"Crackpot Empire"
My Next Book
I’m pleased to announce that I’m writing another book.—
The title (so far) is Crackpot Empire: Lyndon LaRouche and the Conquest of America and, as you can tell, it’s gonna be about Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and his strange movement. If you’re not familiar with LaRouche, he led one of the most bizarre political cults in American history. Born to Quakers in Massachusetts, he began his political life as a member of the Trotskyist Old Left, was an important member of Students for a Democratic Society and was a major player in the Columbia campus takeover before being expelled after a failed takeover attempt, after which he directed his group to violently attack other New Left groups. Then he led his followers on an odyssey that would take them from the far left to the corridors of power—the heart of the Reagan administration and the Central Intelligence Agency—and back out to the fringes again. He was a veritable Shakespeare of conspiracy theories: so many notions that originated from his mind have become part of the common culture—Obamacare death panels, Soros’s malign influence, the Frankfurt School undermining Western civilization, climate change being an “anti-human” hoax. I believe and, I hopefully will persuade you, that, beyond being a mere oddity, LaRouche’s life and thought has much to tell us about America today.
(As a perk for their support, paid subscribers will be able to read part of the book proposal beneath the paywall below.)
I wrote my last book while working on the newsletter full time, so I don’t really anticipate any interruptions. If newsletters do slow down a bit, keep the book project in mind and know you are supporting it! I may announce a little “book leave,” but I imagine that will only come at the crunch time towards the end. Again, I’m very excited to share this news with you and I’m sure I’ll be able to provide you some interesting tidbits that come from my research.
Thanks again for all your support!
“I’m as American as apple pie,” Lyndon LaRouche Jr. once declared, and he was right. The radical hypothesis of this book is that Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr, a crackpot and cult leader, has just as much to tell us about America as Lyndon B. Johnson. Like Edgar Allan Poe, whom he considered an embodiment of the Republic’s spirit, LaRouche is an essential American oddball, whose fervent imagination turned towards the macabre, morbid, and ultimately, madness. Like Captain Ahab on the Pequod, he led a small group of followers on a monomaniacal quest, a perverse microcosm of the American experiment itself. And like Ahab, he believed “all visible objects are, but as pasteboard masks,” and that beneath the apparent reality of the senses, there always lay a deeper reason.
