and money laundering used by the British during the Opium Wars in China continued to be used throughout 18th and 19th centuries and well into the 20th, bringing many of the “Old Money” families of the United States to power and continuing to profit from such trafficking to this day through covert control of organized crime via a number of fronts. The evidence presented is a mixed bag, with a number of interesting connections between individuals and organizations back to British imperialism and the drug trade being undermined by a number of harder to substantiate claims and a conclusion that ultimately endorses the Reaganite “War on Drugs.”

As perennial as LaRouche appears as a political figure, he has had significant impacts on major government policies, the most obvious being his connections to the infamous Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program under the Reagan administration. During the 1980s, LaRouche and his circle had managed to establish several contacts within the Reagan administration thanks to their enthusiastic snitching and intelligence connections, even getting them a number of meetings with Ray Pollock in 1982 and 1983, a member of the National Security Council who was responsible for defense programs. Prior to this, LaRouche had been enthusiastically championing the idea of using space-based particle beam weapons as an alternate approach to the nuclear arms race, shooting missiles out of the sky with high powered lasers. In 1983, Reagan would announce the Strategic Defense Initiative, which intended to neutralize nuclear weapons using laser and particle beam weapons. Naturally, LaRouche and his organizations took credit for this major policy, while the Reagan administration were curiously silent on whether or not they had gotten the idea from LaRouche, refusing to confirm or deny it. A less well-substantiated, but intriguing possibility is that LaRouche may have been an influence on the contemporary Belt and Road Initiative currently being undertaken by China, having championed a “Eurasian Landbridge” rail network of trade infrastructure throughout the 1990s, and apparently having cultivated a relatively positive reputation in China by the mid-2000’s. LaRouchite organizations have been eager to emphasize the similarity between the visions of Lyndon LaRouche and Xi Jinping, but there hasn’t been much in terms of evidence suggesting direct influence. Regardless, it’s clear that LaRouche’s pie-in-the-sky ambitious government program proposals being adopted by more mainstream politicians may be his most significant legacy.

    As impressive as getting the federal government to adopt your laser weapon defense program is, LaRouche and his organization never got anywhere near the actual levers of power. At best, they ended up serving as a useful instrument of the intelligence community on one hand, and a minor nuisance with their advocacy of conspiracy theories on the other. The model of politics which LaRouche pursued, center-left dirigiste economics combined with opportunistic social conservatism and an eagerness to collaborate with the far right, continues to exist today in a number of forms outside of the LaRouche movement. There are significant parallels to both the Trump and Sanders presidential campaigns in terms of messaging: both centered around the promise of rebuilding the devastated infrastructure of the United States and to bring back mid-century labor prosperity which has been taken away from some outside force, representing a sort of “class consciousness,” but ultimately a “middle class” consciousness. Further, both in their roles as “anti-establishment” figures inevitably serve to reinforce the existing political establishment, becoming the face of the reactionary capitalist Republicans on the one hand and an auxiliary of the liberal capitalist Democrats on the other. This variety of eclectic populism can often correctly identify nodes of power and parapolitical actors, but is ultimately powerless to effect any sort of meaningless change. When populists wrapped up in these movements become so eager to create a “big tent” dedicated to left-leaning industrial policy at any cost, including collaboration with the most hardcore social reactionaries, it turns them into nothing more than water-carriers for reactionaries and capitalists, who are more than happy to take advantage of another handful of useful idiots. Lyndon LaRouche is a cautionary tale in how ruthless economism can lead down a road of failure, and paranoia alone is not enough to prevent you from becoming a dupe for the status quo.