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The political views of Lyndon LaRouche are the source of much controversy. For one thing, LaRouche's critics and supporters often have difficulty agreeing what LaRouche's views actually are. This is complicated by the fact that LaRouche's views have changed over time, particularly during the 1970s when he abandoned many of his Marxist views.
Further complicating any explanation of LaRouche's political views is the fact that discussion of his views is generally carried out either by his supporters or by his fierce critics, meaning that most sources about LaRouche are heavily biased to one side or the other.
Political philosophy
Lyndon LaRouche regards government, not as a "necessary evil" that has to be regulated by a "contract" between the state and the citizenry a la John Locke or Newt Gingrich, but rather as an expression of the highest aspirations of the citizenry. LaRouche believes that the material and cultural progress of humanity is the proper concern of government, and the state does not serve a merely negative function, i.e., to ward off hostile foreign powers or restrain criminals. LaRouche regards "freedom" in the highest sense as the right to participate fully in that progress of humanity, which requires certain minimum standards of material well-being, and universal public education that will equip the citizen to play such a role. In LaRouche's view, the political system which enables this to occur is the republic.
The following are a number of specific stands taken by LaRouche and his organization on controversial issues:
- They have opposed the counterculture, and the legalization of recreational drugs, arguing that these create a "bread and circuses" culture of self-centered hedonism, and a highly manipulable population. LaRouche calls for a revival of classical culture, particularly in the domain of public education.
- They have supported nuclear energy and other complex technologies (which are often opposed by the environmentalist movement), arguing that human survival depends on a progression of technologies (see LaRouche on Economics.)
- They defended President Bill Clinton, claiming that those who called for Clinton's resignation or impeachment following the Monica Lewinsky scandal were hiding their true motives.
- They opposed both of the recent wars against Iraq.
- They opposed, from 1979 on, the deregulation of trucking, airlines, telecommunications, public utilities, and financial services, during a period when deregulation was embraced by the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
LaRouche on Economics
LaRouche views economics as the "mother of the sciences," consequently, LaRouche often combines discussion of economics with a discussion of science, philosophy and culture.
LaRouche began as a Marxist, but by the mid-1970s he had abandoned Marxism in favor of the school of thought known as the American System.
LaRouche has said that a fundamental question of economics is the problem of diminishing resources. He argues that this can be overcome through the creative power of the human mind, which makes it possible to harness elements of nature that were once considered useless, such as oil, and then find new resources before the old ones have been depleted. Thus, in LaRouche's theory, the principal subject of economics is the ability of the cognitive powers of the individual human mind to make new "discoveries of universal principles." These discoveries, LaRouche says, lead to revolutions in technology, which re-define man's relationship to nature in a "non-linear way." Such revolutions, he says, are contingent on the "viability of the culture," on its capacity to absorb and transmit new ideas: LaRouche asserts that the most historically successful variety of culture is what he terms the classical culture of Ancient Greece during the time of Plato, or the culture of Europe in the centuries following the Renaissance.
LaRouche favors extensive government intervention, both in terms of regulating sectors of the economy that are essential to the well-being of the nation, and in terms of providing credits for investment in infrastructure projects and science projects such as NASA that are too large and long-term for any private firm to pursue. LaRouche points to policies such as Abraham Lincoln's transcontinental railroad and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority as examples of successful economic policy. LaRouche also supports the selective use of government's power both to tax and to issue credits (see national bank) as a means of encouraging productive investment, while discouraging speculation. He calls for greater federal investment in science and technology, particularly the space program and nuclear energy (with a special emphasis on nuclear fusion.)
He believes that if governments do not play a strong role in directing national economies, the gap will be filled by various sorts of monopolies and cartels. It is for this reason that LaRouche opposes Free Trade and globalism while supporting protectionism.
