One of the all-time great quotes from the blogosphere

John Rogers, Ephemera 2009 (7) Kung Fu Monkey 03/19/2009:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Tags: ayn rand

Ryan and Ayn Randism mainstreamed

Tristero rightly observed when Romney announced Paul Ryanas his Vice Presidential pick, interpreting advice he once got from Dave Neiwert ("Two Distinct Ideologies?" Are You Kidding? Hulabaloo 08/11/2012):

The problem is that elevating extremism to the level of serious discussion tends to confer enormous status on bad ideas and that makes it more difficult to fight against them. It also tends to move the discourse towards treating the bad ideas as reasonable ones - the Overton Window concept, more or less.

The standard conventional wisdom about the 1964 election was that the Republican Party embraced radicalism with the Barry Goldwater nomination, and since then they've stayed away from it, having learned their lesson.

Now that the mainstream press operates so reliably with "scripts" cooked up in the Washington Beltway, they continue to recite the notion that the Republican Party is composed of reasonable conservatives. And so they largely ignore the most defining feature of mainstream politics, the cycle of radicalization in which the Republican Party is caught. With no end in sight.

Paul Krugman in Romney/Ryan: The Real Target describes how that feature works in the Ryan case:

Like Bush in 2000, Ryan has a completely undeserved reputation in the media as a bluff, honest guy, in Ryan's case supplemented by a reputation as a serious policy wonk. None of this has any basis in reality; Ryan’s much-touted plan, far from being a real solution, relies crucially on stuff that is just pulled out of thin air — huge revenue increases from closing unspecified loopholes, huge spending cuts achieved in ways not mentioned. ...

So whence comes the Ryan reputation? As I said in my last post, it’s because many commentators want to tell a story about US politics that makes them feel and look good — a story in which both parties are equally at fault in our national stalemate, and in which said commentators stand above the fray. This story requires that there be good, honest, technically savvy conservative politicians, so that you can point to these politicians and say how much you admire them, even if you disagree with some of their ideas; after all, unless you lavish praise on some conservatives, you don’t come across as nobly even-handed.

The trouble, of course, is that it's really really hard to find any actual conservative politicians who deserve that praise. [my emphasis]

Even-the-liberal Kevin Drum at Mother Jones plays this game in Programming Note: Ryan 2013 Is Not Ryan 2012 08/17/2012, scolding liberals for not, uh, pretending Ryan's plan to end Medicare isn't completely sensible, someway somehow. KJ does make some good observations sometime. But ever since he played this liberal troll game in the lead-up to the Iraq War, this stuff coming from him has really annoyed me. Even a catastrophe like the Iraq War didn't persuade him to clean up his act. Basically, he tries to pretend that Ryan is the "bluff, honest guy" of Beltway scripting that Krugman analyzes so well.

Here is the eminently respectable PBS Newshour bringing us Sleepy Mark Shields and National Reviewer Rich Lowry talking about Paul Ryan, Shields and Lowry on GOP Veep Choice Paul Ryan, Medicare 08/17/2012 (with transcript):

In reality, Ryan's selection as VP nominee (which formally happens at the Republican National Convention) is both a sign that Ayn Rand extremism is now respectable in the Republican Party and an furtherance of the radicalization process that made it so.

This is a nihilistic view, because Rand's philosophy that everyone should be sociopaths isn't a realistic view, even for a rightwing dictatorship. It completely rejects the entire view of a political community as a meaningful entity. As Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey wrote in Ephemera 2009 (7) 03/19/2009:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and [Ayn Rand's] Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

As George Lakoff warns in his "don't think of an elephant" example, even refuting a bad idea makes the audience think about the "framing" the bad idea employs. Lakoff makes a valuable point that the Democrats often try to use the Republicans' framing (e.g., gubment needs to tighten its belt) in a way that undercuts the Democrats' ability to build an alternative framing. But somebody also has to spend the time to understand the Republicans' ideologies, both nominal and real, and has to analyze and refute them in some way.

Although it's reflective of Rand's Sociopaths Rock! philosophy having been mainstreamed in the Republican Party, Ryan's prominence in national politics the last few years has helped produce some useful analysis of Randism, both the fantasy kind and the real existing versions.

The Atlas Society, a group of Rand admirers, provides a video and partial transcript of a speech Ryan gave to one of their meetings in Paul Ryan And Ayn Rand's Ideas: In The Hot Seat Again 04/30/2012, in which he references how he sees his own politics as reflecting Rand's outlook.

Digby and Alternet have been carrying lots of information on the Ayn Rand ideology the last few years: Digby, Randy Conservatives 10/06/2007; Bruce Levine, How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation Alternet 12/15/2011; Jan Frel, Paul Ryan's Biggest Influence: 10 Things You Should Know About the Lunatic Ayn Rand Alternet 08/12/2012

Think Progress carried two posts with the same title: Jeff Spross, [UPDATED] VIDEO: The Truth About GOP Hero Ayn Rand 04/18/2011 and Climate Guest Blogger, VIDEO: The truth about GOP hero Ayn Rand 04/24/2011

Mark Ames describes the development of Rand's thought in a post whose title indicates his, uh, lack of sympathy with it: Paul Ryan’s Guru Ayn Rand Worshipped a Serial Killer Who Kidnapped and Dismembered Little Girls The eXiled 08/12/2012.

