Why Is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?

[EdS]

What nonsense. Are you trying to suggest that there was one original thought emanating from her deeply disturbed mind? You actually believe this is an original thought? Really? Come on.

C'mon, NB, tell us how you really feel!!!

[Narrow Back]

Hear hear.

She was a pro choice atheist and an elitist. She also had a strange obsession with the killer William Hickman, which I found unsettling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Edward_Hickman

When I speak to Rand followers I always ask if they have read Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner. I have yet to hear one say yes. These two philosophers had a very powerful impact on Rand. As someone who has studied these two men I see Rand as a very poor reader, as bad a reader as she was a writer. I personally think her writing style was disjointed and verbose.

If Rand is what a "conservative" is, count me out.

Quite right. Rand's elitism is impossible to understand without reference to Nietzsche. It is not a conservative elitism (belief in the principles of heredity, hierarchy, and aristocracy), nor is it a liberal elitism (a form of fashion snobbery, with the fashions being those of progressive "intellectual" fads rather than clothing). It is not even Nietzsche's elitism - just a bad caricature of it.

Agreed.

[Narrow Back]

What nonsense. Are you trying to suggest that there was one original thought emanating from her deeply disturbed mind? You actually believe this is an original thought? Really? Come on.

C'mon, NB, tell us how you really feel!!!

I've never been good with the spoonful of sugar approach.

[Charles J. White]

Ayn Rand promoted free market capitalism, free market capitalism is good, it represents individual voluntary consent and legal contract. When consent is removed from the equation, one can't be happy. Objectivism understands capitalism, and consent, so it understands happiness. Man has no reason to suffer if he has the abilities and tools with his mind to succeed. The world is as it is around us, and to pretend otherwise is irrational.

[Gerry T. Neal]

Ayn Rand promoted free market capitalism, free market capitalism is good, it represents individual voluntary consent and legal contract. When consent is removed from the equation, one can't be happy. Objectivism understands capitalism, and consent, so it understands happiness. Man has no reason to suffer if he has the abilities and tools with his mind to succeed. The world is as it is around us, and to pretend otherwise is irrational.

Liberalism, which includes free market capitalism, is only good when you compare and contrast it to its modern competitor, collectivist socialism and especially the totalitarian form of socialism, Communism. If our choices are restricted to the two, liberalism is the better choice by far.

Historically, however, liberalism, including free market capitalism, has been a destructive force that tears families apart, shatters community bonds, uproots people, and plunges them helpless and isolated into modern mass society, where they are numbers without names interacting with institutions without faces.

[Ogopogo]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-flynn/rand-vs-ryan/

Rand vs. Ryan

Posted by Daniel Flynn Bio ↓ on Aug 17th, 2012 Comments ↓
20
Print This Post Print This Post

A A A

Mitt Romney named Ayn Rand as his runningmate last weekend—at least that’s the way numerous scribes see it.

In a piece called “Ayn Rand Joins the Ticket,” the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer argues that by naming Paul Ryan his runningmate, Romney adds “the ghostly presence of the controversial Russian Émigré philosopher and writer Ayn Rand.” “Ryan’s devotion to Rand is yet another Republican insult and injury to classic American ideas of fairness, squareness, and civic-mindedness,” writes Jamie Stiehm at USNews.com. “In fact, the Ryan-authored House Republican budget document, which cuts the heart out of our body politic, ripping social services and Medicare to shreds, is a pledge to the Rand coat of arms, standing against people who need a little help from other people.” The Christian Science Monitor’s Husna Haq calls Ryan “an ardent Randian.”

But “an ardent Randian” fakes a Russian accent, chain smokes Tareytons, and extols the Partridge Family’s “C’mon, Get Happy” while condemning Beethoven. Even Rand recognized the fanaticism she inspired. “Do not underestimate the admirers of The Fountainhead,” she told a Warner Bros. producer. “[They are] becoming a kind of cult.” Paul Ryan’s chiseled physique may recall the shirtless Howard Roark smashing rocks in a quarry. But for ways better and worse, Mitt Romney’s runningmate is no Randian.

Certainly Ryan told the Atlas Society in 2005 that “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.” He has also boasted of requiring his interns to read Rand’s magnum opus, 1957’s Atlas Shrugged, and of giving the dystopian book as a Christmas present (Rand, incidentally, was an enthusiast of neither Christ nor handouts). But the Wisconsin representative also supported both the banker and automotive bailouts, and consistently casts pro-life votes in Congress. The puppeteer disapproving of the marionette’s words and deeds suggests that she’s not the one pulling the strings.