LaRouche maintains that supranational financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund are committed to a policy of looting the living standards of the world's populations through austerity and speculation, while contracting the actual productive base of these economies -- a policy that he claims is a revival of the economic approach of the German central banker Hjalmar Schacht, who held office both before and during the Nazi government of Adolf Hitler. To remedy this, LaRouche proposes a new international conference, modeled on the Bretton Woods Conference, for the purpose of reorganizing a bankrupt monetary system, and eliminating most of the presently unpayable debt. For example, he advocates the retroactive cancellation of all financial derivatives contracts. He proposes that new credits be created for very large infrastructure projects all over the world; LaRouche has published specific proposals for such projects in Eurasia, Africa, the Middle East, North and South America, and Australia. LaRouche considers it to be the unfinished mission of the United States of America to end any form of colonialism, which he associates in particular with the austerity policies of the International Monetary Fund in the post-1972 period.
Political philosophy
LaRouche's views on politics come out of his ideas about epistemology. In 1978, he wrote The Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites, in which he described the history of European civilization as a battle between two conflicting images of man, one proposed by Plato and the other proposed by Aristotle (this analysis is similar to the one published a century earlier by the German poet/philosopher Heinrich Heine.) LaRouche favors the Platonists and opposes the Aristoteleans. As LaRouche describes it, Plato and his followers saw the universe as an ongoing process of creation, in which man plays a central role through his powers of cognition. Aristotle and his followers, on the other hand, saw the universe as static and fixed, with humans being just another species of animal.
According to LaRouche, the political expression of Platonism is the republican current, while the rival Aristotelean camp is oligarchical. The republicans seek a form of society which cherishes the creative mental powers of the individual, and seeks to cultivate those powers as the key to economic and cultural progress. The oligarchs seek to suppress the mental powers of the individual, because they prefer a fixed, feudal form of society and consider change to be disruptive and dangerous.
In LaRouche's opinion, the conflict between these two camps is the essence of politics, and all of the contemporary notions about "left vs. right" and "liberal vs. conservative" are a red herring.
LaRouche emphasizes the importance of the Renaissance as a point in the history of Europe when there was a major resurgence of Platonic thinking. European culture gradually embraced the idea of progress, a radical shift from feudalism, which was characterized by the Aristotelean view of the universe as fixed and unchanging.
LaRouche believes that the American Revolution and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution mark a watershed in history, as the most successful attempt to put the republican theory of politics into practice.He also places great importance on the Monroe Doctrine, believing that it is the mission of the United States to oppose colonialism and imperialism.
Fascism
According to LaRouche, the first fascist state was France under Napoleon Bonaparte. European oligarchical forces, he claims, intervened in the French Revolution to prevent it from becoming a republican, American-style revolution, and steered it instead toward becoming a bloodbath followed by a dictatorship. LaRouche calls this the beginning of modern synarchism, a revival of feudal-Venetian methods.
Most contemporary definitions of fascism emphasize components such as racism, chauvinism, and authoritarianism. LaRouche, however, points to a specific economic policy as the foundation of fascism: it is a situation where the financial system has become insolvent, and rather than put it through a bankruptcy reorganization, the ruling powers attempt to prop it up by cannibalizng the workforce through radical austerity and forced-labor policies. LaRouche identifies these policies particularly with German finance minister Hjalmar Schacht, who LaRouche considers to be instrumental in bringing Adolf Hitler to power. With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1972, LaRouche warned that key financial institutions of the world were committed to a revival of Schacht's policies, first in the form of intensified exploitation of the Third World, and increasingly with respect to the economic policies of the more wealthy nations toward their own populations.
Criticism of LaRouche
Lyndon LaRouche's ideas have generated a great deal of controversy and criticism. Although LaRouche's supporters generally dismiss his critics as either failing to understand LaRouche's points, or of intentionally misrepresenting them, it remains the case that LaRouche is a figure of great controversy, attracting constant and often quite intense criticism (see LaRouche's critics.)
LaRouche and Marxism
Lyndon LaRouche began his political career as a Marxist but he and his National Caucus of Labor Committees abandoned this outlook in the 1970s. LaRouche no longer opposes capitalism as an economic system, and his analysis of political events is no longer phrased in terms of class. To LaRouche, the main enemy is now the conspiracy of financiers he calls the Synarchy.
