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On The Left-Wing Reaction to John Galt, Ayn Rand, and Tea
Parties
by Edward Cline
(March 13, 2009)
The nation -- indeed, the world -- is waking up to the
idea
that ideas have consequences. One idea is that sacrificing is not a
life-enhancing option and will lead to misery or death. Another is that
the heedless policy of a spendthrift is not a rational course of
action. Another is that adopting the policy of a spendthrift benefits
no one but a politician who advocates it as a sound fiscal policy. Envy
is not a paying proposition. “Class warfare” in the form of “soaking
the rich” to help the poor assures mutual impoverishment. There are so
many more altruist and collectivist ideas that are being grasped by
millions as a collective prescription for penury and extinction.
The
world seems to be emerging from a moral and intellectual coma, perhaps
temporarily, perhaps permanently. It is discovering that other ideas
have other consequences, as well, ideas that promote life, promote
prosperity, promote ambition and personal success, and that they are
possible only in political freedom, and that this freedom has been
violated, abridged, and nullified by the first set of ideas. True,
politics is the last thing to be affected by a philosophical
revolution. But one cannot help but be pleased with how startled the
collectivists and altruists are now by the knowledge that they have not
successfully pulled a fast one on Americans. These Americans have come
knocking on the doors of elitists or leaning over the café railings or
invading their legislated smoke-free bars and restaurants to ask: What
in hell do you think you are doing?
The Americans who recently
protested the spendthrift policies of the Obama administration and
Congress with “tea parties,” and who plan to protest them on an even
larger scale in the near future, one can wager are not regular readers
of The New York Times. They cannot have much in common with its
columnists and editors, nor with the news media.
So the collectivist and altruist elite become very touchy
when the
people for whom they are “doing good” for their own sake, even to the
point of enacting coercive and felonious legislation, exhibit signs of
intelligence, resistance and anger. How dare these yokels!
And nothing raises their hackles higher than any mention of Ayn Rand.
This is because they thought she and her philosophy had
been buried by that arch-conservative, Whittaker Chambers,
wielding a shovel on one side of the grave, while that fellow-traveler
and critic Granville Hicks wielded another on the other side, in a true
demonstration of bipartisanship half a century ago. And hadn’t all the
academics and pundits and book writers since then refuted her and her
philosophy over time and ensured that she would not return to haunt
them?
The cultural and political elite are upset that she has
not been forgotten. That philosophy has returned to haunt them and
aggravate their guilt. And they are in high dudgeon because they are
being cast in the role, not as saviors, but as her black-hearted
villains. They are discovering that ideas cannot be interred as
permanently as their authors. Atlas Shrugged is on their minds.
The Times blog,
“Opinionator” (a round-up of positions expressed in other blogs) of
March 6th, called “’Going Galt’: Everyone’s Doing It!“ is a testimonial
to how the elite have been blind-sided in their arrogant complacency
and sent spinning out of control on the Internet highway, and evidence
of how thoroughly they have been indoctrinated in the belief that
reality has nothing to do with their chosen “reality.” They are deer
caught in the headlights of an oncoming train, but sneer that the train
does not exist. They are stuffed animals crammed with the excelsior of
worn-out bromides, mulched second-hand sociology, and the sawdust of a
failed ideology.
Reading the denials of the cultural elite is
almost as amusing as watching Sir Fretful Plagiary, the hack playwright
in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy, The Critic, protest that his
play does not fall off, is not tediously spun out, and does not want
incident. Incredibly, these are the literary vices they ascribe to
Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and they claim they can’t understand why
it is getting so much attention. Nor can they understand why President
Obama is having problems putting over his disastrous policies. Why
don’t these “Galtists” just shut up and do as he says?
That they
protest too much is an indication that they do understand. These are
the crusaders who crusaded to destroy literary, economic and political
values, and made living in this culture as pointless as watching a
snow-covered TV screen. They would not have campaigned to destroy them
if they did not feel threatened by them.
Their truncated minds
and shriveled souls will not permit them to concede defeat. They see
the “relevance,” these programmed altruists and dispensers of others’
wealth, and join in a chorus of denials of the relevance. Many are
loathe to admit their malice. Others, while not projecting their
self-deception and hatred on Rand or on her admirers, confess their
utter ignorance of the importance of Atlas Shrugged. Randomly, and to
wit: “I look to Atlas Shrugged more for conveniently
totable
beach reading than an economic blueprint…. If only the people in her
novels had acted remotely like actual people, rather than [like] comic
book characters, I, too, would be rereading the thing now.”
This is the kind of “missing link” mentality that never
progressed
beyond the concretes under her nose. The novel is a novel, not a
blueprint for anything. It is an idealization of reality, and the
events in it are necessarily telescoped. Those events in the novel are
so grounded in reality -- and the heroes and villains are so concretely
real -- that it would be futile to explain to such a person that
“actual people” are moved by the same values or anti-values as are the
novel’s characters. The task of induction would be impossible to her.
