EDITORIAL

America’s Soul
As of October 18, 2018

by Susan J. Kokinda

[Print version of this editorial]

These are edited remarks given by Michigan LaRouche PAC coordinator Susan J. Kokinda, on LaRouche PAC’s weekly Fireside Chat broadcast of Oct. 18, 2018.

I want to address the subjective side of the political process that is unfolding right now, and I want to start by reading a letter to the editor that was in the Sunday Detroit Free Press. It’s addressing in particular the Senate campaign, where we have an incumbent Democratic Senator, Debbie Stabenow. This is from somebody in one of the northern suburbs of Detroit. The author writes the following.

Make no mistake. My certain vote for Debbie Stabenow is no longer. One who normally votes for the most qualified candidate, will vote entirely Republican in this coming election.

The despicable, underhanded, unfair, base tactics of the Democrats, gleefully willing to ruin a good man because they have different philosophies and politics, eliminates any Democrats as a voting choice for me.

I cringed when I heard Debbie Stabenow vote no on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. Well, I also get to vote no in November.

The Democratic talking point that suburban women will now vote Democratic because of this fight is wishful thinking. There is not one, let me repeat that, not one woman I know, Democrat or Republican, who is now going to vote Democratic. All plan to vote Republican.

Democrats have completely and finally committed political suicide.

I think there’s actually a poetic principle embedded in that letter, whether the writer knows it or not, because I think the attacks on Kavanaugh, and really, the attacks on the Constitution itself that the Democrats carried out in the recent weeks, have sparked a shift in the political process, and it’s taking it to a higher level. It’s what we call “the mass strike,” but more importantly it’s a movement which is not about particulars, but rather it’s a profound shift to a higher level.

This is different from the intense support which the Trump base has been giving him during his whole Presidency. President Trump has been under unbelievable attack; his base has been very mobilized and very supportive. But this is different. These are new layers of the population which are now outraged at the Democratic Party and the media. And I don’t think they necessarily understand what’s behind it—as we do—but this is causing a profound shift in the country.

A Poetic Principle of Change

I call this a “poetic principle,” because it echoes something which you can find in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Those of you who were on the call I did about a month and a half ago, remember that I spoke about that play, which describes the fate of Prometheus, who defended mankind from the Olympian god Zeus, and Zeus, of course, represents the oligarchy. Today, some people call it “the elite” or the “deep state”—we correctly call it the “British Empire.” And Prometheus is chained to a rock and he’s tortured for what’s supposed to be eternity, because he gave mankind the gift of fire and gave him the arts and the sciences which made man, man.

Now the first few times I read this play, there was a part in it which completely puzzled me. The story is going along; Prometheus is describing what has happened to him to his audience. His audience includes Hermes, the messenger god, whose basic role is to tell Prometheus he ought to make a plea bargain with Zeus. But then he has a Chorus of sea nymphs, who are very sympathetic, but they sort of have the attitude of “Really? What did you expect? You took on Zeus; you should have expected something like this to happen.” So, there’s a kind of resignation and fear over the power and the cruelty of Zeus and the Olympian gods.

But then you get to the part of the play which I didn’t understand for a while. A cow shows up, a frenzied, maddened cow shows up, being stung by gadflies. And it turns out this is actually a young maiden, Io, who had been raped by Zeus, and then, because Zeus’s wife was jealous, she turned this young woman into a cow to be stung by gadflies, and this poor woman/cow has fled from Greece to the Caucasus, where Prometheus is, and she tells her story to Prometheus and the Chorus. And suddenly, the Chorus changes.

This living image of the cruelty of Zeus and the Olympians—not just against someone who has defied them, like Prometheus did, and as LaRouche has always done, and as Trump is doing—but against this maiden, treating her like an animal (and actually turning her into an animal), that changes the Chorus. They decide to stand with Prometheus. They move beyond their fear of the oligarchy and they join with Prometheus as he continues to defy Zeus. And it represents a very dramatic shift in the whole direction of this play.

A Principled Shift in Thinking

And I think what you’re seeing in that letter to the editor, is that same thing is happening, a principle of justice is suddenly awakened in the American population. I don’t know if the writer likes Judge Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy. He may not like many or most of Trump’s policies. He may not even like some of the Republicans for whom he’s voting. But it’s a reflection of the fact that this has gone beyond the domain of issues, into a different domain, and this is what is called the “mass strike,” where the population is moved by higher principles, not the laundry list of “issues.” Instead, it’s responding to something else.

The issues are still there. If you turn on the TV and watch any campaign ads, with few exceptions, it’s mostly the attack politics, the laundry list of issues. But if this midterm is fought over issues like immigration or health care, I’m not so certain of the outcome. Instead, it has to be transformed, as I think we’re seeing it being transformed. Here especially in the Midwest, this is what we set out to do on Aug. 16, when we issued our national campaign statement on the countdown to the consequential midterm elections. We wanted to make clear to people that the midterm elections were a fight between two paradigms, whether we can go forward, with Trump into a new paradigm of peace and economic cooperation, or whether we’re going to be dragged back into the war and economic disintegration policies.