During and after the period of his break with orthodox Trotskyism, LaRouche's theory was influenced by what he called his "Theory of Hegemony" which was derived from Lenin's view of the role of intellectuals in being a vanguard helping workers develop their consciousness and realise their leading role in society. He was also influnced by Gramsci's concept of a hegemon as an intellectual and cultural elite which directs social thought. LaRouche's theory saw himself and his followers as being able to become such a hegemonic force. He rejected, however, Gramsci's notion of "organic intellectuals" being developed by the working class itself. Rather, the working class would be led by elite intellectuals such as himself.
LaRouche was also influenced by his readings of Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital and Karl Marx's Capital developing his own "theory of reindustralization," arguing that the west would attempt to industrialize the Third World, particularly India, and attempt to solve the economic crisis both by developing new markets in the Third World and using its cheap and surplus labor to increase profits and minimise costs (see neocolonialism.) This attempt would be unsuccessful, however, and would lead to catastrophic economic collapse. To oppose this, LaRouche argued for a "reindustrialization" of the United States with himself at the vanguard of the effort allowing him to personally resolve the crisis of capitalism. Though his arguments have since been stripped of their quasi-Marxist language and citations, his core theories have remained essentially the same since the late 1960s.
Wohlforth writes:
- This scheme, which shaped LaRouche writings and agitation in the late '60s and early '70s, was presented in an increasingly frenetic manner, bolstered by predictions of economic doom. LaRouche was a crisis-monger of the highest order. LaRouche and his followers became increasingly convinced that the fate of the world rested with their group and their great leader. The problem lay with the stupidity of the nation's leaders and the boorishness of the masses. If only LaRouche were in power, all the world's troubles - perhaps even the rats problem in New York City - would be resolved swiftly.
According to research conducted by Dennis King, LaRouche developed an intense interest in fascism in the 1970s, and began to adopt some of its slogans and practices, while maintaining an outward stance of anti-fascism.
LaRouche and feminism
In 1972 LaRouche's second wife, Carol Larrabee (also known as Carol Schnitzer), left him for Christopher White, a younger man who was a member of the LaRouche movement in Britain. Following the personal crisis of his marital breakdown, his writings became, in the view of some critics, obsessively anti-feminist, even to the point of misogynism, and obsessed with sex. In an article, "The Sexual Impotency of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party", LaRouche wrote:
- The classical case is the sexually athletic Macho who regards himself as a successful performer in bed, the Macho who has much to say and think respecting his capacities for various modes of penetration and frequency and cubic centimeters of ejaculations. The ugly secret of the matter is that he is almost totally sexually impotent.
In 1974 and 1975, on the heels of Operation Mop-Up, the LaRouche organization took what his critics call a further turn towards misogyny and psychological mistreatment of its members. LaRouche issued an article called "Beyond Psychoanalysis" which instituted a regime of "ego-stripping" sessions and what has been called social coercion, in which individuals would be subjected to incessant group criticism.
According to disaffected ex-members, LaRouche's theories of sexual dyanamics and female domination of men resulted in a breakdown of relations between the sexes and the break up of dozens of relationships as women were attacked for being "sadistic bitches" and "witches," and for "mother-dominating" men.
A September 1973 editorial in the NCLC's Campaigner charged that "Concretely, all across the U.S.A., there are workers who are prepared to fight. They are held back, most immediately, by pressure from their wives. . . ."
In an August 16, 1973 internal memo, "The Politics of Male Impotence," LaRouche told his followers:
- The principle source of impotence, both male and female, is the mother. . . .to the extent that my physical powers do not prevent me, I am now confident and capable of ending your political--and sexual-- impotence; the two are interconnected aspects of the same problem. . . . I am going to make you organizers--by taking your bedrooms away from you until you make the step to being effective organizers. What I shall do is to expose to you the cruel fact of your sexual impotence, male and female. . . .I shall destroy your sense of safety in the place to which you ordinarily imagine you can flee. I shall not pull you back from fleeing, but rather destroy the place to which you would attempt to flee.
LaRouche's conspiracy theories
During this period, LaRouche steered the NCLC further away from the Marxist left, while retaining some of the slogans and attitudes of the left. LaRouche's critics, particulary Dennis King and Chip Berlet, characterize his new orientation as a conspiracy theory. In their view, the Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, the Council on Foreign Relations and other standard villains of the extreme right, many though not all of them Jewish.