Consider the differences between Ryan’s reaction, and Rand’s anticipation, of President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” scolding of businessmen. “If you have a small business—you did build that,” Ryan remarked at his coming-out party last weekend. “We Americans look at one another’s success with pride, not resentment, because we know, as more Americans work hard, take risks, and succeed, more people will prosper, our communities will benefit, and individual lives will be improved and uplifted.” Rand, by way of comparison, writes in The Fountainhead, that “Roger Enright had started life as a coal miner in Pennsylvania. On his way to the millions he now owned, no one had ever helped him.” The congressman’s positive remarks mesh with common sense. The novelist’s depiction of a social-atom businessman seems as divorced from reality as President Obama’s flipside fantasy of entrepreneurs as creations of the state.

What the Wisconsin congressman and the Russian refugee share in common is the contempt of the Left. Where they differ is in their reactions to that venom.

Rand saw the Left at work firsthand in St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution, in Hollywood during the Red Decade, and in the Manhattan publishing world. She liked neither what she saw nor what she experienced. The Left confiscated her family’s business in Russia and blocked her books in America. She didn’t turn the other cheek.

She lampooned leftists as caricature characters in her books. As buffoonish as Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt is heroic, the liberals of Rand’s fiction are designed to infuriate more than convert the liberals to Rand’s reality. “When everybody agrees,” James Taggart shrieks in Atlas Shrugged, “when people are unanimous, how does one man dare to dissent? By what right?” Ellsworth Toohey professes in The Fountainhead, “A man braver than his brothers insults them by implication. Let us aspire to no virtue which cannot be shared.” “Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them,” Dr. Ferris tells Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. “One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s in there in that for anyone?”

Whereas Ayn Rand puts down, Paul Ryan persuades. Bill Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles called Ryan “amazing” last year. “He is honest. He is straightforward. He is sincere. And the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, serious budget.” Whereas Rand scowls, Ryan smiles. The district Ryan represents hasn’t voted Republican in a presidential race since Ronald Reagan’s reelection. Yet, he has never in his seven congressional races won with less than 57 percent of the vote.

Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand’s substantive differences involve religion, ethics, economics, policy, and much else. But the greatest divide between the pair is stylistic rather than substantive. One who can’t distinguish the smiling and sunny politician from the dark and dour novelist lives in fiction as much as John Galt does.

[Ogopogo]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087 ... TopOpinion

Updated August 20, 2012, 4:41 p.m. ET

Randier Than Thou
The left's weirdest attack on Paul Ryan.

By JAMES TARANTO

President Obama plans "an audacious effort to paint former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and the majority GOP as radical libertarians that have abandoned mainstream American politics," the Daily Caller reported back in June. Although the president himself didn't use the L-word, he did accuse Republicans of having "gone from a preference for market-based solutions to an absolutism . . . a belief that all regulations are bad; that government has no role to play."

Obama singled out Romney's future running mate for criticism: "If you look at Paul Ryan's budget or you look at Governor Romney's proposals, what they're talking about is something that is fundamentally different from our experience."

It's possible that the president intended his Friday the 13th speech--"you didn't build that"--to be a part of this effort. Perhaps he meant merely to imply that his opponents were crazy enough to deny that man is a social animal or that some degree of government is necessary. If so, he failed. Instead of a straw man, the president set up a reductio ad absurdum. It was he who came across as a radical, a collectivist who contemns individual achievement or denies it altogether.

Nonetheless, Obama's caricature of Republicans is widely accepted on the left, and it accounts for much of the joy the president's supporters expressed in the immediate aftermath of Romney's announcement that Ryan would be his running mate.

Ryan's "introduction to the American people . . . will involve explaining who Ayn Rand is," wrote Newsweek's Michael Tomasky, who called the Ryan pick "stunning" and "terrible." New York magazine's John Heilemann reported that he had spoken with Obama aide David Axelrod the day before the announcement, and "I couldn't help but detect a gleeful flicker in his eyes when we talked about the fervor on the right for the congressman from Wisconsin." The New Republic's Noam Scheiber theorized that Romney had resigned himself to losing the election and chosen Ryan merely "to shift blame for the loss onto the party's conservative wing."

