The Washington Monthly has an interesting article on the decline of the Lyndon LaRouche movement, which for 40 years has tried to get LaRouche elected president by standing on street corners with homemade signs accusing the Queen of England of heading up the global drug trade (seriously).
“What you don’t understand is that the global dialectical paradigm must necessarily shift in an advanced preeminent status quo. Also, there are rats living in my boobies and Dick Cheney talks to me through the television.”
The LaRouche model was basically to draft cocked-up nonsensical diatribes, force movement members to bear the printing costs, and push younger members to distribute the wild-eyed rantings to the public. A vulnerable few could always be counted on to contribute money to the “cause.”
Interestingly, LaRouche’s popularity started to spiral downhill not when he was sent to jail for FEC and tax violations, but when he demanded his members stay away from the Internet:
But LaRouche’s politics had always focused on physical infrastructure—in recent years, for instance, he had championed massive maglev construction and giant waterworks projects. The rise of the information and services industry held little interest for him, and so, having failed to predict the Internet, he proceeded to ignore it. Moreover, Computron and other similar fiascos had forced out the talent that made the group an early adopter of technology in the late 1970s. Although the group’s fund-raising had improved in the ’80s, it had failed to attract new classes of committed, educated senior cadres. This generational gap left the organization painfully unaware of the Internet’s value as an organizing tool.
When the group’s older leaders eventually ventured online, they often stumbled. They were slow to grasp that although the Internet allowed the free dissemination of ideas, it also made criticism equally accessible. Around 2003, the organization set up a discussion board and then a Yahoo group, but both were discovered by a former member who delighted in asking inconvenient questions about Jeremiah Duggan, a young Briton who died in 2003 under mysterious circumstances at a LaRouche conference in Germany. Organization members shut the boards down and tried a more proactive approach, popping up on anti-LaRouche sites to defend the organization. That tactic only inspired more criticism, and confirmed to posters that the LaRouche organization was worried about what they were saying. Eventually, Youth Movement members were ordered to stay off social networking sites like MySpace, which LaRouche deemed an “Orwellian brain-washing operation.”
Of course you can’t really kill a community of whack jobs. You can only drive them to Ron Paul.
Publish and Perish [Washington Monthly]
2 Comments
March 23, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Ron Paul being a traditional conservative, Larouche a typical nutjob. Not sure I see the connection…
March 23, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Hey!
Remember when Ron Paul wrote this?
“Two years ago, in a series of predictions for the 1990s, I said that race riots would erupt in our large cities. I’m now predicting this will be the major problem of the 1990s.”
Sounds pretty mainstream conservative to me. Maybe that’s why the founder of the White Supremacist group Stormfront sent him $500 for his whackjob campaign.