In the 1960s and 1970s, LaRouche was particularly focussed on the supposed danger posed by liberal Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller believing that they were attempting to rescue a debt-strapped international financial system by imposing austerity and forced-labor programs on impoverished populations in order to facillitate debt collection. LaRouche called this "Fascism with a Democratic Face," and charged that it was similar to the tactics of German Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht.
The heart of the conspiracy, according to LaRouche, was the financial elite of the City of London. LaRouche has always been violently anti-British - a trait shared by many American isolationists - and has included Queen Elizabeth II, among others, in his list of conspirators.
Later, LaRouche argued that Adolf Hitler had been a British agent; Menachem Begin was a Nazi; The Beatles were "a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications." Both Communism and Fascism were facets of the great overarching conspiracy of the "Synarchy," an oligarchical network of financiers and manipulators who rule the world. Only LaRouche and his "humanist elite" fully understand this vast conspiracy, and possess the willpower and knowledge to withstand it. LaRouche's personal egotism is a significant force driving his politics. In 1979 he wrote: "My principal accomplishment is that of being, by a large margin of advantage, the leading economist of the twentieth century to date." In "An Open Letter to President Brezhnev" (June 2, 1981) LaRouche identified those pushing the world as "the forces behind the World Wildlife Fund, the Club of Rome, and the heritage of H. G. Wells and the evil Bertrand Russell."
LaRouche claims that there is also a conspiracy by the "Establishment" and the press it allegedly controls to deny him coverage and prevent his views becoming known.
Criticism of LaRouche's economics
Although he has no academic qualifications, LaRouche has written extensively on economic subjects. He states that his economic ideas are descended from the "American System," a slogan originally associated with Alexander Hamilton (Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington and the main critic of the policies of Jeffersonian liberalism), and later with Henry Clay. LaRouche also says that his ideas are based on the the economic policies of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln's advisor Henry Carey, as well as those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In practice this amounts to advocating centralised, though not socialist, state control of the economy, with heavy state investment in industry and science.
Some people think that LaRouche's ideas are not original and are similar to the policies of Germany under Bismarck, the corporatism of Spain under Francisco Franco, and Portugal under Antonio Salazar. LaRouche believes that capitalism is not, as Marxists argue, the principal enemy of progress. LaRouche has developed the elaborate conspiracy theory described above, in which he says that a secret elite called the Synarchy really rules the world. This elite conspiracy, he says, predates and transcends both capitalism and socialism.
LaRouche and the Jews
LaRouche has been regularly accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. From the early 1970s LaRouche regularly criticized "Zionists." The use of "Zionist" as a code word for "Jew" is a common practice among anti-Semitic groups (see for example and ). In the 1970s also, according to Dennis King, LaRouche developed connections with the Ku Klux Klan and the Liberty Lobby, a leading extreme right group, both well-known for anti-Semitism.
In NCLC publications during the 1970s, some Jewish individuals were accused of running the slave trade, controlling organized crime, and the drug trade. LaRouche also claimed that the "Zionist lobby" significantly influenced the U.S. government. Any American professing "Zionist loyalties" was, he said, a "national security risk." However, during this period LaRouche publications such as Campaigner magazine often promoted Philo of Alexandria and Maimonides as positive examples of the "Platonic humanist current in Judaism," and most of the leadership of the NCLC was Jewish.
In The Case of Ludwig Feuerbach (1973), LaRouche (under the pen name L. Marcus) said that "Jewish culture... is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim." In an editorial in New Solidarity in 1978 he wrote: "America must be cleansed for its righteous war by the immediate elimination of the Nazi Jewish Lobby and other British agents from the councils of government, industry, and labor."
LaRouche has been regularly accused of Holocaust denial, widely seen as a hallmark of anti-Semitism. In 1978 LaRouche wrote (in "New Pamphlet to Document Cult Origins of Zionism," New Solidarity, December 8, 1978) that "only" 1.5 million Jews died during World War II, and that their deaths were not the result of a deliberate campaign of extermination by the Nazis.