Scheiber's hypothesis would be strange under any circumstances but is utterly bizarre given the closeness of this year's polls. Still, it's understandable that those who buy into the "radical libertarian" caricature would see the Ryan selection as an opportunity. As The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza noted in a profile published two weeks before the Romney announcement, Ryan "claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand":

After reading "Atlas Shrugged," he told me, "I said, 'Wow, I've got to check out this economics thing.' What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government." He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. "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," he told the group. "The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism."

Ryan's acknowledgment of intellectual debt to Rand would seem to make him an easy target for the "radical libertarian" caricature. Rand's philosophy, known as Objectivism, fits the description, although she herself scorned "the 'libertarian' hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism."

Ayn Rand in 1962

To be sure, Ryan is no Objectivist. Lizza notes that "to me he was careful to point out that he rejects Rand's atheism." Writing at the Daily Caller, Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, argues that "even on economic issues," the differences between Rand and Ryan are "stark." Whereas Rand "saw entitlements as a violation of individual rights on a massive scale" and "held that the whole entitlement state should be phased out and ultimately abolished," Ryan's goal "is not to end the entitlement state but to save it. . . . Although Ryan regularly invokes individual rights, he does not stand by them consistently."

Such nuances notwithstanding, it would be unrealistic to expect Ryan's political opponents to forgo the "radical libertarian" line of attack. Yet in one of the weirdest developments of the campaign so far, some of them are doing just that. At least two leftist publications have published articles criticizing Ryan for not being enough of a Randian.

The first is the New York Times. According to an op-ed by Stanford historian Jennifer Burns, author of "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right," Rand "would have denounced Mr. Ryan as she denounced Ronald Reagan, for trying 'to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics' ":

Mr. Ryan's selection as Mr. Romney's running mate is the kind of stinging rebuke of the welfare state that Rand hoped to see during her lifetime. But Mr. Ryan is also what she called "a conservative in the worst sense of the word." As a woman in a man's world, a Jewish atheist in a country dominated by Christianity and a refugee from a totalitarian state, Rand knew it was not enough to promote individual freedom in the economic realm alone. If Mr. Ryan becomes the next vice president, it wouldn't be her dream come true, but her nightmare.

The Nation's Ben Adler complains that "Ryan does not share any of Rand's commitments to freedom, other than the freedom to be selfish." He offers a bulleted list of issues on which Ryan purportedly disagrees with Rand, but his source, the ACLU, is far from Objectivist.

On only one of these topics, abortion, does Ryan clearly disagree with Rand. She defended the practice with characteristic bluntness, as quoted in the Ayn Rand Lexicon: "A piece of protoplasm has no rights--and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable."

Adler's other three issues are immigration, gay rights and voting rights. "Libertarians believe in open borders, but Paul Ryan doesn't," Adler asserts. Well, some libertarians believe in open borders. Ron Paul, for one, does not. What about Rand? She did not express a view on the subject, at least as far as we can tell from searching the lexicon. Its editor, Harry Binswanger, published an essay in 2010 endorsing open immigration, but his two supporting quotes from Rand are highly abstract and do not specifically address immigration.

Rand does not seem to have given much thought to the question of homosexuality, much less same-sex marriage and gays in the military, the specific questions on which Adler posits a Rand-Ryan conflict. That's hardly surprising. She died in 1982, years before almost anyone had thought about these matters.

Adler's lamest suggestion is that Rand would have disagreed with Ryan's support for voter ID requirements. The lexicon entry for "Voting" shows Rand's concerns to have been entirely substantive. She wrote in the 1970s: "The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system--and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny."

However tendentious Adler's arguments, it's astonishing that the left is attacking Ryan for being insufficiently Randian. It's as if conservatives were criticizing Obama for failing to live up to the ideals of Karl Marx or Jeremiah Wright. What accounts for this turnabout?

In an editorial savoring "the irony of the New York Times complaining that Paul Ryan is an unworthy disciple of Ayn Rand," the New York Sun quotes a 1997 article by the Times's David Brooks: "Many people remember their youthful passion for Ayn Rand the way they remember teen-age make-out parties. It seemed daring at the time, but now the memory of it just makes you feel queasy."

Few Americans, and no political officeholders that we know of, describe themselves as Objectivists. But Ryan is not at all unusual in having read Rand as a young man, been influenced by her, yet rejected some of her ideas. Her individualism might have been too extreme for most Americans, or at least most Americans over 30.

But even some on the left seem to be realizing that individualism, not collectivism, is at the heart of the American creed. In the final weeks of the campaign, it will be interesting to see whether that dawns on Barack Obama.

