Those Randy Republicans

Who knows how I stumbled on to this? Perhaps it was meeting a very engaging professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, and discovering—what did we do before Google?—that she had written an article about the convergences of Wisconsin under Walker and Puerto Rico under our former governor, who is so conservative that he was rumored to be a member of Opus Dei. (caps by tradition and nothing else….)

Right—read the article, which is excellent, and then remembered having seen something about Paul Ryan. But what was it? Well, it was three in the morning, so I tripped—almost literally—off to bed; this morning I remembered: Paul Ryan’s ideological mentor is or was Ayn Rand.

Look, let’s be fair. When you are 17, and when the beauty of purely abstract thought is freshly sprung upon you, you can be forgiven for loving Ayn Rand. Similarly, when at the same age you choose to bathe in the emotions, you are permitted to love Tchaikovsky. The point? You’re supposed to grow up.

Rand’s philosophy, which she called Objectivism, is deeply attractive to the adolescent mind; in fact, it almost feels that it was created for it. And there may be a reason for it—Rand could have stopped her cognitive development because of a traumatic incident. At age 12, she saw the Bolsheviks seize her father’s pharmacy in St. Petersburg.

She was told it was for “the people;” she saw it as rank injustice to her father, who had worked and struggled and dared and succeeded. And so she developed a philosophy, the philosophy of Objectivism. Its cornerstone was reason, and the first floor was selfishness, which she hailed as the greatest good. From that, the corollary was a hatred of altruism, or doing anything that was not in some way in your self-interest. And then came a hatred of religion—Rand was a staunch atheist, because who was more sickeningly altruistic than Jesus, curing all those lepers and washing whores’ feet? Screw that.

Now then, anything that prevents you from your capitalism, from making your fortune or pursing your goals, is bad—so that means government, unions, social groups pressuring on you or regulating you or even just taxing you. So—zero, or at least minimal, government.

Rand came to the United States and started writing—she cranked out The Fountainhead, which was pretty good, and then got to work on her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. At 1200 pages—60 pages of which are a long speech that the main character presents outlining Rand’s objectivist principles—it makes an excellent doorstop. The hitch? It’s completely unreadable.

“What’s it about?” you may be asking.

Well, I got through, those days when I was reading Rand, but only because of the discipline practicing cello six hours a day had given me. And confession time—the book is so bad, it’s a soporific. In the same way that new mothers are said to forget the agony of labor an hour past, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged recedes into a fog of words. Or perhaps it’s just buried under them.

OK—here goes. A Great Man, John Galt (did I hear the sharp intake of breath, somewhere? You know, the one the denotes surprise and adoration?) is a great industrialist, but what happens? The fleas, the blood suckers, the leeches—read government, unions, church, social groups—drive him to abandon his enterprise and go off, with everybody like him, to form their own perfect, objectivist world. And so we’re fucked.

Dear Reader, calculate your hourly rate and the amount of time it would take to read a 1200 page blowup of the idea above. Then send your check to me….

Of course everybody hated it, but guess what? According to William F. Buckley—neither an intellectual lightweight nor a rabid liberal—it was the best-selling novel of all time. Is it still, after Twilight and the Fifty Shades of Gray? A better blogger would look that up….

Whether yes or no, it’s sold a lot of copies, and sales of the damn thing spiked two years ago when it was announced that Paul Ryan, the cute and chilling boy senator from Wisconsin whom Romney picked to give some pizazz to his ticket, had read it, been deeply influenced by it, and had given it to his aides as required reading. I presume, by the way, not on the taxpayer’s nickel, which would have driven Rand out of her grave and charging to Capitol Hill.

For the conservatives, you see, have taken the same approach to Rand as they have to the Bible: pick and choose. Rand’s atheism? OK—skip that. Her views on homosexuality, which were that she wasn’t into it, but the government had no business saying one thing or another about it? Err, move on. Her belief that sex…wait, let Wikipedia tell the story….

In rejecting the traditional altruistic moral code, Rand also rejects the sexual code that, in her view, is the logical implication of altruism. In Atlas Shrugged Rand introduces a theory of sex that is based in her broader ethical and psychological theories. Rather than considering sexual desire a debasing animal instinct, Rand portrays it as the highest celebration of human values, a physical response to intellectual and spiritual values that gives concrete expression to what could otherwise be experienced only in the abstract.

Right, maybe a mistake there, though the writing above does give you a fair taste of the 1200 page work itself. I can put it simpler—fuck whom you want. As Rand did, by having an affair for umpteen years with the husband of her close friend. Oh, and there are three adulterous affairs in the book—all very much glorified as the supreme and crowning physical expression of noble, selfish beings.

The conservatives have also forgotten that Rand scorned Ronald Reagan, whom she thought (rightly) was a nitwit. Nor did she think he was a true capitalist, but rather a “mixed-government” type. Here she is:

In conclusion, let me touch briefly on another question often asked me: What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don’t think of him—and the more I see, the less I think. I did not vote for him (or for anyone else) and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called “Moral Majority” and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling—apparently with his approval—to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.

The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for another fifty years.

Observe Reagan’s futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element. But he will not find it in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.

Well, we have the John Galt Society and the Ayn Rand Institute and a whole host of organizations that espouse the carefully pruned views of Ayn Rand. In fact, Rand had a whole coterie of followers, some quite influential, like Alan Greenspan. And so Paul Ryan went off to speak to the Atlas Society in 2005; here’s what he said:

The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.”

Or consider this, from 2009:

“what’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.”

Well, well—the election came along and it had to be admitted: there were some serious issues that Rand espoused that the right wing didn’t want to get into. So when someone trotted over to ask Ryan about all this, here’s what he had to say:

He admitted that he had “enjoyed her novels,” but, as Mak notes, he stressed that, “I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas.”

Wow—that’s class! Epistemology? Thomas Aquinas? Well, I looked it up: what was the epistemological view of Aquinas? And here it is:

Thomas believed "that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act."

Reading further, I came upon this, from the wicked and atheist pen of Bertrand Russell:

He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

Oh, I thought—isn’t that another word for apologetics? So I trotted over to look that up, and yes, it’s suspiciously close—apologetics is the defense of (usually) a religion by making formal arguments (when possible). Oh, and as an example, I found a wonderful graphic used to explain the trinity, a concept that has mystified everyone for a millennium or two. Here goes:

 See? What could be clearer? Well, got that cleared up!

All this, and before lunch!