- It is argued that the culmination of the persecution of the Jews in the Nazi holocaust proves that Zionism is so essential to "Jewish survival" that any anti-Zionist is therefore not only an anti-Semite, but that any sort of criminal action is excusable against anti-Zionists in memory of the mythical "six million Jewish victims" of the Nazi "holocaust."
- This is worse than sophistry. It is a lie. True, about a million and a half Jews did die as a result of the Nazi policy of labor-intensive "appropriate technology" for the employment of "inferior races," a small fraction of the tens of million of others - especially Slavs - who were murdered in the same way Jewish refugee Felix Rohaytin proposes today. Even on a relative scale, what the Nazis did to Jewish victims was mild compared with the virtual extermination of gypsies and the butchery of Communists.
Not only does LaRouche place "holocaust" in inverted commas and refer to the "the mythical six million Jewish victims", his assertion that Jews died only as a result of forced labour can only be read as a denial that the extermination camps existed, a denial of the fact that the Nazis directly and deliberately killed millions of Jews, both in these camps and by means of the einsatzgruppen.
LaRouche's critics claim he is a "disguised anti-Semite," in that he takes the classical anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and substitutes the word "Zionist" for the word "Jew", and ascribes the classical anti-Semite's caricature of the evil, scheming Jew to particular, named, Jews and groups of Jews, rather than to the Jews as a whole.
- The Czarist Okhrana's "Protocols of Zion" include a hard kernel of truth which no mere Swiss court decision could legislate out of existence. The fallacy of the "Protocols of Zion" is that it attributes the alleged conspiracy to Jews generally, to Judaism. A corrected version of the Protocols would stipulate that the evil oaths cited were actually the practices of variously a Paris branch of B'nai B'rith and the evidence the Okhrana turned up in tracing the penetration of the Romanian branch of B'nai B'rith (Zion) into such Russian centres of relevance as Odessa..."
LaRouche's principal target in this article is "Zionism." Zionism is a Jewish political movement supporting the creation and (since 1948) defence of Israel as a Jewish state. For LaRouche, however, it is an underground conspiracy, existing since the 16th century. "Modern Zionism was not created by Jews, but was a project developed chiefly by Oxford University," LaRouche says.
Today, LaRouche says, Zionism is controlled by the financiers of London: "Zionism is the state of collective psychosis through which London manipulates most of the international Jewry", and "Zionist cultism is among the most important of the levers through which British criminality and miscalculation is plunging the world towards ."
LaRouche denies equating "Zionism" with Judaism. "You cannot be a Zionist and also a Jew," he writes. However, when LaRouche accuses "Zionists" of treason and conspiracy, he is seen by Jews, and many others, to be levelling those accusations against most Jews. When he accuses organisations such as B'nai B'rith, the ADL, and many individual Jews, of various crimes, he is seen to be attacking the great majority of Jews who support those organisations and those individuals, particularly since he attributes to them the classic crimes of the sterotypical Jew of the anti-Semitic imagination.
LaRouche has never explicitly repudiated the views expressed in this article, and in the 1980s, the Supreme Court of New York state ruled that calling LaRouche and anti-Semite was "fair comment".
In recent years, however, LaRouche appears to have modified his views on these subjects. In a 1999 LaRouche published an article called "A Personal Statement from Lyndon LaRouche on Music, Judaism, and Hitler." In this article he several times refers to "the Jew," a usage typical of anti-Semites and one which he must have known is offensive to Jews.
Nevertheless, in the course of a discussion of Moses Mendelssohn, LaRouche acknowledges the contribution made by Jews to European civilization. He says: "Germany can never be truly freed from the legacy of Hitler's crimes, until the contributions of German Jews, in particular, are celebrated as an integral part of the honorable history of Germany." The article contains several other statements in similar vein, including praise for Walther Rathenau, an archetypal Jewish business figure.
