| http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2002/2903_continue_amer_rev.html
During the 1890s, the United States' enemies, centered around the Prince of Wales, the later Edward VII, launched a global operation which was called "geopolitics." This was a British scheme which was intended to end the cooperation among those nations, by putting France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and others at one another's throats. Such were the wars and similar disruptions which erupted over the interval 1894-1917. The hoax of the Dreyfus indictment in France, the launching of Japan's wars against China, Korea, and Russia, during 1894-1905, and Fashoda in 1898, were parts of this process leading into what became known as World War I. The most significant blow against civilization in general, was the successful assassination of U.S. President McKinley in 1901, which put into the U.S. Presidential mansion a Theodore Roosevelt who was, like Woodrow Wilson later, not only a whelp of the Confederacy, but, like his notorious mentor and uncle, a fanatical devotee of that specifically pro-Confederacy form of adoration of the British monarchy. Thus, during the sweep of the Twentieth Century, excepting the 1933-1945 role of President Franklin Roosevelt, the United States has been dominated, since the 1901 assassination of McKinley, by the influence of a commitment to shared Anglo-American imperial domination of the world at large. This has been accompanied, under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Coolidge, Truman, Nixon, Carter, and also the influence of Eisenhower's unfortunate Arthur Burns, by efforts to uproot even the vestiges of the American System of political-economy, and to introduce radically irrational extremes of liberal ideology into our schools, universities, and mass media, ideologies which are inimical not only to the sturdy republicanism of our traditional patriot, but to the very idea of truthfulness. That is not to suggest that the role of the United States became "all bad" under these variously failed or soiled Presidencies. The post-War economic reconstruction of the U.S.A. and Western Europe, for example, under the 1945-1963 Bretton Woods system, was a marked success, relative to the later decadence of approximately thirty-five years of the long wave of economic-self-destruction launched by Nixon and greatly accelerated by Carter. Thus, as the U.S. economy now crumbles, the best features of the past history of our republic, and the related, best features of our past relations with Europe, the Far East, and within the Americas, beckon to us, telling us to return to the American intellectual tradition, which inspired Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt during those memorable past moments, when that tradition was all that saved our republic from a threatened descent into oblivion. It is time to renew and continue the American Revolution. 2. The Role of Leadership The cases of Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, the Careys, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, illustrate a principle of decisive importance for any people whose nation is gripped by an existential crisis, such as that facing the world today. National leadership in time of great crisis, like leadership in fundamental scientific progress, is a quality which, in known history thus far, has been specific to the kind of exceptional individual personality who leads a people once again out of a recurring condition of habituated moral and intellectual mediocrity, the awful condition into which nations and their peoples have retreated, not inevitably, but repeatedly, as now. On that account, the most deadly threat to our republic today, comes precisely from those who delude themselves into assuming that the weight of that mediocrity called variously "popular opinion" or "mediaocracy," ought to be the governing principle of national leadership. No nation was ever in danger from within, unless its prevalent popular opinion had sponsored that crisis. No nation was ever self-destroyed, except by the persisting error of its ruling institutions, and by the acquiescence, if not the consent, of its own prevalent and decadent popular opinion. Therefore, consider the figure of Socrates. Consider the person, like the ancient Solon of Athens, who shocks the conscience of his people into recognizing and abandoning those opinions which have misled them to the brink of destroying themselves. Thus, Franklin Roosevelt, in his election-campaign, and his first crucial acts as President, succeeded in inducing a majority of popular opinion to abandon the fickle fashions of the age of the "Flapper" and "The Charleston," those popular fashions which had misled the foolish consent of the majority of the nation into the great economic catastrophe which Coolidge had bequeathed to his luckless successor. Those qualities which distinguish a Solon, a Socrates, a Benjamin Franklin, a Lincoln, or a Franklin Roosevelt, are sometimes called "inner-directedness," or simply "conscience." Sometimes, but not always, this quality of leadership is associated with exceptional qualities of true intellectual genius; but, it always reflects a stubborn toughness of personal character, as we see in the case of the great post-War Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer. In all cases of an effective leader for a time of existential crisis, the difference which sets the true leader, genius or not, apart from the ordinary politician, is a sense of unshakeable devotion to the future, rather than the moral mediocrity's customary sense of immediate interest in nothing but that pathetic state of intellectual and moral littleness, the littleness of blind devotion to the so-called harsh local realities of the here and now. Indeed, it is precisely that moral weakness of most citizens today, the tendency to fear the risks of offending a popular opinion, which deprives their motives of the morally indispensable quality of truthfulness. This cowardly submission to fear of a mediocre popular opinion, has often deprived a people of its competence to discover and act in a necessary way. At a time of existential crisis, such as this one, a society would certainly destroy itself, if the only solution available to society were widely rejected merely