Have you ever read the book, "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand? Well, whether you have or not, let's first get something out of the way: the book is an epic glorification of industrial capitalism, and a searing, neigh-slanderous critique of socialist systems (which, to be fair, weren't working out so well in Russia at the time when Ayn Rand left it for the United States.)
But even though I am a socialist politically, I like this book anyway. In fact, I like it so much that I routinely lend it to friends who haven't read it yet. Why? Because another picture "Atlas Shrugged" paints is the picture of a government that is failing under the weight of its own stupidity and corruption. Remarkably, this picture looks an AWFUL LOT like our current political situation. If you want to know how, make the jump:
1. Leadership basing critical national decisions on ideology rather than reason.
This includes such lovely items as Bush's tax cuts for the extremely wealthy while driving the country into massive debt with his war effort. Any eight-year-old could tell you that the math here doesn't add up, and that you can't spend more money than you have to begin with. This also includes the notion of "pre-emptively" going to war. The notion that we could avoid a bloody conflict by STARTING A BLOODY CONFLICT with another nation is so devoid of any semblance of reason that it almost goes beyond Ayn Rand's depiction of denial of reality in the service of ideology, and totters off into the deep end of Orwellian double-think.
2. Leadership passing the blame, essentially saying, "it's not my fault! No-one can blame me!"
This phrase comes out of the mouth of leadership characters repeatedly in "Atlas Shrugged". (Next thing you know, Bush&co will be throwing their hands in the air and asking, "Who is John Galt?") The blame-passing of the current administration is legendary. Our President has only once EVER "publicly accepted responsibility" for any of his many egregious mistakes, and only then after it was so obvious that he was wrong that even the conservative-owned media was criticizing him. The "acceptance of responsibility" took place in a speech in which he addressed the nation about the disaster of hurricane Katrina, and it was offered as a platitude, throwing a bone to his critics in order to distract them. Nowhere in this "acceptance of responsibility" was there any talk of accountability-- which would include consequences for the President for the mistakes he admitted being responsible for, consequences like impeachment, or resignation. Meanwhile, during the Katrina disaster, Bush's cronies were busily passing the blame-buck onto whoever they could get it to stick too-- Brownie, FEMA, the Mayor of New Orleans, etc. etc.
3. Leadership being "Ignore-ant", but claiming they are "Ignorant" instead.
A variation on the pass-the-blame theme, Bush has repeatedly claimed that he was "misinformed" or "badly advised" or that there was a "failure of intelligence" that prevented him from having all the facts necessary to make the right decisions. Time and time again, this has proved to be utterly false, as witnesses and advisors and panels and FEMA think-tank personnel (Hurricane Pam) have stepped forward and said, "actually, we thought of that years ago, and we wrote reports, and we advised the President, and he did nothing." The mindset of the current administration is very similar to that in "Atlas Shrugged"-- it is deliberately "ignore-ant". It uses the tactic of ignoring to deal with situations. This tactic requires our leadership to go out of their way to ignore every piece of advice that contradicts their world-view, to discredit every dissenting opinion, to alienate and refuse to listen to anyone with brains who they might still be able to call on to help them, and to instead surround themselves with brown-nosing sycophants who will tell them only what they want to hear.
4. The Use of Catastrophe and Lies to Justify Pre-Planned Political Maneuvers.
The wildest tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theory out there now is that Bush somehow knew about 9/11 in advance, and somehow aided the terrorists, because he planned to use their attacks as justification for the war he wanted to wage in Iraq. If this were true, it would be much like the government-staged riot in the steel mills described in "Atlas Shrugged", in which people were killed so that the government could justify its plans to seize control of private steel-making corporations by lying and saying that the industrialists could not keep control of the mills. But even if, as most people believe is more probable, Bush did not participate in staging 9/11, he has clearly made use of this strategy. There is reason to think that Bush's desire to go to war with Iraq long predated the 9/11 catastrophe, for example, his quote about Saddam as being the man who tried to kill his father. Since 9/11, Bush has repeatedly attempted to link the catastrophe to the need for the war in Iraq in the minds of the American people, even though to date, no credible proof exists to link the two. There has been no sign of Osama Bin Laden in Iraq, no indications the Iraqi government participated in the planning of the attacks. The 9/11 terrorists did not come from Iraq: they were mostly Saudi Arabian, trained in Afghanistan. And let us also not forget the weapons of mass destruction which were never found (which we knew all along were unlikely to even exist) and the supposed uranium-sale documents (which were found, before the State of the Union address where they were given as a reason to go to war, to be a forgery).
5. Rampant Corruption, Favoritism, Nepotism, and "Pull".
Even though Ayn Rand wrote as though "Pull" was a form of corruption unique to the socialist system, we can clearly see this type of nepotistic corruption in the no-bid contracts routinely fed to Haliburton, and in Grover Norquist's Wednesday Meetings, where the elite of the Neoconservatives meet to discuss, not how to best face off against liberal opposition, but how to insure compliance and support within the Republican Party for everything the Far-Right has on its agenda. Those who have "Pull" with inner-circle elites can make a grab for our nation's resources and line their own pockets with impunity. While the wealth is concentrated into the hands of the few favorites of the Neocons, the rest of the nation grows increasingly poorer and more destitute.
