Lyndon LaRouche (American political activist) Add a review

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. (September 8, 1922 – February 12, 2019) was an American political activist who founded the LaRouche movement and its main organization, the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). He was a prominent conspiracy theorist and perennial presidential candidate. He began in far-left politics in the 1940s and later supported the civil rights movement, but in the 1970s he moved to the far-right. His movement is sometimes described as, or likened to, a cult. Convicted of fraud, he served five years in prison from 1989 to 1994.

Born in Rochester, New Hampshire, LaRouche was drawn to socialist and Marxist movements in his twenties during World War II. In the 1950s, while a Trotskyist, he was also a management consultant in New York City. By the 1960s, he became engaged in increasingly smaller and more radical splinter groups. During the 1970s, he created the foundation of the LaRouche movement and became more engaged in conspiratorial beliefs and violent and illegal activities. Instead of the radical left, he embraced radical right politics and antisemitism. At various times, he alleged that he had been targeted for assassination by Queen Elizabeth II, Zionist mobsters, his own associates (who he said had been drugged and brainwashed by CIA and British spies), in addition to others.

It is estimated that the LaRouche movement never exceeded a few thousand members, but it had an outsize political influence, raising more than $200 million by one estimate, and running candidates in more than 4,000 elections in the 1980s. It was noted for disguising its candidates as conservative Democrats and harassing opponents. It reached its height in electoral success when Larouchite candidates won the Democratic primaries for the 1986 Illinois gubernatorial election and related state offices; this alarmed Democratic Party officials, whose national spokesman called the Larouchites "kook fringe". The defeated mainstream Democratic candidates ran in the general election as members of the Illinois Solidarity Party; the Larouchite Democrats all finished a distant third. Later in the 1980s, as part of the LaRouche criminal trials, criminal investigations led to convictions of several LaRouche movement members, including LaRouche himself. He was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment but served only five.

LaRouche was a perennial candidate for President of the United States. He ran in every election from 1976 to 2004 as a candidate of third parties established by members of his movement, peaking at around 78,000 votes in the 1984 United States presidential election. He also tried to gain the Democratic presidential nomination. In the 1996 Democratic Party presidential primaries, he received 5% of the total nationwide vote. In 2000, he received enough primary votes to qualify for delegates in some states, but the Democratic National Committee refused to seat his delegates and barred LaRouche from attending the Democratic National Convention.