[Ogopogo]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/onkar-gha ... 66189.html

Onkar Ghate

Senior fellow and vice president of intellectual leadership, The Ayn Rand Institute
GET UPDATES FROM Onkar Ghate

Like
11
A Liberal Ayn Rand?
Posted: 11/02/2012 2:23 pm

It's no secret that the right is awash in Ayn Rand. Tea Partiers carry signs like "Who is John Galt?" and, astonishing for a novel published 55 years ago, sales of Atlas Shrugged topped 445,000 last year.

All of this has prompted researchers like Yale historian Beverly Gage to wonder, "Why is there no liberal Ayn Rand?" Good question. Liberals today, Gage observes, have no long-term goals or vision, no big ideas, no canon.

Here's a radical thought. Instead of liberals dismissing Rand's appeal to the American spirit of individualism and independence, as President Obama recently did in his Rolling Stone interview, why don't liberals make Rand part of a new canon? Why let conservatives monopolize her?

Rand herself I suspect would have welcomed this. In a talk in Boston in 1961, she lamented the fact that both liberals and conservatives were ideologically bankrupt, with too many liberals turning sympathetically to unlimited government and too many conservatives turning back to the Middle Ages. She was seeking to address, she said, "the 'non-totalitarian liberals' and the 'non-traditional conservatives'" in the audience.

Her message that night was the need for a principled, uncompromising fight for a moral ideal she thought long abandoned by both sides, the rights of the individual. This means life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness: your moral right to follow your own reasoned judgment in earning your way in the world and achieving your happiness.

Religious conservatives like Paul Ryan have to distance themselves from Rand's philosophy. Theirs is an inconsistent position. Ryan, for instance, wants to be seen as an advocate of individual rights while simultaneously making a mockery of a woman's right to the pursuit of happiness by proposing to force her to bring a pregnancy to term even in the case of rape.

Rand rejects such medievalism. Precisely because raising a child is a personal and immense undertaking, a woman must have the freedom to judge whether and when to have children. To equate an embryo with a human being, a potential with the actual, and then to declare the willful ending of a pregnancy murder, is to abandon reason and science in favor of mystical Church dogmas. No government, Rand argued, should have the power to dictate to a woman in such matters; it's her life and her decision.

The same principle -- the individual's moral right to his own life -- put Rand on the side of other supposedly liberal causes: she was a staunch defender of free speech and immigration and a staunch opponent of racism. But this very principle led Rand to reject what too many liberal-leaning people seemingly dare not even question: the modern regulatory-welfare state.

What in the end is the regulatory-welfare state but a massive and growing attempt to override our reasoned choices and decisions: to dictate to us whose permission we must obtain to drive a taxi or serve alcohol in a restaurant, what questions we're allowed to ask in a job interview, whose health care we must pay for and in what way, how much we must "save" for retirement (which the government then proceeds to spend), and on and on and on.

Take the case of but one regulatory agency, the FDA. The FDA wasn't created to outlaw fraud, which was already illegal. It exists to tell us which drugs we can buy, companies which drugs they can sell, how those drugs must be tested and how manufactured. What if people rationally disagree with the government's dictates? What if a company thinks it has developed a better way of testing for efficacy or an unconventional but superior manufacturing process? What if a patient is willing to risk known and even unknown side effects because of the unusual severity of his disease? If the decision about abortion should be left to a woman (in consultation with her doctor), why shouldn't these important decisions be solely between the individuals involved? Because they are economic in nature, and therefore subject to majority vote?

This is precisely one issue on which Rand challenges modern liberals: whether it's consistent to advocate an individual's intellectual and personal liberty while denying him economic liberty.

It wasn't always so. Liberals in the nineteenth century were champions of science and at the forefront of abolishing slavery and securing a woman's individual rights. But they were also champions of private property, free trade and economic liberty. It is this combination that produced the individual's unprecedented progress in that century. Modern liberals, however, abandoned the right to private property in favor of various socialistic visions, which have since faded with awareness of what socialism and communism actually wrought. The result is what Gage notes: modern liberals bereft of an ideal.

Any liberal-leaning person today who seeks long-term goals and a new vision, but will not touch the political right because of conservatives' anti-evolution, anti-immigration, anti-abortion platforms, would do well to remember nineteenth-century liberalism. Perhaps the two alternatives confronting us, a government with virtually unlimited power to dictate our personal lives or our economic lives, are both defective.

For anyone willing to explore this possibility, I can think of no better place to start than with Ayn Rand.