As I’m sure, as most people on this call know, what we laid out in that statement is three standards which people should hold their candidates to—those three standards being: (1) Stopping the attacks on the President and going after the perpetrators of these attacks, (2) Supporting working with Russia and China, as President Trump clearly wan ts to do, and (3) most fundamentally, the full body of LaRouche’s policies, which will free the nation from Wall Street, and launch a science-driven economic policy, in collaboration with Russia, China, India and the other great powers.

We can see the effect of our intervention, I think especially in the Midwest, because we’ve triggered something and we’re tapping into something which is of this higher character. We’re seeing it when we intervene in Trump rallies and go to political events, and in the form of some of these campaigns that Dennis [Speed] referenced, which I’ll get to in a minute. I want to give you an example of the quality of response we’re getting.

Last week, as people may know, President Trump held a series of rallies in the Midwest. We were able to send a team of two people down to the one in southern Ohio, near Cincinnati, and then the second one, the next day, was about 100 miles away in Kentucky. Between those two rallies, we distributed about 4,000 copies of our midterm elections strategy leaflet. We got over 200 contacts, of people who gave us either their emails or their phone numbers to be in touch, and we were challenging people to set the agenda on these three defining questions.

Obviously, on the first pledge, defending the President—well, people were there to defend the President; they were standing in the cold for six hours or so, or more, in order to be able to get in to see him. And of course, people were telling us, “I defend the President, I’m going to vote Republican, all my friends are going to vote Republican”; and we were saying to them, that’s not why we’re here.

We’re here because you have to take this leaflet, and you have to go out, and you have to recruit blue collar workers, and Democrats and Independents, and they have to be ready for the next big fight, because President Trump is going to have to take on Wall Street and the City of London, because this financial system is going to come down. And the question is: Is it going to come down on our terms, or is it going to come down on the enemy’s terms?

We were telling them, the President does have the international relationships to do this. He’s got the relationship with Xi Jinping and Putin, and to a certain degree, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But he’s going to need a movement that actually will back him up and understands what the fight is all about.

A Sober but Optimistic Response

We got a quite interesting response from people, a very sober but optimistic response that this is the fight that we have to be ready for, and that we do have to recruit broader layers. This was different from some of the previous rallies we’d gone to; we went to the one down in Columbus in July and then, earlier in April, when Trump was here in Michigan. In those earlier events, we were largely eliciting a very strong response on the question of the British, because it was new to people, but they knew that they needed to understand what we were saying. Now, individuals such as Joe diGenova and George Papadopoulos, and others, have put that out there, and it’s something which is in people’s frame of reference in terms of how they’re waging this fight.

In the most recent events, what has become clear is the people are ready for profound ideas. To give you a sense of some of the responses, obviously, you’re talking about Ohio, where LaRouche has had a presence for decades and decades—one guy wearing his Teamster jacket came up and said. “LaRouche? Isn’t he a communist?” And then he burst out laughing and he said, “Gimme a bunch of those leaflets!” We were getting a very strong indication that people are ready to organize, as this guy represented. One person said, “Give me a bunch of those leaflets. I have to take ’em to work.” And we said, “Yeah? Where do you work?” He said, “I’m a state legislator; I’m going to take them to the state capitol.” People were remembering LaRouche’s role in the Strategic Defense Initiative, and so on.

People are ready for the bigger ideas, and really, the bigger fight. We were also saying, it’s obvious that the Democratic Party is not going to hold its base, with what they did to Kavanaugh, with the identity politics and mob violence, and people can see that—that the Democratic Party, as that writer said, has committed its final “political suicide.”

Beyond Party Labels

But we’re not just seeing a rejection of the Democratic Party. We have a unique candidate running for U.S. Senate here in the state of Michigan. We have saturated the political environment here with our campaign strategy statement, and it’s reflected in the way that John James, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate running against Debbie Stabenow, is conducting his campaign. James is young, a 38-year-old; he’s a West Point graduate; he was a combat pilot in Iraq; he’s African American, he runs his family’s business. He won the Republican primary with the backing of Trump, who came in, pretty much at the last minute, and helped him defeat a very standard, monetarist Republican businessman.

He does have the Republican nomination, but he is unabashedly running as a de facto Independent. He never misses an occasion to attack both political parties, doing it in his campaign ads, in interviews; he did it in the debate he had with Debbie Stabenow the other day. He is saying, both political parties have failed; all they do is pit us against each other. He says, my message is not Democrat or Republican, my message isn’t black or white; he’s attacking the policies that have failed the cities, failed the schools, failed the veterans. In fact, he says that when he came back from Iraq, he saw more devastation in Detroit than he saw in the Iraq war.

