Quiz:
Who's issued warnings against “the Straussians’ commitment to transform the United States from a democratic republic into a tyranny, using the events of Sept. 11, 2001 as their 'Reichstag fire'”?
Was it Ted Kennedy? Howard Dean? John Kerry? Wesley Clark? Some other Democratic Party politician?
Answer:
It was Lyndon LaRouche.
You can be forgiven for making this mistake. As James Bowman says in his article “Beast-man Politics” in the February 2004 issue of The New Criterion:
“Conspiracy mania, though usually kept just off-stage, has long been a temptation for parties out of power in America, and it all tends to sound pretty much the same. But conspiracy mania is flourishing today as it has seldom done before in America, and not just at the fringes where the mainstream press would once have disdained to venture, because the standards of discourse have been cut free from their moorings in a common culture. As a result, anyone can say anything.”
One could say that LaRouche has not so much moved towards the mainstream, as the mainstream has moved towards him.
Bowman says LaRouche “is precisely the visionary he imagines himself to be, for it is obvious that, although he himself may never be elected to anything, his day has come in American politics.”
What’s going on in the Great American Conversation?
You may remember Howard Dean’s comment that it was an “interesting theory” that President Bush knew about 9/11 beforehand. This kind of talk is common parlance now.
Prominent politicians during the last few months -- not just extremist figures -- have repeatedly claimed the Administration lied and deliberately mislead the public about MWDs because Bush wanted to keep the American people in a state of terror for political purposes.
Among America’s intellectual and celebrity pop leadership today, the perceived conspiracies are even more lurid. Bowman mentions that:
“[T]he voices belonging to such ornaments of our national intellectual life as the novelist and belle-lettrist Gore Vidal, the linguist-philosopher Noam Chomsky, the film maker and best-selling author Michael Moore, the comedian and best-selling author Al Franken, the actress Janeane Garofalo, and the spy novelist John LeCarré are scarcely to be distinguished from LaRouche’s—in substance if not in style. Mr. Vidal and Mr. Chomsky suggest that the Bush administration is itself implicated in the terror-attacks of September 11, while Mr. Moore believes that it knows where Osama bin Laden is hiding but chooses not to capture him in order to stoke war-fever.”
Conservative commentators have suggested these conspiracy-ideas are signs that the Left is desperate because of the decline of liberalism.
Liberal commentators on the other hand claim these signs as indications that the progressive portion of the country is gaining energy and righteous anger; it's getting its voice back after all these years.
Yet others point to the influence of the Internet: how it fragments and Balkanizes the culture into sections that don’t speak to each other; thus, the mainstream has lost its common arena for a group conversation.
I think it’s none of these.
Rather, despite its vast size and diversity, America can endure national emergency (war, depression, attack) because the culture pulls together during troubling times when people share common needs. But during peace-time and enormous prosperity, people have a proclivity to focus on personal fulfillment and the pursuit of individual “quality” experiences; they begin to live more narcissistically, "in their heads", so to speak.
Two features follow from this:
First, people's dreams diverge widely when their understandings of reality are not guided by common experiences. The freedom of our culture, in fact, encourages experimentation in thought and action. Since the Vietnam War and the troubling 1960s (until 9/11), the country has not felt particularly threatened.
Second, conspiracy theories rest on a foundation of fear. Beneath the accusations of hidden strategies and nefarious secret deals -- is the frightened awareness that something deeply dreaded is reappearing in our midst that was thought to have been banished long ago. In the case of LaRouche and many popular figures of our day, this fear is caused by the surprising emergence of ancient human primal forces: the 9/11 attack itself, and then the response of war -- not police-action -- against a mortal foe.
Many people believe that Western culture has progressed to the point where the "savage" aspects of historical reality no longer hold sway. These threats of mass violence: shouldn't be here.
And yet, here they come: neo-fascist barbarians collapsing tall buildings; and -- surprise! -- millions of "ordinary" Americans suddenly wanting American warriors to go out riding against the hordes. It's shockingly pagan!
Human nature has reasserted itself.
Some people are horrified; none of this is "real." Normal human nature is not like that!
It must be a conspiracy!
Posted by Rick Penner at February 14, 2004 07:10 PM