because that solution is considered contrary to popular opinion. So, the great poet and tragedian, Friedrich Schiller, looking at the horror of the Jacobin Terror in France, said of France, "a great moment has found a little people." The narrowness and the short-sightedness of a popular opinion obsessed with what it perceives to be its most immediate and short-term interests, is that form of moral mediocrity which is the most frequent cause of the horrors which a nation may bring upon itself. A similar rampage of mediocrity among our people, has become the greatest source of danger to our nations today. Therefore, history reminds us: the necessary leader for a time of existential crisis, is always the person who challenges popular opinion: "We can escape this crisis, if you are willing to face up to the fact, that it was popular opinion which brought this nation into the present disaster!" The leader must be essentially correct in his criticism, but he or she must deliver it, and that forcefully, or, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, prove worthless as a leader for that nation in its time of crisis. For example, a terribly foolish U.S. popular opinion, praised that "new economy" which has now proven itself the lunacy it was all along. How many Americans who could ill-afford the loss, wasted their resources in investing in the "new economy" hoax? How many Americans swallowed the fairy-tale, which said that shipping our work-places to cheap-labor markets abroad, would bring prosperity and security here, inside the U.S.A.? How many swallowed the fairy-tale, which insisted that "free trade," by lowering the prices of goods, "democratically," below the physical cost of their production, would make life better? How many believed, that the measure of national prosperity was the price of so-called "shareholder values" on financial markets, even if those "values" were based on the predatory financier practices which have now led to chain-reactions of plant closures, loss of health-care and pensions, accelerating mass-firings from places of employment, and, now, the immediately ongoing threat of chain-reactions of national bankruptcies among nations? The list of those follies goes on, and on, and on. Keeping in mind what I have just written on the subject of leadership, look at the typical governments and leading political parties of today. Do you hear a murmur of foolish, often repeated slogans such as "You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube"; "You can't turn back the clock"? That kind of foolishness, is precisely the kind of habituated behavior to be seen in most leading political parties around the world. Does that not remind you of the fabled lemmings diving off the cliff en masse, each murmuring to the others, "We must go along, to get along; this is our way of life!" Should the performance of such party leaderships not remind you, often, of the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who led the foolish children of that town, off to some place from which they never returned? To save a civilization which, at this moment, is plunging toward the biggest depression in modern history, and the endless slaughter which religious wars unleash, we must inject a new factor of leadership into the political processes of our own U.S.A. and other nations, more or less as Franklin Roosevelt did in 1932-1933, or Lincoln before him. Whether either the Republican or Democratic party, or both, could survive the present crisis, is uncertain. Those who have studied the history of parties under conditions of great crises similar to the one gripping us now, would estimate, from those parties' recent behavior, that both parties are veering near to the brink of self-disintegration, if they cling to their presently ingrained habits. My estimate is the following. It is possible, perhaps even probable, that both the Democratic and Republican parties will soon begin to disintegrate, because they have shown themselves stubbornly incapable of the kinds of reforms which must occur to make them useful once again. I do not know whether or not they will survive during the months ahead, and neither do any among you. It is notable, that similar conditions of decadence exist presently among parliamentary forms of government in most of the world. We in the U.S.A. can be certain, if we understand the perils of anarchy, that we must organize the political process in the United States around its best traditions, traditions such as that of President Lincoln in his century, and Franklin Roosevelt during the century which has just expired. We must proceed as Mathew Carey's The Olive Branch led the way to the emergence of the U.S. Whig Party, at a time when both leading parties existing at that moment were politically and morally bankrupt. We may be certain, that the only hope for the preservation of our Constitutional form of government, under these perilous conditions, will be a regrouping of existing political forces, as the Whig leaders did, and as Franklin Roosevelt made something good and necessary out of the Democratic Party he led. Amid all the uncertainties of the U.S. republic's presently decadent political-party processes, one thing is certain. For Democrats, in particular, the road we must travel, wherever that takes us, must bring the best of the Democratic Party back to the Franklin Roosevelt standard, and let the fight to bring about that change, become the way in which we sort out who stays, who goes, and who comes in from other quarters. For this effort, we must not think of a partisan electoral victory as a fight for "shareholder values," but as a way of organizing the national dialogue through which we sort out the arrangements made to constitute a government of which future generations need not be ashamed. In the United States right now, we must have at least one leading political party which is the servant of truth, rather than a continuation of the recent past's decadent practice, of making mere popular opinion the instrument of party. We must have political leadership in the American intellectual tradition, a leadership which puts the truthful promotion of the general welfare of present and future generations, back into the saddle again. For that purpose, I am, at this moment, your Solon and your Socrates; help me to save you! |