Some Republicans are nervous about the fact that he says he isn’t going to the Senate to represent the Republican Party: He’s going to represent all the people of Michigan. And, this obviously is not bothering Donald Trump. Yesterday, Trump put out a tweet, once again praising John James to the sky, calling him a “star,” calling on the people of Michigan to recognize what they have and to vote for him.

There was also a rally here for James—Donald Trump, Jr., came in to host the rally. They had to change the venue three times because of the number of people who were responding and sending their RSVP. The first venue was 900 people; then it was 1,500 people, and the fire marshal just kept saying, “Nope, can’t do it here”; so, they ended up in a venue which held, I think, 4,000 people. It looks like they actually pulled 4,000 people for this rally yesterday.

Again, we were there organizing the people going in, and as we had seen elsewhere, people were ready to move. What we had seen down in Ohio and Kentucky, we saw again here, including trade unionists coming out in open support. We talked to a guy from the United Auto Workers (UAW) who was there, and he said, Look, there’s a lot of people in the UAW who support Trump. They’re not going to say it publicly, but that support is there.

At the same time, our role is being increasingly acknowledged. We spoke to a high-level GOP representative from the state whom we had met a couple of weeks earlier and had an extensive discussion on the looming financial crisis. And this person thanked us profusely for what we’re doing with our intervention into these midterm elections.

John James is running a campaign parallel to ours in a certain sense. But we also have a Republican congressional candidate, who is more than parallel. He has openly embraced the LaRouche program. His name is Jeff Jones (and I know, it’s easy to get John James and Jeff Jones confused), but Jeff is running in one of these Detroit suburb areas as a Republican. He’s a real long shot, whereas John James is rapidly closing the gap with Debbie Stabenow and could pull off the upset of the 2018 election. But the congressional candidate, Jeff Jones, like the Senate candidate, is attacking the failure of policy over the last 50 years, not just talking about Barack Obama and the last eight years. He’s talking about the fact that there has been a profound failure in the nation for a half-century.

Now, there’s one other reflection I want to mention in terms of this independent shift. It was reported out of our office in Baltimore, that the board of elections in Maryland, which people probably know is very Democratic, very blue—the board of elections is reporting that the overwhelming number of new registrations to vote are coming in as Independents, not as Democrats and not as Republicans.

The Mandate of Heaven

And this is exactly what LaRouche forecast on his 90th birthday, six years ago in 2012. He called for the end of the two-party system, and called for freeing the nation from the death grip of these partisan politics, such that we can actually conduct policy—as a republic is supposed to—and this is what I think we’re seeing unfold.

Before I end, I want to take it out of the domain of politics and put people up on the stage of history, by referencing a remarkable piece that Lyndon LaRouche wrote from his jail cell, in 1989. And remember, he was put in that jail cell, courtesy of the Get LaRouche Task Force, which was launched by Robert Mueller’s indictment a couple of years earlier. This document that LaRouche wrote was entitled, “The Great Crisis of 1989-1992,” and he wrote it in July, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Lyndon LaRouche is Promethean, he has foresight, and he saw it coming, and he wrote of the worldwide revolutions. He said,

Every true revolutionary upsurge in history is distinguished by two general preconditions. First, it must become widely sensed that the existing regime has lost the Mandate of Heaven. Visibly, the signs are that God has turned his face against that regime.

The “Mandate of Heaven,” as some people may know, is a concept from ancient Chinese culture; it’s a Confucian concept, that there are universal principles, and if a government or a ruler violates those universal principles then it will lose the Mandate of Heaven and its regime will fall. Clearly, this is what is now happening to the British Empire and its policies, and its minions in the Democratic Party and the Bush/Cheney wing of the Republican Party, as well as all of the governments and parties in Western Europe, which we’re watching fail spectacularly at this point. There is this rejection of those institutions which have lost the Mandate of Heaven.

This is why LaRouche characterized Trump’s election in 2016 as part of a movement of international change. I think that part is clear—the loss of the mandate. We see it on the streets, we see it in letters to the editor. But then, Mr. LaRouche says, there’s a second precondition to a revolutionary upsurge. And he says, “The new government implicit in a revolutionary movement, must be seen as qualified to receive the Mandate of Heaven.”

That is where we come in. It’s not enough to just reject globalization or Wall Street, or identity politics, or manmade climate change, or liberals or Democrats. We have to be prepared to define the qualified policies in order to receive the Mandate of Heaven. Mr. LaRouche identifies what the most essential role of government in that regard is, and he says it is to “shape the entire nation’s relationship to the physical universe.” Most people don’t think about government in those terms, but that, of course, is the essence of LaRouche’s economic policy—to define the principles of economics that will shape a nation’s successful relationship to the physical universe.

Today, twenty years after LaRouche wrote that paper, we can see that governments that have successfully done that—like China with its New Silk Road policy—are in essence leading the world into a new paradigm. That is the real challenge that lies beyond the midterm elections. I’ll conclude with the fact that our experience in organizing in the Midwest—seeing how some of these Independent candidates are beginning to emerge—proves that the population really is ready for that challenge.