Thursday, September 21, 2017

Louis "Lyndon LaRouche" Proyect

In a comment (here), Louis Proyect takes me to task for writing obsessively about unimportant things (such as his blog). He urges me to "get a f***ing life."

So it comes as a surprise that Mr. Proyect has devoted four long posts (he promises a fifth) to the political career of that truly unimportant figure, Lyndon LaRouche. I confess I have read only the fourth in the series, which is more than enough. I'm ashamed to say that LaRouche was a comrade of ours (Proyect and me) in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), though he left well before my time.

In my opinion LaRouche is not a political figure at all. He made his mark raising money by fair means and foul--a boiler room telemarketing operation followed by credit card fraud, for which he spent five years in jail. I don't think he had (has) any political convictions at all beyond what he thought would raise him the most money and influence.

Yet for no reason that I can discern (at least from post #4) Mr. Proyect refers to him as a "fascist." This is a word I avoid because it no longer has any meaning--it's just an expletive. That, along with the word "racist," is precisely how Mr. Proyect uses the term. Anybody with any association with Mr. LaRouche (however tangential) gets tagged as "racist" and/or "fascist," with no other evidence necessary.

Mr. Proyect reports that "[a]t the peak of his powers when he was a presidential candidate, LaRouche used to buy an hour’s worth of time on network TV to present his rather convoluted mixture of leftish sounding attacks on the IMF and bizarre conspiracy theories about how Queen Elizabeth was a drug lord." Are those beliefs hallmarks of fascism? Or racism? Mr. Proyect doesn't say.

Mr. Proyect purports to document the extensive influence that LaRouche wielded during the Reagan administration. Upon even casual examination it collapses into hilarious rubble. He quotes journalist Dennis King as follows:
Its fund raisers brought in tens of millions of dollars while its candidates attracted over 4 million votes, including voting percentages above 10 percent in hundreds of contests. In at least 70 statewide, congressional, or state legislative races, LaRouche candidates polled over 20 percent of the vote. At least 25 appeared on the general election ballot as Democratic nominees, either by defeating a regular Democratic opponent or by running in the primary unopposed. Although none was actually elected to any public office higher than a local school board, hundreds won Democratic Party posts (mostly county committee seats) across the country.
That proves what money can buy, but upon closer examination it's not very dramatic. We're told that this happened over several elections from 1982 to 1988. That's four presidential and off-year cycles. Suppose 30 million people cast ballots each cycle, meaning that 120 million ballots were cast over the six years. But each ballot contains many contests--for president, congressman, city council, family court judge, etc. A reasonable estimate is that on each ballot a voter would have marked ten candidates for 10 different offices. That means 1.2 BILLION votes were cast, of which the LaRouchians got only 0.3% of the total.

Hardly a mass movement. Even the Green Party does better than that! And LaRouche looks even worse when one notes that for minor offices people often vote randomly.

Here's another example of LaRouche's supposed reach.
The Reagan White House and LaRouche saw eye-to-eye particularly on the need for Star Wars and pushing for nuclear power. They had even beaten Reagan to the punch. In the late 70s they were lining up rightwing atomic scientists like Edward Teller to support the goals of the Fusion Energy Foundation that promoted a Star Wars type anti-missile defense, fusion energy, and bigger and more powerful thermonuclear devices. While Teller considered them too weird to network with, a close friend of his and highly respected scientist named Robert Budwine from the Livermore Labs was drawn into their periphery.
Mr. Proyect uses this trick several times. First, LaRouche purports to agree with some commonly held opinion, in this case supporting nuclear power. Then LaRouche "lines up" Edward Teller, who we're supposed to believe wouldn't otherwise have championed nuclear power. Mr. Teller is smart enough to dismiss LaRouche as a crank, but somehow one of his colleagues (Teller had thousands of them), gratuitously dubbed "a close friend," falls into the periphery. This is the extent of LaRouche's influence in high places--it amounts to nothing.

Then there's this slander by (slight) association:
By providing a platform for softball interviews, the EIR [LaRouche's magazine--ed] cultivated ties to the Republican Party elite. Among the politicians whose views could be seen in this fascist journal were Agriculture Secretary John Block, Defense Under Secretary Richard DeLauer, Commerce Under Secretary Lionel Olmer, Treasury Under Secretary Norman Ture, Assistant Attorney General Lowell Jensen, Murray Weidenbaum, the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Senators Orrin Hatch and John Tower.
Mr. Proyect makes no claim that these people wrote anything for the EIR. They were simply fooled into contributing interview remarks, which hardly demonstrates any LaRouche influence on them whatsoever. Note the gratuitous expletive.

That same paragraph goes on to say:
No matter how much Richard Spencer has praised Donald Trump, he never could have gotten through the front door to the equivalent of such pols today. That’s the big difference between LaRouche and the alt-right. He was far more interested in influencing public policy than doing half-assed imitations of a Nuremberg rally.
This is ridiculous. LaRouche got away with his antics only because there was no Google. He could reinvent himself with impunity and pretend to be an establishment figure whenever he wanted to. Richard Spencer can't do that--a single search will turn up his past. And to what end did LaRouche want to influence public policy? Mr. Proyect offers no clue. Did he really believe that Queen Elizabeth was a drug lord?

No. LaRouche's only goal was to raise money, and to shanghai these officials onto his cause helped him do that. Mr. Proyect completely overstates his significance.

He similarly grossly exaggerates LaRouche's interactions with the CIA. Apparently he had a few meetings with a couple third or fourth tier officials (stupid ones). And this is supposed to be consequential?

At the top of his piece Mr. Proyect links to the video produced as an infomercial by LaRouche's presidential campaign. It's 28 minutes long--I gave up after the first three. It's the most banal, tedious speech I've ever heard, delivered in an ultra-pretentious and faux-intellectual style. The content, such as it is, would be agreeable to Marxists and Conservatives alike--it's that anodyne.

I can't believe an intelligent man like Mr. Proyect sat through the whole thing. If so, he wasted his time. For that matter, I can't believe he has invested so much effort writing about an irrelevant con man.

Though I guess we can thank him for one thing. He's preserved the virtue of the British monarchy. At least now we know that the Queen isn't a drug lord.

Further Reading: