Ayn Rand's Perverted Worldview Will Destroy the GOP in the End

[KamaAina]

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/ayn-rands-perverted-worldview-will-destroy-gop-end

Republican legislators and candidates responding to President Obama’s recent executive measures on gun control have openly and willfully distorted the president’s stated policies and ambitions. Thus, when Paul Ryan says “the president has never respected the right to safe and legal gun ownership,” it’s not because his listening and reading comprehension are so poor that he took the following words from Obama’s speech to mean their diametric opposite:
Now, I want to be absolutely clear at the start—and I’ve said this over and over again, this also becomes routine, there is a ritual about this whole thing that I have to do—I believe in the Second Amendment. It’s there written on the paper. It guarantees a right to bear arms. No matter how many times people try to twist my words around—I taught constitutional law, I know a little about this—I get it. But I also believe that we can find ways to reduce gun violence consistent with the Second Amendment....

Ryan, like many politicians on both sides of the aisle, is being cynical. True, it’s particularly disconcerting when someone exercises that kind of cynicism in response to a president crying for the dead—the dead schoolchildren, the dead churchgoers, the dead on the streets of Chicago—and all other varieties of gun-murdered citizens—but Ryan and the Republicans are hardly our only detached cynics. They are, however, our most open and brazen ones, particularly on the issue of modest gun-control measures of the sort that—it’s a cliché at this point to state—a vast majority of Americans and Republicans support....

While I think this is true, I also think the cynical response to gun control is telling us something else about the state of conservative politics more broadly, something worth learning from. Between responses to gun violence and the rhetoric of the 2016 crop of Republican presidential candidates, it’s clear that cynicism is itself a prevailing conservative value, deeply important to the present iteration of conservative politics....

If you prod a little, it becomes clear that cynicism is not merely at the root, but at the surface of conservative politics and policy. The conservative notion of freedom itself has become cynical. It’s no longer the libertarian credo “your freedom to swing ends where my nose begins,” but “if you can get away with it, do it.” If you can get reelected while backing the interests of the gun lobby above those of 90 percent of Americans (and those of the roughly 30,000 a year who die from gun suicide and gun murder), do it. If you can get reelected by making it more difficult for poor, young or minority citizens to vote, do it. If you can increase profits by keeping wages so lowthat taxpayers have to pick up food and healthcare expenses of the working Americans you employ, do it. If you can “monetize” public education at the expense of the most socioeconomically disadvantaged children, do it. And if you can scapegoat an entire world religion in the process to take the heat off yourself, do it.

[HassleCat]

1. The appeal is individual exceptionalism, not just cynicism.

The former leads to the latter, of course, so I guess it boils down to cynicism in the end. Rand's writings instill in the reader the idea that, "I am one of the exceptional people. I am like Hank Reardon." There are so many people who believe they were destined for greatness, but were cheated by the government, by the system, by affirmative action, by bureaucrats, etc. They identify with Rand's protagonists and identify the primary cause of their troubles as the examples so relentlessly offered by Rand, the faceless, bureaucratic, repressive hand of government grown too large. Reagan was great at getting people to buy into this, and jining his attack on "gummit," as e called it.

[hifiguy]

2. Probably true. But it may well crater the country

before that point. And that is a problem.

[Katashi_itto]

3. Fuck the GOP and 3rd Way.