The Alarming Revival of Ayn Rand: The Right's Weirdest Idol of Them All
By Hal Crowther, Progressive Populist
Posted on July 18, 2011, Printed on July 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151674/the_alarming_revival_of_ayn_rand%
3A_the_right%27s_weirdest_idol_of_them_all
The Republican Party’s slapstick search for a leader would be
heartwarming and sidesplitting, but for the tragic knowledge that one
of these scrambling midgets will collect tens of millions of votes in
the presidential election of 2012. Never have so many amounted to so
little, talked so much rubbish, dreamed of an office so far above
their abilities. Blood pressures rose among party elders when Donald
Trump, marginally Republican and one of the greatest fools in the
solar system, momentarily tossed his hairpiece into the ring and
became the instant favorite.
The GOP dilemma — a golden opportunity to rule but nothing to say and
no one to say it — is so desperate that my instinct is to help them
sort it out. Could we make a start, at least, by dismissing
candidates who called for President Obama’s birth certificate or
raised the specter of Sharia law in America, followed briskly off the
stage by lunatics who dismiss global warming as a socialist plot?
That would leave plenty of unbalanced extremists still in the
running, yet reduce the stench of sheer evil and madness. The
“birther” and Sharia cults reek of cheesy talk-radio racism; climate-
change denial is a stranger faith yet, a political assault on basic
science that insults a ground squirrel’s intelligence and casually
threatens the survival of life on earth.
The party that produces birthers and global-warming deniers no doubt
harbors End-of-the-Worlders, too, Christians who packed their bags
for heaven with the senile prophet Harold Camping on May 21. Though
none of them, I suppose, would commit to the time and expense of a
presidential campaign just to preside over a nation of sinners
expiring in fire and pestilence. Leo Rangell, the prominent Freudian
analyst whose obituary is in this morning’s Times, once lamented that
the American public is “gullible or easily seduced, and susceptible
to leaders of questionable character.”
Dr. Rangell wrote that in 1980, long before gullibility became such
an epidemic that we began to doubt the value of our schools, before
media demagogues made a billion-dollar industry of manipulating our
most credulous citizens, before the Republican Party dedicated itself
to gathering most of them into its fold. Before Rush Limbaugh, before
Fox News, before the Tea Party.
“Finally, people’s stupidity will break your heart,” observed my
father, a small-town politician and a loyal Republican of the
moderate traditional strain that has been systematically exterminated
by the radical Right.
My father lived long enough to vote for George McGovern and against
Ronald Reagan, but the rhetoric GOP candidates churn out to charm
this Tea Party would sound extraterrestrial to most Republicans of
his generation.
The odious hypocrite Newt Gingrich, who considered himself a serious
presidential candidate until his entire staff abandoned him in
disgust, rests his appeal on his intellectual superiority to Sarah
Palin and Rick Perry — a distinction much like being a faster runner
than Dom DeLuise. In his obligatory pre-campaign book Gingrich claims
that Barack Obama, a cautious centrist if there ever was one, drives
a “secular-socialist machine” that “represents as great a threat to
America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”
Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Father Coughlin, move over. Newt is
just full of Shariah, among other things, and accuses Obama of
“Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior,” a blatant pitch for the racist vote
the Tea Party has re-energized. A colossal irony — demonstrating how
hopelessly divided America has become — is that the radical
philosopher Cornel West, a black Princeton professor, calls Obama “a
black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate
plutocrats.” This is not helpful of Dr. West, nor even responsible.
He and Newt Gingrich are equally useless if a calmer, more logical
and coherent political culture is what we’re after. But if I had to
say which of these two hostile portraits of our president is less
preposterous, I’m sure I’d choose West’s. Virtually all the valid
criticism of Barack Obama has come from the left.
When Tea-stained legislators gut environmental laws to protect
corporate profits, when they sneer at climate change while America
bakes in its bedrock like a big green casserole — when Republican
educational reform means classrooms with fewer teachers and more guns
— there’s a temptation for reasonable Americans to throw up their
hands and succumb to despair. Is it a death wish or a scheme to kill
the rest of us, when “conservatives” fight against clean air laws, or
legislate to place a loaded pistol in every yahoo’s holster? I’ve
reached the second half of my seventh decade, and I’ve never seen
such an intimidating swarm of fanatics and fools marching under one
banner. The election of a non-white president has brought out the
worst in the worst of us. But who guessed that there were so many, or
that their worst was so awful?
