www.LaRouchePAC.com

---- SUBSCRIBE TO THIS CHANNEL FOR WEEKLY POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE UPDATES & MORE ----

"The cases of Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, the Careys, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, illustrate a principle of decisive importance for any people whose nation is gripped by an existential crisis, such as that facing the world today. National leadership in time of great crisis, like leadership in fundamental scientific progress, is a quality which, in known history thus far, has been specific to the kind of exceptional individual personality who leads a people once again out of a recurring condition of habituated moral and intellectual mediocrity, the awful condition into which nations and their peoples have retreated, not inevitably, but repeatedly, as now.

On that account, the most deadly threat to our republic today, comes precisely from those who delude themselves into assuming that the weight of that mediocrity called variously "popular opinion" or "mediaocracy," ought to be the governing principle of national leadership. No nation was ever in danger from within, unless its prevalent popular opinion had sponsored that crisis. No nation was ever self-destroyed, except by the persisting error of its ruling institutions, and by the acquiescence, if not the consent, of its own prevalent and decadent popular opinion...

Therefore, history reminds us: the necessary leader for a time of existential crisis, is always the person who challenges popular opinion: "We can escape this crisis, if you are willing to face up to the fact, that it was popular opinion which brought this nation into the present disaster!" The leader must be essentially correct in his criticism, but he or she must deliver it, and that forcefully, or, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, prove worthless as a leader for that nation in its time of crisis.

For example, a terribly foolish U.S. popular opinion, praised that "new economy" which has now proven itself the lunacy it was all along. How many Americans who could ill-afford the loss, wasted their resources in investing in the "new economy" hoax?

How many Americans swallowed the fairy-tale, which said that shipping our work-places to cheap-labor markets abroad, would bring prosperity and security here, inside the U.S.A.?

How many swallowed the fairy-tale, which insisted that "free trade," by lowering the prices of goods, "democratically," below the physical cost of their production, would make life better?

How many believed, that the measure of national prosperity was the price of so-called "shareholder values" on financial markets, even if those "values" were based on the predatory financier practices which have now led to chain-reactions of plant closures, loss of health-care and pensions, accelerating mass-firings from places of employment, and, now, the immediately ongoing threat of chain-reactions of national bankruptcies among nations?

The list of those follies goes on, and on, and on."

-Short excerpt from, Continue the American Revolution! (http://www.larouchepub.com/la r/2002/2902_continue_amer_rev. html) by Lyndon LaRouche