LYNDON LAROUCHE AND THE NEW AMERICAN FASCISM

Veteran LaRouche-watcher King, who has written for the New Repubic, Mother Jones, and others, here sets out to expose the ultraright-winger. Though now a right-wing extremist, LaRouche's early adherence was to Trotskyite socialism, a faith that sustained him well into the 1970's, when he, followed by a ragtag band of supporters, announced that he had ""subsumed"" Marxism and would henceforth champion industrial capitalism. King points out how LaRouche repeated the pattern of Mussolini (a socialist newspaper editor prior to founding his Fascist party), and demonstrates how, even as a Marxist, LaRouche managed to add his own twist to traditional party philosophy, insisting that an intellectual elite rather than a proletarian mass act as vanguard of the movement. These elitist views, the author shows, stemmed from a precocious and socially isolated childhood spent under the wing of untypically militant Quaker parents in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Though LaRouche attended Northeastern U. twice, he never attained a degree. LaRouche achieved full Socialist Workers Party membership in 1949 (under the party pseudonym ""Lyn Marcus""). After switching allegiance in the 1970's, and managing to garner powerful economic support from influential sources as diverse as oilmen and racketeers, LaRouche's tactics began to emerge: making demagogic appeals to mutually opposed constituencies (such as white supremacists and black nationalists); cultivating a populist mass movement of farmers, small businessmen, and blue-collar workers while convincing many industrial capitalists that he could be their savior. Despite his reputation as a kook, LaRouche has transformed his National Democratic Policy Committee into one of the most powerful extremist political groups in the nation, supporting nearly a thousand political candidates nationwide in 1987. King swings heavily and hammers another solid nail into the political coffin constructed by the government for LaRouche with his 1988 conviction for fraud and conspiracy.