◆ SpookStack

Sette] tational debate style —— and even those who suffer just a casual brush with the party come away with the same eerie feeling: there's something weird about these people. “What they do on the surface sounds terrific,” says Chip Berlet, of the Cam- bridge-based independent think-tank Political Research Associates, who spent four years digging into Newman and his followers. “But like anything that sounds | too good to be true, it is. Newman represents another white male guru, and. who needs it? No matter how benevolent their current political line might be, if they took over the country, you'd have Strongman Fred Newman.” If all the criticisms are true, then there's something really scary about the New Alliance Party — it's growing. Since its founding, in 1979, the party has spread to 22 states, and it currently boasts an estimated 30,000 members, including 5000 in New England. It offers its own brand of psychotherapy at clinics around the country — including one in Jamaica Plain — and also boasts a network of legal, educational, and other community- based services that touch perhaps hun-_ dreds of thousands of poor and working- class people. Its weekly newspaper, the Nationa! Alliance, is read by as many as 100,000 people. And this year the party's presidential can¥idate, _Lenor, i, became the first plack woman eyerto ~ qualify for, matchy Fedéral Election C issi on the ballot in alf\50°states and the ; ow eee District of Columbia. For a band of wacked-out cultists, those are impressive achievements. ; The support the NAP has found (granted, it hardly makes the party a major political force at this point) isn’t hard to understand. Its entire political rap is built on the simple premise that the two-party system has failed the working class — which, in a lot of ways, is true. Cash has become the major player in American politics, which means politi- cians serious about surviving -- even devout progressives — have to woo the nation’s moneybags. Unfortunately, that leaves the poor and members of the working class playing second string. But, as the NAP rightly calculates, those people are ripe for picking by any group that sells itself well. And any party that can swing that bloc of voters to its ranks . has a decent shot at serious power. “We're building something,” says NAP New England coordinator Mary Fridley, “come hell or high water, that's capable of engaging the right in this country. And furthermore, we've found — it’s been tested through millions of hours on the streets, millions of hours going door-knocking and millions of hours on the phone — that people respond to a militant, black-led, indepen- dent movement. That's the way we chose to go.” No one questions the NAP’s ability to turh peeple on to its ideas; indeed, that’s what frightens its critics. The concerns, rather, are about how the party does its: ° organizing, and — perhaps more impor- tant — why, especially given its leaders’ past and what critics say is the NAP's consistent refusal to deal with that history honestly. According to researchers like Berlet and Joe Conason, who wrote a 1982 Village Voice article about the NAP, Newman put himself and his followers under Lyndon LaRouche's leadership — then calied ‘ y"’ — for a relative- ly short time in the early 1970s in New York. Although LaRouche was then operating within the left and had yet to develop fully his neo-fascist theories of today, he was nonetheless a twisted man with twisted ideas. By autumn 1973, US communists had already denounced him as a neo-Nazi after his “Operation Mop- up” terror spree, which featured his young followers pummeling rival leftists with chains and baseball bats. And LaRouche's bizarre and degrading psy- chosexual theories were pretty well formed by the winter of 73. And though it wasn’t until June 1974 that Newman afGcia!ly put himself and almost 40 of his cadre under LaRouche (a fact NAP members don't dispute), party members deny that the Newman-LaRouche ties started much earlier and continued for some time after Newman and his group jumped ship, in August 1974. According to Berlet’s and Conason's evidence, though, Newman's Conters for Change (CFC), a grassroots leftist organization, held “joint forums” with LaRouche‘s Continued on page 14