Tags: 2012 election, ayn rand, paul ryan

Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and "vulgar Nietzscheanism"

In the previous post, I discussed a couple of articles on libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand (born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum), including Michael Prescott, Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman (2005) and Corey Robin, Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage As Truth -- Why Did America Buy It? 06/07/2010. His sketch is interesting for the biographical background he provides.

I wanted to follow up on Robin's discussion of the brand of "vulgar Nietzscheanism that has stalked the radical right ... since the early part of the twentieth century" is decent, focusing as he does on the aspects of this type of Nietzscheanism on Rand herself. But his discussion of Nietzsche doesn't distinguish well between the actual Nietzsche and "vulgar Nietzscheanism."

Despite these reservations, those two articles together give a worthwhile sketch of the dark side of Rand "libertarian" ideology.

Nietzsche himself didn't make a "journey back to antiquity, where he hoped to find a master-class morality untainted by the egalitarian values of the lower orders." He was a philologist by training, a specialist in Greek and Latin. He built his concept of "slave morality" on the ancient Greek usage, as in Homer, in which the aristocratic characters spoke of "good" not in terms of morality but in terms of what aristocrats did. What the common people did was "bad", not because it was morally evil but because it wasn't aristocratic.

Nietzsche argued that Judaism turned that notion on its head but also redefined them, so that they regarded what was aristocratic as not just "bad" but evil, morally damnable. He saw Judaism and, to an even greater extent, Christianity, as a product of the anti-aristocratic "slave morality." But, despite his extravagant language, he wasn't condemning that development, he was describing it - and with a great deal of perception. Robin seems to see Nietzsche as the prophet of conservative anti-religious sentiment. While Nietzsche rejected Christianity, though, he respected religion as a human force.

And he hoped to see humanity turn to a higher form of religion that affirmed life and human passions in a way he believed existing Christianity did not. He envisioned that higher form of religion as a return to the Dionysian religion of old.

Tags: ayn rand, nietzsche, radical right

Even I didn't realize Ayn Rand had been this weird

Dave Johnson has a good post on "Statism" and the Ayn Rand Cult Seeing the Forest 05/23/2010. He mentioned one thing about the far-right libertarian guru that hadn't registered with me before. I'm pretty sure I hadn't heard it before, because it probably would have registered.

Thriller writer Michael Prescott explains in Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman (2005). It seems that one of her early models for the ideal individualist was a particularly sadistic mass murderer, William Hickman. It's an ironically relevant twist to his story that Hickman used an insanity defense against the murder charges against him. (Prescott actually says Hickman was the first person in US history to attempt an insanity defense but I'm not sure that's the case.)

Corey Robin at Alternet has a long article devoted to the question, Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage As Truth -- Why Did America Buy It? 06/07/2010. His sketch is interesting for the biographical background he provides. It's a good piece, though I don't think he necessarily picked the best examples to show parallels between her thinking and Nazi ideology. It's true that the Nazis promoted notions of individual heroism and of life as an unending, dangerous struggle as an ideal. But these were trends in conservative thought that had taken a radical turn in Germany in the 1920s among advocates of what was known as the Conservative Revolution.

Those and other broad ideas from the Conservative Revolution thinkers and ideologues were picked up by the Nazis. But they gave them a particular application: struggle as struggle on behalf of the Master Race, heroism as embodied above all in the Führer (Leader), Adolf Hitler. After all, the praise of heroes long predated the 20th century, and only a very narrow type of the adulation of heroes became part of fascist/Nazi doctrine. Even leaving loons like Glenn Beck aside, there are way too many superficial characterizations of what fascism and Nazism were about. So if people are going to make comparison like Robin does between Rand's ideology and the Nazis', it's worth making some effort to be clear.

And on the mass murderer study ... It's not sinister in itself that Rand studied a notorious killer. She was a writer and was looking to make money with her writing in Hollywood. There are lots of reasons someone might want to study some aspect of the psychology of violence, most of them not related to glorification of homicide. But it's not entirely accidental that Rand found her notion of radical individualism reflected well in a violent psychotic, who had no healthy emotional connection to his fellow human beings and recognized not even the most basic social rules restraining people from destroying one another.

Her Roark character in The Fountainhead is anti-social to the extreme. One of the twisted things about that story is that he rapes the heroine early on, and she becomes completely committed to him because he raped her. The preferred reading of that story by Ayn Rand disciples sees that as an aspect of Roark's marvelous, admirable individualism. He comes off to me as a sadistic, destructive, hate-filled freak.

Tags: ayn rand, radical right