The late Albert Einstein, of my father’s persuasion if not of his
party, once wrote despairingly, “The tyranny of the ignoramuses is
insurmountable and assured for all time.” But the coalition that
poisons this struggling republic is an unnatural one, made up of rich
cynics who supply the money and poor ignoramuses who supply the
votes. They have nothing in common, except that the cynics will say
anything and the morons will believe it. There must be something,
optimists insist, that could drive a wedge between the exploiters and
the exploited — some irresistible revelation, some fraud or
contradiction so flagrant that the most obtuse voter could see how
callously and criminally he’s being used.
How about Ayn Rand? The latest Republican poster boy, congressman
Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, stole the media spotlight with a slash-to-the-
bone budget proposal that Fox News heralded as the Magna Carta of
fiscal responsibility in America. I lack the expertise to take on
Rep. Ryan’s budget digit-for-digit, but I place considerable
confidence in the opinion of the Times’ Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel
Prize for Economics in 2008. “The proposal wasn’t serious at all,”
Krugman wrote. “In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in
it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax
cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All
the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.”
That sounds about par for the current Republican course, with fresh
infusions of Tea Party belligerence and unreality. But what
frightened me most about Rep. Ryan was the report that he is an
avowed disciple of the writer/philosopher Ayn Rand, and has declared
in public that Rand is “the reason I got involved in public service.”
Good grief, she’s back. She died in 1982, but someone neglected to
drive a stake through her heart.
A passion for the prose and philosophy of Ayn Rand tells us a great
deal about an individual, none of it good. There are few surer signs
of a poor reader, a poor thinker and an unpleasant person than a well-
thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.
In 2005, Rand’s acolytes gathered in Washington for a symposium to
celebrate her 100th birthday — the occasion for Rep. Ryan’s
disturbing confession — and I admit I’d give anything to see the
seating chart. If there was some way to ban everyone in that room
from holding public office, we could probably turn the United States
of America back toward the generous light of reason.
She was to literature what Rod McKuen was to poetry, what Fabian was
to rock n’ roll, what Guru Maharaj Ji was to religion. Look them up.
Like them, she once enjoyed a huge audience of admirers. Unlike them,
she was never harmless and she’s enjoying an alarming revival.
Since Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, it has sold seven million
copies. It’s possibly the most polarizing book ever written. For
every Paul Ryan who finds it life-shaping, a dozen readers are
mystified and a dozen more appalled. Few actually finish the 1,200-
page novel, which ends with the mysterious Galt drawing a dollar sign
in the air with his finger. If you wade into this stuff up to your
ankles — the hokey melodrama, the backlit macro-characters posed like
Easter Island monoliths, the cruel and obvious message stamped on
every page—-you begin to fear that you can never wash it off.
At times her critics oversimplify Rand’s beliefs, which embody any
number of contradictions and opacities. But essentially she glorifies
the will and celebrates Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, the superman whose
blazing passage through the world need never be impeded by the
interests or opinions of mediocrities like you and me. It’s the same
string of arrogant assumptions that spawned the Master Race theories
of Herr Hitler: ego-deification, social Darwinism, arbitrary
stratification of human types. Adapted for capitalism, it becomes the
divine right to plunder — a license for those who own nearly
everything to take the rest, because they wish to, because they can.
Because the weak don’t matter. Let the big dogs feed. This repulsive
theology was the work of a fairly repulsive person.
For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of
her celebrity, you can’t improve on the “Ubermensch” chapter in
Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School.
Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the
narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-
smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her
audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to
avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-
infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as
the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black
manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who
had admired and invited her.
What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of
charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views
as disfiguring or disabling: a huge wen on the headmaster’s forehead,
the narrator’s running head cold, the war injury that emasculated
Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.
To the boy, she appears to be exactly the sort of merciless egotist
who might have designed a fascist philosophy that exalts power and
disparages altruism. Rand is wearing a gold pin in the shape of a
dollar sign. After meeting her, he can no longer read a word of The
Fountainhead, which as an adolescent romantic he had enjoyed.
This division of the human race into the elect few who are destiny’s
darlings and the “second-rate” multitudes above whom they soar—-this
Ubermensch nonsense—-is perilously thin ice on which to rest a
philosophy (Nietzsche, you recall, went hopelessly mad.)
Since there’s no agency that rates human beings the way we rate
bonds, the elect are always self-elected supermen and superwomen.
Super, says who?
If it’s supposed to be intellect as much as will that sets them above
us, I sense a critical problem. Whenever a person of superior
intelligence begins to comprehend the human condition, the first
fruits of his knowledge are humility and irony—-those two things Rand
and her heroes most spectacularly lack.