In this article also LaRouche acknowledges that the Holocaust is not mostly mythological or a Zionist swindle. He says: "We can not allow 2,000 years of Jewish survival in Europe to be buried under the faceless stone epitaph which speaks only of a bare 13-odd years of Hitler's Holocaust." He explicity states that "Yes, Hitler killed millions of Jews," a direct repudiation of his 1978 statement that only 1.5 million died and those not as a result of a deliberate plan of extermination. This article can be seen as a significant (if unacknowledged) retreat by LaRouche from his statements of the 1970s and 1980s. In recent years, LaRouche publications have begun to feature articles praising the Yiddish Renaissance, such as I.L. Peretz, Father of the Yiddish Renaissance. Whether LaRouche can be fairly described as an anti-Semite today is thus an open question.
Is LaRouche a fascist?
LaRouche is frequently described by left-wing writers and orators as a fascist. Dennis King used this thesis in the title of his book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. Fascism is an extremely difficult word to define, and has been debased since World War II by its frequent use of a term of general abuse by political activists of various kinds. LaRouche himself frequently describes his enemies as fascists or proto-fascists.
Most definitions of fascism agree on a number of elements: nationalism, militarism, contempt for democracy and the advocacy of some form of authoritarian rule, and economic corporatism. Organizationally, fascist movements are characterized by the use or advocacy of violence, lack of internal democracy and regimentation in the service of charismatic personal leadership. Racism and specifically anti-Semitism are often characteristics of fascists and fascist parties, but are generally not held to be essentials elements of fascism.
Based on that definition, LaRouche is not a fascist and his organisations are not fascist parties. LaRouche does not advocate American nationalism or militarism. He does not advocate the abolition of democracy or the imposition of authoritarian rule. For the past 20 years he has devoted much of his energy to competing in democratic elections. Operation Mop-Up which consisted of violent physical attacks on left wing meetings is the genesis of most accusations of LaRouche being fascist however the LaRouche movement has not engaged in physical abuse against its political opponents since the 1970s.
LaRouche's political organization is built entirely around his own personality and the promotion of his words and ideas. This is a characteristic of all cults, religious or secular, and not just of fascist groups. Some of the political sects from whose milieu the LaRouche organization developed share this characteristic.
The percieved abusive and demagogic nature of his political speech often leads to him being accused of being a fascist.
LaRouche's critics
Although some criticism of LaRouche has come from his former allies on the political left from the 1960s and 1970s including Tim Wohlforth, Clara Fraser and Fred Newman, LaRouche supporters believe that a key nexus of criticism comes from what they call the John Train Salon.
They assert that high profile reports on LaRouche that appeared in the American media in the mid-1980s are the result of a deliberate campaign devised at series of meetings held in the early 1980s, prior to the criminal prosecution of LaRouche (see United States v. LaRouche.) According to a sworn affidavit submitted by Herbert Quinde, a reporter for LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review, he conducted interviews with 3 participants, Michael Hudson, Sol Sanders and Chip Berlet, who described meetings at the Manhattan home of investment banker John Train, for the purposes of discussing anti-LaRouche strategy (see ). Further confirmation that these meetings took place was provided by sworn testimony by the ADL's Mira Lansky Boland on May 24, 1990 before the Commonwealth Court in Roanoke, Virginia. The participants allegedly included reseachers Berlet and Dennis King; John Rees, of the John Birch Society; Roy Godson, a consultant to the National Security Council and President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; Mira Lansky Boland, of the Anti-Defamation League; at least one representative of Freedom House; Richard Mellon Scaife, a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman and prominent funder of right wing causes; and several dozen journalists from major national media outlets, including NBC-TV, Readers Digest, Business Week, The New Republic and The Wall Street Journal. Supporters futher claim that news coverage that was highly critical of LaRouche, describing him variously as a fascist, communist, racist, anti-Semite, cult leader, and conspiracy theorist was a direct result of a "coordinated strategy coming out of these meetings." Stories circulated that LaRouche had orchestrated the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and that he had attempted to assassinate U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
However, much of the public scrutiny of LaRouche followed the high profile 1986 victory of NCLC members Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart in Illinois' Democratic primaries for statewide offices, a victory that resulted in others on the Democratic ticket, most notably gubernatorial candidate Adlai Stevenson III, deciding to drop off the ticket and run as candidates for a de facto party.