 “If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world
on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down
his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still
trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength,
and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon
his shoulders - What would you tell him?"
I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"
To shrug.” - Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Donald Trump is what happens when the Republican Party gets into
power and lets out a mighty shrug. And Gym Jordan, Matt Gaetz,
and Marjorie Taylor Greene are the farcical results of a
political ideology that asserted what Ayn Rand described in 1957
as a “new code of ethics: the morality of rational
self-interest”. This idea was embraced by both Libertarians and
Conservatives, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. Rand’s
celebration of America’s “winners” and her contempt for its
“losers” is at the heart of our current hyper-polarized politics
– and it is, most notably, at the center of Donald Trump’s
rapacious heart.
Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House from 2015-2019, so
admired Ayn Rand’s philosophy of “Objectivism” that he became
famous for giving new members of his staff a copy of Atlas
Shrugged. His puerile doctrine of the “makers and the takers”
can be considered pure tincture of Ayn Rand, and her influence
within the Republican Party can be seen today in its callous
indifference to the sufferings of immigrants, the poor, and
disenfranchised minorities. It is Herbert Spencer’s late 19th
century, “social Darwinism” but without even a whiff of science.
It is Sir Frances Galton’s “eugenics”, embraced in America in
the early 20th Century when 32 U.S. states enacted laws that
justified forced sterilization of more than 64,000 Americans -
including immigrants, minorities, unmarried mothers, and the
mentally ill.
This history should sound chillingly familiar to all Americans
today. Dick Cheney’s ruthlessness was not new, and Alan
Greenspan’s economics was not new, but they led directly to the
new class of robber barons that crafted the political and
economic doublespeak of the Reagan years, and they did so with
the usual air of fake intellectualism designed to conceal their
bad behavior and execrable policy.
Greenspan, Cheney, and the Republican murder of crows of the
1970s gave us Reaganomics in the 1980s. Reagan gave us the
risible fig leaf of “trickle down economics”, coupled with the
naked racism of his administration’s “welfare queen” propaganda.
Newt Gingrich gave us the “contract for America” in the 1990s –
now better known as “the contract on America”. And as the last
twenty years have unfolded, the Randian philosophy of
anti-government policy is best exemplified by the emergence of
the Tea Party in 2009, which espouses dramatically reducing size
of government, deregulation with no federal oversight, reducing
government spending, lowering the national debt ( when
convenient) and the opposition to tax increases.
These doublespeak policies of the American Right often
masquerade as populist ideology, but they are more accurately
described as “political astroturfing” – the use of fake
grassroots efforts to influence public opinion, usually funded
by corporations and political parties, in order to create the
appearance of public consensus for a policy where none exists.
Last week’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of a web designer
claiming her First Amendment rights had been violated, sought an
injunction to prevent the State of Colorado from forcing her to
create wedding websites for LGBTQ unions. This case couldn’t be
a better example of political astroturfing. This fake case,
chosen over ~7,000 other cases waiting to be heard by the
Supreme Court, demonstrates the dishonest tactics of the
Republican Party and its packed court, because although the suit
implied broad support for the web designer – the web designer
had not actually been asked to create a website for an LGBTQ
customer in the first place.
As Atlas has continued to shrug over the last 70 years,
according to CFRA Research, “ten of the eleven U.S. recessions
between 1953 and 2020 began under Republican presidents… and
since 1945, the S&P 500 has averaged an annual gain of 11.2%
during years when Democrats controlled the White House,
according to CFRA Research. That’s well ahead of the 6.9%
average gain under Republicans.” Makers and takers – my arse.
But when The Library of Congress polled readers in 1991 as to
what book they believed had influenced them the most, Atlas
Shrugged finished second, only behind the Bible.
Although Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s other books and lectures were
not widely embraced by scholars and elite institutions at the
time, her ideas have persisted in American culture, starting
with the crop of Republicans within the Nixon administration.
And now, 7 decades later, the shallowness of Rand’s type of
reductionist logic, and its celebration of laissez-faire
capitalism has seeped into our American culture to such an
extent that the GOP now venerates pirates like Donald Trump,
river-rats like Rudy Giuliani, and weirdly preppy mustache
twirlers like Tucker Carlson.
Last week’s series of Supreme Court rulings demonstrate among
its conservative justices, nothing, if not a thoroughly embedded
Randian indifference to the rights of women, minorities, and
LGBTQ citizens. Their rulings telegraph a sociopathic lack of
empathy and compassion for other human beings, as they seek to
clear the way for the unregulated corruption that their personal
ideology relies upon. Justice Clarence Thomas is a well-known
Randian, and given the previous rulings of the Roberts Court, it
is reasonable to assume that all the Conservative Supreme Court
Justices have second homes in Ayn Rand’s, "Galt’s Gulch", where
the motto is: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will
never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to
live for mine”. - Ayn Rand, 1957
“If civilization is to survive, it is the altruist morality that
men have to reject.” The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, 1964
When Atlas Shrugs, America loses, as the engine of America’s
prosperity scatters into the shards of a “thousand points of
light”. Chronic tax cuts for the wealthy, ceaseless attempts to
eliminate all entitlement programs, and the advanced degree of
corruption among the GOP has now made the Republican Party a big
tent for sociopaths.
In Ayn Rand’s famous speech, John Galt, the hero of Atlas
Shrugged says:
“In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all
those evils, which you held as the cause of your plight.
You have sacrificed justice to mercy.
You have sacrificed independence to unity.
You have sacrificed reason to faith.
You have sacrificed wealth to need.
You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial.
You have sacrificed happiness to duty.” - Atlas Shrugged, Ayn
Rand, 1957
The irony of Ayn Rand and her many books and lectures - and of
today’s Republican Party – is that at the end of her life, Rand,
herself, sought the protection of the social safety nets of
Social Security and Medicare, both programs that came out of the
Progressive era of FDR’s New Deal. The very programs that the
Republican Party has sought to dismantle for the last 20 years.
We could simply call Republicans greedy, and we’d be correct. We
could call them craven and venal, and we’d be correct. But it is
about time that we call them what decent society should see them
as: Sociopaths. |