Personally, I never feel more superior than when I see someone
carrying a copy of Atlas Shrugged. What actually sets the self-styled
super race apart is an unrepressed infantile id, a raging “I want”
that defies socialization. These are damaged children, people of
arrested development drawn to an ugly philosophy that legitimizes
narcissism and socially unacceptable behavior. Donald Trump would be
a perfect example. For an apostle of self-willed happiness, the
goddess of greed led a troubled life, marked by depressions,
amphetamine addiction, messy love affairs and betrayals. But you
could say that she had a capacious mind, if not a healthy or an
orderly one.
She was well educated, she had actually read Aristotle and Nietzsche
before she hobbled them and hitched them to her wagon. Her unlikely
21st-century resurrection is the work of much smaller, often almost
invisible minds that cherry-pick the vast creaking structure of her
oeuvre for their own ends, just as they cherry-pick the Bible or The
Wealth of Nations.
If corporate feudalism is your dream for America, she’s the prophet
for you. Her naïve faith in capitalism and contempt for “the welfare
state” are just what the right-wing doctor ordered.
Much of the rest, alas, will never fly in Alabama. Pundits have been
delighted to note that the heroine of the new Republicans was a
pacifist who opposed the Vietnam War, a feminist who supported
abortion, an adulteress who preached free love, a bohemian who mocked
family life and child-bearing, an elitist who sneered at the common
man, and, after all her “nanny state” rhetoric, a recipient of Social
Security and Medicare and a late, sick convert to the benefits of
socialized medicine.
Worst of all, for tea-stained Christian Republicans, she was a
militant atheist. In Rand’s ideology religious faith was the most
abject form of weakness, a sniveling retreat from the hardheaded,
self-centered “objectivism” her heroes impose on the world. She not
only would have rejected Jesus and his gospels, she actually did—-
repeatedly. Christ’s message that the poor are blessed and the meek
will inherit the earth is antithetical to Rand’s belief that the poor
and meek are no more than mulch where the dreams of the mighty take
root.
So adamantly did she denounce the altruism and self-sacrifice at the
center of the Christian message, it’s no exaggeration to call her the
intellectual Antichrist.
It’s no great exaggeration to say that praising her is like spitting
in Christ’s face.
How do Paul Ryan, Ron and Rand Paul and company manage to pass off
this radical atheist, this subversive Russian Jew (born Elisa
Rosenbaum) as an iconic role model for Christian conservatives?
Apparently they don’t think they need to get into the details, not
with their particular constituency. Assuming that they know the
details themselves. The careless condescension of their leaders is
not yet a scandal to the tea-baggers of America’s unlettered hard
Right. But Ayn Rand seems like the biggest joke of all, one that
might yet blow up in the party’s face.
The plutocrats she worshiped are so few, the plebeians she scorned
are so many. The GOP’s little people can’t all be totally illiterate,
and Limbaugh and Glenn Beck actually urge them to read this woman’s
books. It’s in-your-face deception that reminds me of the old stage
villain, the silent-movie heavy with the waxed mustache, cackling
behind his cloak and inviting the audience to share the cruelty he’s
about to inflict on his innocent victims. It’s as if Wall Street is
surreptitiously giving the finger to Main Street Republicans,
laughing at the gullible recruits as they march to the polls to lower
corporate taxes and deregulate markets. Ayn Rand, indeed. She would
have applauded the big dogs’ ruthlessness but rolled her eyes at the
Christian-family rhetoric they’re obliged to use for bait.
She wasn’t one of them, of course; she certainly wasn’t one of us.
She was one of a kind, thank god. In her defense, you might argue
that her love affair with capitalism was rooted in a Russian Jew’s
horror of the totalitarian systems that devastated Europe in the 20th
century.
That offers her a gravitas she doesn’t share with ultra-light
Midwestern reactionaries like Paul Ryan or Michele Bachmann. But the
more Americans read her books, the better for liberals and the worse,
I think, for Republicans.
Her work illustrates conclusively what a few brave clergymen and a
few ink-stained relics like me have been saying for years to anyone
who would listen, and to Republicans who refuse to listen — that
Christianity and the wolverine capitalism of a John Galt are totally
incompatible systems, two mutually exclusive human possibilities.
They cancel each other out. Any political party that pretends to
integrate them is a party of liars, and doomed.
Hal Crowther’s most recent book is Gather at the River. Write him at
219 N. Churton St., Hillsborough, NC 27278.
© 2011 Progressive Populist All rights reserved.
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