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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsConservatives once ridiculed Ayn Rand
BY MICHAEL LIND
The growing influence on the American right of Ayn Rand, the libertarian rights answer to Scientologys novelist-philosopher L. Ron Hubbard, is a wonder to behold. When she died in 1982, Alissa Rosenbaum the original name of the Russian-born novelist was the leader of a marginal cult, the Objectivists, who had long been cast out of the mainstream American right. But the rise of Tea Party conservatism, fueled by white racial panic and zero-sum distributional conflicts in the Great Recession, has turned this minor, once-forgotten figure into an icon for a new generation of nerds who imagine themselves Nietzschean Ubermenschen oppressed by the totalitarian tyranny of the post office and the Social Security administration.
Rand-worshipers can be found in, among other places, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. At a 2005 gathering to honor her memory, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan declared, 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.
The late Gore Vidal would not have been surprised by the former Republican vice-presidential candidates choice of a patron saint. After all, it was Vidal who observed, in a 1961 article for Esquire:
Vidal might be dismissed as a biased leftist. But the late William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of post-1945 conservatism who engaged in a famous televised spat with Vidal during the 1968 Democratic convention, shared Vidals contempt for Ayn Rand. After her death in 1982, Buckley wrote in the New York Daily News: She was an eloquent and persuasive anti-statist, and if only she had left it at that, but no. She had to declare that God did not exist, that altruism was despicable, that only self-interest was good and noble. In 2003, Buckley described his encounter with Rands interminable propaganda novel Atlas Shrugged: I had to flog myself to read it.
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http://www.salon.com/2013/08/08/conservatives_once_ridiculed_ayn_rand/
d_r
(6,907 posts)because, you know, Ayn Rand's message was all about being in public service
kelliekat44
(7,759 posts)the President is moving so they can line up against him. Oh, BBO=before Barack Obama.
deutsey
(20,166 posts)A real dork, he was. Frequently during his lectures when he said something he apparently thought was funny, he'd pause, saying, "and, uh...and, uh..." like he was waiting for us all to stop laughing. The problem was, no one was laughing.
Had to read essays from "The Virtue of Selfishness."
MisterP
(23,730 posts)"the Commies" didn't work after Vietnam and the Church Committee told everyone about Mockingbird, so the Sagebrush Rebellion concocted the slogan "you're being taxed and regulated to death individually" as a way to strengthen the new neoliberal order
however, RL's roots are earlier, in Heinlein and other Cold-Warrior SF writers' paeans to cowboy capitalism IN SPACE; they came up with the "high frontier" in the early 80s--it even made it to the Heritage Foundation's newsletter! (together with "help Pol Pot's brave rebels"...)
Hydra
(14,459 posts)Even she grew out of it eventually. The Repubs love having a "religious" framework to justify being greedy assholes though- she's given them moral sanction to be the destroyers of society.
Ironic, considering that she was revenging herself endlessly on the people who stole her life from her...by encouraging people to steal the lives of others. Talk about staring into the abyss and having it stare back at you.