LaRouche Movement - Characterizations

Characterizations

According to a biography produced by the LaRouche-affiliated Schiller Institute, the movement is based on a commitment to "a just new world economic order," specifically "the urgency of affording what have been sometimes termed 'Third World nations,' their full rights to perfect national sovereignty, and to access to the improvement of their educational systems and economies through employment of the most advanced science and technology."

The LaRouche movement has attracted devoted followers and developed some specific and elaborate policy initiatives, but has also been referred to variously as Marxist, fascist, anti-Semitic, a political cult, a personality cult, and a criminal enterprise. In 1984, LaRouche's research staff was described by Norman Bailey, a former senior staffer of the United States National Security Council, as "one of the best private intelligence services in the world". The Heritage Foundation calls it "one of the strangest political groups in American history", and The Washington Monthly calls it a "vast and bizarre vanity press".

The LaRouche movement is seen as a fringe political cult.

Journalist and John Birch Society activist John Rees wrote in his Information Digest that the movement has "taken on the characteristics more of a political cult than a political party", and that LaRouche is given "blind obedience" by his followers. He has also called the movement a "cult of personality". In rebuttal, LaRouche called the accusations of being a cult figure "garbage", and denied having control over any of the groups affiliated with him.

According to longtime critics Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons:

Though often dismissed as a bizarre political cult, the LaRouche organization and its various front groups are a fascist movement whose pronouncements echo elements of Nazi ideology. Beginning in the 1970s, the LaRouchites combined populist antielitism with attacks on leftists, environmentalists, feminists, gay men and lesbians, and organized labor. They advocated a dictatorship in which a 'humanist' elite would rule on behalf of industrial capitalists. They developed an idiosyncratic, coded variation on the Illuminati Freemason and Jewish banker conspiracy theories. Their views, though exotic, were internally consistent and rooted in right-wing populist traditions.

In the summer of 2009, LaRouche followers came under criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for comparing President Barack Obama to Hitler. Media figures as politically diverse as Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart criticized the comparison.