6. The Failure of Critical Infrastructure.
Much like in "Atlas Shrugged", key parts of the American infrastructure have begun to fail that will have wide-reaching impacts on our economy. The most crucial example are the oil-refining capabilities lost to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which will inevitably cause fuel shortages and result in lost businesses and livelihoods. The release of oil from the Oil Reserves will not alleviate this problem, without enough refining facilities to refine it into gasoline. As in "Atlas Shrugged", alternative energy sources that could be harnessed (like Galt's motor in the book and alternative energy sources like solar, wind, corn oil, hydrogen, etc. in real life) are not going to be harnessed. This is not because anyone is actively attempting to steal away the brainpower of the world, like in Rand's novel-- but rather because Big Oil has the current administration in its pocket, stifling innovation and preventing reformers from taking steps to fund progressive solutions. Without innovation, the infrastructure will undoubtedly continue to decline, and fuel shortages and infrastructure decay will worsen.
7. Patriotism Defined as Non-Opposition.
In Ayn Rand's novel, "opposition" to government actions becomes the definition of "treason". Any dissent to the government's increasingly corrupt and ineffective remedies to the state of national crisis is publicly denounced in the media as "unpatriotic" and "divisive". Certainly this is in evidence in our current media discussions of the Iraq War, and in discussions of the Patriot Act and the War in Afghanistan. Cindy Sheehan has been called "unpatriotic" for her protests against the war, and denounced by the Right. Increasingly, Americans have lost sight of the fact that dissent is actually VERY patriotic, and a healthy sphere of public debate is vital to maintaining our democracy. Instead, serious critique of the current administration causes its loyalists to cry that the critics are unpatriotic and disloyal to their nation and the service-men and -women risking their lives in the wars.
8. Increased Government Intrusion into the Private Lives of Citizens.
In "Atlas Shrugged", this came in the form of government directives forbidding citizens to take such actions as quitting their jobs or shutting down their companies. In Ayn Rand's vision, governmental limits on freedoms were hard to enforce, while in Orwell's vision, Big Brother was always watching. In real life, we see elements of both. The main form of this came in the US Patriot Act, which suspends the right to privacy in various situations which are deemed as terroristic or threatening to the government, as well as the rights to due process and freedom of information. The Patriot Act allowed the government to track the books you borrow from libraries, tap your phones and read your e-mails, and it can prevent you from obtaining information critical for your legal defense if it is thought that such information is a "matter of national security". It provides for long-term incarceration of supposed "suspected terrorists" and may limit what lawyers can do to represent their clients in such situations. But besides the Patriot Act, the Neocons have also tried to have legislation passed to prevent gay couples from marrying, women from aborting, and scientists from getting funding to study promising leads in stem-cell research.
9. The Backhanded Ruination of Political Opposition.
In "Atlas Shrugged", those great industrialists who the government sought to manipulate (for example, Hank Rearden) were blackmailed into submission by threats to those they cared about (for example, Dagny Taggart). The case of Valerie Plame, the CIA agent whose identity was leaked, allegedly, by Karl Rove, is a current example of our administration's abuse of its power to ruin political opposition. Only, it wasn't Valerie Plame who the administration was seeking to punish-- it was her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, who told the administration something they didn't want to hear-- that there was no plot in Niger to sell uranium to Iraq, and that documents claiming such were forgeries. Nevertheless, the false claim made it into Bush's State of the Union address as a reason why the war in Iraq was absolutely necessary.
10. A Culture of Blind Faith, Helplessness, and Apathy.
As the world falls apart around them, the common people in the novel "Atlas Shrugged" do not waver noticeably in their support of obviously-corrupt leadership and an ideology of mental passivity that is clearly taking them to the brink of destruction-- at least not until the very end, when they begin to starve, and then chaos, fighting, and revolution ensue. Current surveys of citizens in the US are beginning to indicate that a large percentage of Americans are similarly set in their ways and/or apathetic about politics-- a strong sense of helplessness pervades the common citizens' understanding of how little their vote counts, as well as a colossal reluctance to withdraw their support from unsuitable leadership, even as the unsuitability is made increasingly obvious for all the world to see.
Unfortunately, there is one crucial difference between "Atlas Shrugged" and real life. That is: there is no group of wealthy, morally upright, hard-working, brilliant minds waiting in the wings (or valleys of Colorado) for when the administration folds to step up and rebuild the world as better, more rational place. When our nation folds-- notice I don't say "if", but "when"-- there will be nobody left to rebuild and no reason to want to. I can only wonder, if maybe once the starving is over, the last of the native Americans will take back their land, hunting and gathering again in the shadows of abandoned office buildings, as they sink slowly into the swampland of Washington D.C.