Conservatives Used to Mock Ayn Rand -- How Did She Become a Hero to Right-Wing Nerds Everywhere?

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/conservatives-used-mock-ayn-rand-how-did-she-become-hero-right-wing-nerds-everywhere



The growing influence on the American right of Ayn Rand, the libertarian right’s answer to Scientology’s 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 candidate’s choice of a patron saint. After all, it was Vidal who observed, in a 1961 article for Esquire:

She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the ‘welfare’ state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you’re dumb or incompetent that’s your lookout.



***where ever you are -- gore vidal -- i salute you

[MADem]

1. GV had a brilliant wit--he died just over a year ago, IIRC. nt

[demwing]

2. Confused by the L Ron Hubbard reference

I know the author isn't here, but does anyone care to elaborate? Is it just that Hubbard and Rand were both writers who spawned true "cult" followings? Or are there political messages in LRH's work?

Never read him (and have no desire to) but maybe someone who has can comment, please?

[Igel]

3. One isn't conservative or liberal in a vacuum.

One's only conservative or liberal in a context. Many liberals would be conservatives if I revised reality one way and put them into it. Many conservatives would suddenly be liberals if I revised reality a different way.

1940s and 1950s, most American conservatives were very religious and knew the basis of their beliefs. Government may have grown sharply, but nobody was seriously thinking it would become all that controlling. Individual rights were a given and group rights may be been buried in the system yet they also cross-cut Jim Crow.

People generally knew that capitalism was an economic system in which people set up businesses, workers produced, and consumers consumed. It was grass-roots or, if it got out of hand, would be pruned. Democracy was a political system and politics and economics didn't mix too much. But in addition to that there had to be an individual-level moral system to make democracy less of an intense power-grab and to blunt the economic hardship that those who lose in the capitalist system suffer.

Greed is good--it motivates people to produce, to create, to set up businesses and work their tails off. Greed is bad--it motivates people to steal, to oppress. Depends where the greed is located. Same for democracy. Democracy is good--unless it's 50% + 1 voting to institute slavery. Giving to help the poor is good--unless your family comes home to find that you've sold the house without asking them, then gave the money to the local food bank. Suddenly your "Christian love" is identical to "hate." Individual rights are good, too--unless they're confused with anomianism, then individual rights and licentiousness are the same. Context matters.

Even in the '60s individual rights were still on the upswing even as group rights were starting. Thing is, the legislation that produced group rights were deemed to be a short-term process, not the bean in Jack and the Beanstalk. It was assumed that this wouldn't lead to what people judged to be immorality.

Fifty years later Ayn Rand's a bit more appealing. The moral underpinnings that made capitalism work are largely gone. Democracy has become more ambush politics than a system of reasoned representation that it only ever was on its best days. Government has grown. Group rights in many cases trump individual rights even as individual rights trump culture.

Ayn Rand is still marginal. She's cited more in name and for a specific point or feature of her philosophy than the philosophy as a whole. Much like 99% of liberals and conservatives cite Jesus. They pick a few things they like about him, replace him with their partial views, and leave the rest up on the stake for the crows and vultures.

[Javaman]

4. Left wing nerds read fantacy. right wing nerds believe fantasy. nt

[MyshkinCommaPrince]

5. The Ayn Rand Institute?

Inexpensive mass market paperback copies of Rand's writings started being heavily pushed during the late 80s, IIRC. You could find a whole set at any of the bookstore chains which were most prevalent then. A lot of high school and college students apparently read them. A friend of mine gave me The Fountainhead to read and I took it as just a sort of long-winded drama about an artist defending his creative works. I guess I liked it well enough that I sought out more of her writings during a time of emotional vulnerability, when some long-winded, immersive fiction might be helpful. I was hooked on Rand's books (Collect them all!) for months afterwards, during a strange period when I was simultaneously obsessed with the life and works of John Lennon. Happily, I escaped. More of Lennon stuck with me than Rand.

If you're young, bookish, and not too critically intelligent, those books can hook you pretty easily. The books flatter the reader as one of the smart, special people, to whom (of course) the harsher ideas in the philosophy need not apply. They give one a potentially much-needed ego boost, they help one to critique religion, they impart a sense of rebellion against (parental, pseudo-parental, or societal) oppression, and they offer a simplistic four-color worldview which may appeal to young people still influenced by comic book-style thinking. I suspect many people have been ensnared by those cheap paperbacks, over the past couple of decades. And now they're beginning to reach the age where they may be running for elected office on the national scale. I think we're seeing a wave of Randroids, created in part by the easy availability of those writings 20-25 years ago.

[Blaspherian]

6. Atlas Shrugged

Crapfest of a book.