Looking into the Democratic Labor Party's apparent Senate success in Victoria, the seat, if it has been taken, has been taken from Family First, a party sound in many ways, but with the flaws in these things when their original inspiration is Evangelical Protestant rather than orthodox Catholic, and when they have no roots on the trade union and mutual Left.
Also slogging it out was the Citizens Electoral Commission, Australian torch-carrier for Lyndon LaRouche, whose followers have been known to post comments on this blog, and the nomination of one of whom by the Democratic Party in TX-22 has come up in some other work that I am doing. It occurred to me today that the LaRouchies are missing a trick. Put together the old man's economic and other theories with hatred of the "German" Royal Family and a not unfounded view of the United Kingdom as the nucleus of the British Empire, and they have real potential to exploit the rise in English separatism.
After all, neoconservatism, which is also extremely anti-British and which is exactly as sane as anything propagated by LaRouche, has more than a foothold here. So why not?
Very intriguing post. I am fascinated by the LaRouche movement, mainly because I wonder how the same people can be so right on some issues but so wrong, and even positively wacky, on others.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that because it is such an idiosyncratic movement, it reflects, for better or for worse, all the complexities of Lyndon LaRouche himself.
Unfortunately for the LaRouche people, because of their economic views, they probably won't be able to find many backers among the very wealthy and very powerful. The neocons were willing to move to the Right on economics in order to pursue their foreign policy goals, which, in my opinion, has always been their main purpose.
But on the other hand, the LaRouche movement has been going strong for decades, although I wonder what will happen when LaRouche himself passes on.
I agree with you about the possibilities for an English LaRouche movement gaining steam from English separatism, especially because of the anti-monarchy issue. I suppose it is not unlike how Berlusconi took advantage of Northern Italian separatism to bring a somewhat American-style conservatism to Italy, where the previous conservative tradition, at its best, was more or less similar to American New Dealism or social democracy in the rest of Europe. Separatist movements seem to end up having many unintended consequences.
They have secured the nomination of Kesha Rogers in TX-22, and she is 33, so they are not going to go away in the US when LaRouche dies.
ReplyDeleteDemanding that England become an independent republic is not a trick that they will miss for much longer, I reckon.