By Peter Galuszka
Reading this blog and studying the conservative political movement makes for some curious, if not hilarious, observations.
It’s always interesting to note the tenets that have evolved. Selfishness is good. You must also be moral and self-disciplined. The free market is a magical corrective. All government and regulation are bad. Altruism and kindness are bad, too. And so on.
Granted some of these concepts are somehow contradictory. For instance, how can you be simultaneously selfish and moral? Why is altruism bad when you are following a strict dogmatic code? Why is government bad if you need some kind of force to uphold your rights?
I’m mixing things up, of course. These are the ideas of Ayn Rand, the extraordinarily influential whack-job of a cult leader whose ideas are being widely adopted throughout the conservative movement, especially the Tea Party types. They also fade in and out, like a coastal fog, with Libertarianism. Anyone who reads Bacons Rebellion regularly gets a caffeine kick of Libertarianism the size of a triple Grande latte.
So, it is helpful to check out a book by a former colleague of mine, Gary Weiss, a New York investigative journalist who has produced “Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul.” Gary is fascinated with how Randianism is pervading the entire spectrum of the right and just how screwy and fun the ideals can be.
Rand, of course, was a dark-eyed, Russian-Jewish immigrant whose rabid anti-Bolshevik attitudes and sharp intelligence brought her to Hollywood and New York. Her still-popular political tomes, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas, Shrugged,” are fodder for the anti-government philosophy that has its latest expression in the disparate but intriguing Tea Party movement that links together everyone from traditional Libertarians to gun nuts to Patrick Henry re-enactors who often show up at Tea Party events as some kind of cornball throwback to “patriotism” (of the White Bread variety, of course).
Gary has a lot of fun taking apart not only Rand, but more importantly, her True Believers at the Ayn Rand Institute and various other institutions. Rand is always a lot of fun. Despite her hatred of Soviet Communism, she ran her cells like a pint-sized Stalin, ordering people about and shunning (liquidating in essence) those she considered wrong believers. And since we’ve spent a bit of time on this blog reviewing the supposed irresponsibility of a poor African-American man from Tennessee, it is worth noting that Rand, while not much to look at, was a sexual dominatrix of the first order.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Rand and her “Objectivists” hated “Libertarians” such as the way, in the Catholic Church, the Dominicans hate the Jesuits, or in the traditional Communist Party, the Suslovs hated the Titos.
I had never really thought about Libertarians very much but when I did, I realized that they really are Hippies. They are not Main Street Republicans at all. They could give a damn about keeping big corporations happy and joining the country club. They want to make sure that we all can make whatever personal choices we can while paying no taxes and not having to deal with regulation.
Yet, according to Weiss, there was bad blood between the Libertarians and Big Sister:
“Libertarians and Objectivists have a lot in common, but from the beginning the libertarians annoyed the hell out of (Ayn) Rand. At its dawn in the early 1970s, the libertarian movement was widely viewed as a quirky right-wing variation of the New Left, sharing its anarchic, antiestablishment spirit. Rand dismissed it out of hand. “I disapprove of, disagree with and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called ‘hippies of the right’ who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism,” she wrote in her newsletter 1971.”
Weiss continues: “It was a failure of imagination and a major political blunder, in hindsight, because libertarianism matured over the years to become the influential political movement it is today.”
So, too, is Randism. A lot of influential people have been its followers, such as former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan and former Securities & Exchange Commission chief Chris Cox. Neither one was particularly successful since both played supreme roles in the 2008 financial meltdown, but what the hey, they are all part of the fun.
So, read Gary’s book and see “Bacon’s Rebellion” in an entirely new light!
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