One must ask, also: Whose fictional characters, in her mind, aren’t of
“comic book” caliber? John Updike’s? Joyce Carol Oates’s?
Then there is another kind of arrested mentality, writing about those
who may choose to go on strike:
“And of course none of these folks designed an
engine that
would have created basically free energy (and made global warming a
non-issue). In the individual case, ‘going Galt’ smacks of a kind of
self-aggrandizement in the same way that climate smuggery does.
Because, really, your marginal contribution doesn’t matter that
much….The point is that you are not John Galt. You don’t even know who
he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train
tracks.”
This is someone struggling to convince “you” that you
aren’t
important enough to make a difference, and himself that your quitting
in protest wouldn’t affect him much. The desperation is in the sneer.
This individual apparently has read the novel, and got nothing from it.
He is a minuscule, belittling Ellsworth Toohey. Well, Hillary Clinton
once said she’d read Ayn Rand’s novels in college, and that it was just
a “passing phase.” Look at the kind of contemptible person she grew to
be.
Other bloggers make equally irrelevant comments about Rand
and her novel. Trying to make sense of them is like trying to make
sense of a Picasso canvas. Just as interesting, however, are the kinds
of responses their comments elicited from their readers, ranging from
the malicious to the short-range to the certifiably dumb. To wit:
“Atlas Shrugged is a joke. A piece of
ridiculosity.”
“I wish they would take a John Galt….Please feel free to go on strike.
We would be better off without you.”
“Rand
falsely assumes these innovative genius[es] work in a vacuum and don’t
benefit from having a safe, civil society to work in.”
“Please show me anything that I can touch, or eat, or live in, or drive
that the ‘productive rich’ have made?”
Then there are the obvious Obama supporters, individuals
ready and willing to sacrifice and work for “the good of society.”
“It is not at all clear that we need to bribe
people with
promises of riches in order to get them to do useful work. If it turns
out to be necessary with today’s crop of masters of the universe, then
we’ll need to find a way to start over, once we have turned the spoiled
brats out of their unearned positions of power.”
“Please, go
Galt. Be my guest….Take that genius talent of yours right over to the
bus station at Applebee’s. I can’t wait to watch you scraping uneaten
peas into the garbage disposal. You and your genius Galt buddies Bernie
Madoff and Sir [Allen] Stanford.”
“The top tax rate will go up approximately 5%, and this makes you
decide to take your ball and go home? That seems silly to me.”
“One
of the characters [Hugh Akston, the philosopher of reason] in Atlas
Shrugged was working in a diner frying hamburgers when he encountered
Dagny Taggart. He was one of the ones who ‘shrugged.’ It was honest
work and he made a very good hamburger. If Malkin and [Rick] Santelli
and some others ‘go Galt,’ hopefully we can count on an increase in
hamburger quality across the nation.”
These are people who probably believe that the concept of
“unearned income” is a valid one and should be taxed and otherwise
penalized, because no observable physical labor is involved in the
rewards of risking investments in stocks and innovators and loans to
productive enterprises. Intellectual labor is as much an unreal concept
to them as it is to the IRS. Such labor is responsible for everything
that the one individual “can touch, or eat, or live in, or drive.”
And,
a number of these individuals view Bernard Madoff and Stanford as the
symbols of capitalism and freedom. One newscaster on ABC this morning
erroneously referred to Madoff as a “financier,” but then the news
media suffer from a similar truncated mentality. They don’t “get it”
that Obama, his appointees, and Congress are all guilty of the mother
of all Ponzi schemes.
Two or three respondents answered with defenses of Rand and the novel.
One promised to go on strike.
“I will cut back so that my hard-earned income is
not taken
by the government and redistributed to people who have not worked as
hard. I will not subsidize others.”
One point of this commentary is to reveal the scope of
hostility
that exists in our culture to individualism, capitalism, freedom, and
“the rich” -- and to the mind. Another is to prepare those who would
argue in defense of those things for the levels of ignorance and
species of malice they will encounter, not only in people they might
personally engage in argument, but in politicians, academics, and the
news media.
The thing to remember is that reason and reality
is on our side. Most of our opponents and enemies know it. They are not
the ones who need convincing or any kind of rational guidance. Beware
especially of the ones who claim it is your duty to convince them.
These creatures' minds are the truly truncated. Let reality be their
ultimate persuader.
Focus on those who show genuine interest in answers, and never mind the
fools.
Edward Cline is a novelist who has
written on the revolutionary war period. He is author of the Sparrowhawk
series of novels set in England and Virginia in the Revolutionary
period, the detective novel First Prize, the suspense novel
Whisper the Guns, and of numerous published articles, book reviews and
essays.
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