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Why have Americans accepted the status of ``underlings,'' in a consumer society increasingly divorced from the aspirations of its revolutionary founding? And, confronted with the collapse of the world economy, how can this nation and its people be restored to their historic mission in the fight for global progress? The recently released winter/spring double issue of the Schiller Institute journal Fidelio addresses these issues, providing crucial ammunition in the fight to reverse the cultural ``paradigm shift'' of the past 35 years.

In `Freedom vs. 'Democracy': How 'Democracy' Became Diseased, Lyndon LaRouche demonstrates the dependence of the post-Renaissance nation-state, upon each individual's moral responsibilty to seek truth for the betterment of mankind. This has been the core of the American Intellectual Tradition--of which LaRouche is today's leading exponent--from its roots in Tudor England, through the influence of G.W. Leibniz on Benjamin Franklin and the Founding Fathers, up to the Presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In facing today's crisis, LaRouche juxtaposes such seemingly ``strategic'' evaluations as

``[s]ince the U.S. republic has still the capability of assuming a unifying role, not easil replaced, of leadership among nations, the reform of our political party system should be mustered around the effort to bring about those specific forms of economic cooperation to bring the world out of the mess the U.S. and its parties have contributed so much to creating,'' with the intensely ``personal'' challenge, modelled on the exemplary life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that ``[t]he task before us, a task on whose outcome the continuedexistence of our republic may depend absolutely, is the rapid recruitment of young people, and others, to emerge, soon, as true leaders.''

|In `How the 'Lost Corpse' Subverts the American Intellectual Tradition, Stanley Ezrol exposes the20th-century takeover of American cultural and political institutions by the Tory ideology of the Confederacy, naming the ``Southern Strategy'' ideologues who plotted the nation's transformation from a republican to a ``shareholder'' society. Ezrol traces the history of the feudalistic Nashville Agrarians, as they twist and turn between New Age modernists, H.G. Wells/Bertrand Russell ``Open Conspirators,'' Carlist pro-fascists Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and William F. Buckley, and utopian geopoliticians William Yandell Elliot, Henry A. Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Feature articles, by Paul Gallagher and Robert Trout, on the nation-building statecraft of England's King Henry VII, Thomas More, andWilliam Shakespeare--which culminated in the establishment of the American republic--give in-depth background on the educational process needed to create a citizenry capable of self-government.

`A Yearning for the Classical,'' by Bonnie James, reviews an exhibit of works by the extraordinary 19th-century American artist Thomas Eakins. Paintings by Eakins appear on the magazine cover and inside text.

Other features, including an interview with pianist Andres Schiff, a report on the Call to Ban Violent Video Games, and a music review of a CD of the newly discovered Mozart opera, "The Beneficient Dervish "make this an extraordinary issue to read and ciruclate.