2008: Elections without Lyndon LaRouche

Odd Man Out

The New Republic
07.12.07

The town of Round Hill, Virginia, (population 500, more cows than people) is probably not the right place to build a global political empire. But Lyndon LaRouche--conspiracy theorist, convicted felon, international cult leader, and eight-time failed presidential candidate--has selected it nonetheless. Pinched between a hayfield, a bison farm, and--locals brag--the fishing pond where a resident caught the largest smallmouth bass in the county, lies the three-story farmhouse set on the few dozen acres that LaRouche calls home. It's a place that feels like a cross between a pastoral poem and an out- post on the Maginot Line: The long gravel path that leads up to the house is lined by blossoming and well-groomed dogwoods--a welcoming sight, until you see the two security cameras, in green and red, attached to branches near the gate. Neighbors say that LaRouche, always on the lookout for brainwashed assassins, still has armed guards watching over the property, day and night.

Illustration by David CowlesPredictably, LaRouche doesn't do interviews in person. His staff says the security risks are too great. But he did agree to a telephone interview, and, after speaking with him, the Round Hill farm takes on a different feel: that of a retirement estate--a regular Mount Vernon for a man who has always ranked himself with the heavyweights of U.S. history. ("Oh, there's no question about it," he told The Washington Post in 1980. "I am the leading economist of the century.") After running in every presidential election since 1976--and supporting everything from colonizing Mars, to bringing back the gold standard, to building a giant land bridge across the Bering Strait--LaRouche has decided not to go in for a ninth bid in 2008. "I've stepped out of the presidential campaign," he grumbles with an unexpected New England lilt. "After all, I'm close to eighty-five now. And a candidate should have at least eight years [left] before running for the presidency of the United States."

The timing might seem strange, since, if there's one thing the 2008 election has attracted, it's an apparently infinite supply of oddball (and long-shot) candidates. There is Ron Paul, a Texas representative nicknamed "Dr. No" for his habit of voting against almost every spending bill that crosses his desk. And there is Mike Gravel, a 77-year-old former Alaskan senator who hasn't held an elected office since 1981. (Asked after the first Democratic debate where he's been for the last 25 years, Gravel replied, "Under a rock.") But, for LaRouche, it seems fitting that his strange political tale should have a plot twist in the final chapter. The election in which everyone is getting in is the one in which LaRouche is finally, after a three-decade presidential marathon, getting out.

Not that everything has changed. Politics is the very first thing LaRouche brings up in conversation, although his politics are not so much left or right as they are a conspiratorial mishmash of anxieties and accusations. His enemies list has had a large and distinguished membership--it's probably the only one to include Henry Kissinger, Harry Truman, Queen Elizabeth II, Jane Fonda, and most nineteenth-century British empiricists--but lately it's focused almost exclusively on Al Gore, whose antiglobal warming crusade he treats with special contempt. LaRouche, his colleagues say, is unambiguously "pro-civilization" and regards anything that hinders growth as a threat to life as we know it. "If you do what [Gore] says you should do, or even approximate it, you're going to destroy the possibility of civilization," LaRouche warns. "We could go into a dark age."

The prospect of darker times is a subject LaRouche brings up a lot. In the course of an hour-long conversation, he warns that "the worst financial crisis in modern history [is] in the process of hitting" and "the world financial monetary system" is "disintegrating very rapidly"; that "civilization may not be here when we come to our senses"; and, rather cryptically, that we are approaching a "Tower of Babel." And, just as he has done for decades, LaRouche maintains that he is the only one with the qualifications to save us from an unappealing fate. "My personal identification will go back to ancient Greece, to Plato and so forth, but more immediately to Franklin Roosevelt's tradition, which was essentially to save civilization from a nightmare."

But, with electoral options now off the table, LaRouche is fending off the nightmare by pouring his inimitable skills into something new: nurturing the eponymous LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM), an effort to enlist the support of college-age men and women that he started in the late '90s. After being released from prison in 1994--five years earlier, he was convicted of running a massive mail-fraud scheme--LaRouche found that many of his original associates had abandoned him. Most of the turncoats were baby-boomers, so LaRouche began writing off the entire generation as "generally crazy" and saving his affection for the young, whom he sees as filled with revolutionary promise. Of course, it doesn't hurt that most of the impressionable college students LaRouche recruits are too young to remember that he spent five years in prison for mail fraud.

For some observers, the LYM is a hilarious failure. The most press the group received was for repeatedly harassing Joe Lieberman on the campaign trail in 2006 (a role that LaRouche describes as "historically significant"), and the most contact the average American will ever have with the organization is seeing a group of kids singing on a street corner or distributing pamphlets, sometimes with racy titles like "Children of Satan III: The Sexual Congress for Cultural Fascism." But the relative success of recruiting--most estimates put membership at a few thousand--has worried others more than any of his legal infractions from the '80s. Many of the LaRouche youth drop out of college to work for the movement full-time, and most move into crowded and filthy group housing, where they work long hours distributing literature and making fund-raising phone calls. A number of colleges now warn incoming students about the group.

Given this less than flattering press, it's not easy to see how LaRouche keeps recruiting members and raising dollars. But somehow, despite age and the odds, he does. During the 2004 election, he raised close to $9 million--far more than the comparatively mainstream Dennis Kucinich or Al Sharpton--and former followers all describe the same weirdly hypnotic power. "He's a very tall guy, very imposing, and he can drop so many names--Plato, Leibniz, Kepler, on and on," says one former devotee. "You have no idea what the **** he's talking about, yet you think he's a genius."

It's a description LaRouche is perfectly happy to cultivate, especially since he is now hard at work on a new "educational program" for the LYM--which, he says, starts with "questions of the Pythagoreans," then dips into "[Carl Friedrich] Gauss's 1799 doctoral dissertation," and then moves on to the work of nineteenth-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann. "If you don't understand Riemannian dynamics," intones LaRouche, "you don't know how economies work." He chose the curriculum based on "the kind of things that a leading cadre of economists"--like himself--"should have mastered."

But, despite escaping the riga- marole of electoral politics, the 2008 election is never far from LaRouche's mind, and he claims to be in "close consultation" with a number of Democratic presidential campaigns. (As in past years, every Democratic campaign denies this: The party has never recognized LaRouche, and a 2004 DNC letter cited his "explicitly racist and anti-Semitic" beliefs as a reason.) But LaRouche--who has, despite the restrained reception, called himself a Democrat for almost 30 years--isn't ready to commit to one candidate just yet. John Edwards? "Too shallow." Barack Obama? "He's owned by the Chicago Board of Trade." Hillary Clinton? "Hillary Clinton is a very intelligent person who I like, but I wouldn't pick her for president. She's too fly-off-the-handle." Is there anyone worth backing?

LaRouche pauses. "I would probably end up being stuck with Hillary Clinton, who I do not think is qualified to be president," he admits. There is, in the end, only one person who can do the job. "I have the qualities," he sighs. "But I'm a bit old. ... My job is to create the image of what that president should be," and, he says, "have somebody step into those shoes." LaRouche is pretty sure he can deliver. "I'm likely to be around, unless somebody kills me."