My friends know I'm obsessed with Ayn Rand, who for better or worse I’ve got to own up to as an influence. For a long time I've been wanting to write about that influence.
I thought I would use Kossacks as guinea pigs (since in a Randian world there wouldn’t be a law against it). Is this of any interest at all?
Like the indecisive security guard in Atlas Shrugged who deserves to be murdered in cold blood because he would not make a choice, I’m waiting to be told what to think.
Thanks for taking a look at this.
In many of Ayn Rand’s writings, there is a moment where one character forces another to consider the consequences. It goes something like this:
You advocate something but haven’t thought it through. Don’t you see where all this is going to lead? Because when your world is a wasteland, a concentration camp, a charnel house, don’t come crying to me. "But I didn’t mean this!" you’ll shriek. But it will be too late, too late.
Because I loved the writings of Ayn Rand for a couple of years when Nixon was President, the subsequent thirty-some years of Republican misrule is partly my fault.
But I didn’t mean this!
In 1972, for a brief time – and here is one of the most embarrassing things I have ever written down -- I worked for the re-election campaign of President Richard M. Nixon.
What moved me to volunteer was an essay by Ayn Rand that appeared as an ad in The New York Times. If memory serves, it was headlined "No one has asked McGovern the only relevant question: By what right?" She was mad because of McGovern’s socialist-sounding guaranteed annual income, and because of course McGovern was going to disarm the United States.
I could not sit still for either of those things. I was willing to bear the stigma of being 17 and for Nixon, even if I didn’t like or trust him. Lesser of two evils and all that. The draft lottery and the backup of a college deferment were kinder to me than I deserved.
Like the hero/villain of the melodramatic story I've heard but never read -- the man who commits crimes while sleepwalking, then spends his waking hours struggling to undo the damage he’s unleashed -- I want to take it all back.
Because I recommended Rand's writings to Michael and Mark and Frank and George, who recommended them to Jill and Kelly and Sabrina, who recommended them to, say, a young Karl Rove, I feel partly responsible for the mess we currently find ourselves in.
To be clear, by mess I mean the era of Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Gingrich, Bush II, Cheney, Iraq, Katrina, Abu-Gitmo, the trampling of the Constitution, and the Grover Norquist New Orleans Memorial Bathtub-Drowning Society. I know Rand didn’t think of herself as a libertarian or conservative, but come on.
Today a lot of grown-ups, including a well-known former Fed chairman, make noises like Ayn Rand. And they don't even seem embarrassed. I should get this, given where I'm coming from. I wonder why I don't.
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For a fairly accurate snapshot of my high-school years, watch the video for "Sixteen Military Wives" by The Decemberists. I was a dead ringer for the lead singer dressed up for the Model U.N. (they got the blazer and tie color right). I was in a program called Youth and Government, sponsored by the YMCA. I felt a twinge, being an Objectivist in a Christian organization, but in a cowardly if not depraved reality-evading fashion, I tolerated the disconnect.
My friends and I – all guys – packed committees, tied the legislature in knots of parliamentary procedure, and even tried to impeach our Model Governor just because we knew how to do it and thought it was fun. We were gleeful little Karl Roves without the courage or stomach to do the really dirty personal attacks. Poor girl never knew what hit her just the same.
We even elected our own high school class president, unconsciously borrowing Nixon’s trick of exploiting the resentment of the silent majority against the jocks and National Honor Society students. I say unconsciously: we were clever, but not clever enough to anticipate Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland.
Yet when it came time for a vote on a model-legislative bill, and anybody stepped out of line, trouble ensued. Loyalties were called into question. So was character -- sometimes literary character. I was likened to the villains of Miss Rand’s novels. "Wesley Mouch," a friend called me, voice thick with contempt. Or, "Hey, he’s getting stupid again," when I decided that capital punishment was wrong because we might execute an innocent person. Silent treatment all around: Russia and China kicking each other out of the movement. Besides, we had our pride.
None of these antics helped me with a girl I really liked. "You have a lot of potential," she told me, "if you could free yourself from the shackles of Rand."
"They’re not shackles!" I insisted.
One of the things I’m most ashamed of, after Nixon: Through rigorous logic, merciless use of reductionism, and a somewhat pedantic debating style I still haven’t managed to shake, I converted a friend, a pen pal, to libertarianism. Just when he declared himself a libertarian, I dropped the correspondence like a hideous still-beating heart. What was I supposed to say? That I had doubts? That I’d changed my mind?
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Winning a debate with my father, no slouch, was a bracing experience. The experience scared me a little. It wasn’t supposed to happen: certainly it had never happened before, nor did it ever happen again.
I wore him out with specious reasoning: I certainly didn’t convert him. I can still hear him saying, "Good night, Tom. Don’t oversimplify." Both my parents deserve credit for tolerance. Had I been my Dad, I would have laid on the stories about his coal-miner father’s union activity, the strikebreakers, the scabs, the dogs, the company store, and the Christmases when a child’s only gift was an orange.
As one National Review writer said some years ago -- when Rand died, I think – headbanging philosophies and love for heavy metal or Wagner are part of adolescent obnoxiousness. I lingered in teen obnoxiousness longer than most (I loved Deep Purple). But another clock was ticking on my love affair with Miss Rand’s ideas. She purported to speak for a consistent view of reality.
So when a company in Pennsylvania dumped kepone, part of a pesticide that causes blindness in humans, into drinking water wells, I had to wonder precisely which example of intrusive government regulation had distorted the marketplace to such an extent that a business entity would find it in its rational self-interest to do such a thing. Or which repeal of which worse-than-slavery regulation would prevent this kind of thing from happening. I never figured out answers to my questions.
(As far as I can tell, this mess still hasn’t been cleaned up.)
Another faith-eroder was probably generational. The Miss Rand essay "Apollo and Dionysus" (in her 1971 book The New Left, since retitled Return of the Primitive) contrasted the achievement of the 1969 moon landing with the decadent filthy dirty 1969 mudwallowing of the hippies at Woodstock. I thought both the moon landing and Woodstock were pretty cool. Holding up one as exemplar and the other as anathema still seems pointless, and probably as John Galt’s crack about "some barefoot bum in some pesthole of Asia." Trashing Gandhi: Way to bring in the young people, Ayn.
Inconsistencies: Wasn't Apollo government-funded? Impossibilities: A truly free market will eliminate racism and sexism, because no businessman would be so irrational as to drive off customers and talent. Unless he owned an axe-handle.
Absent all that, I like to think she’d have lost me at "Ketchup is a vegetable," but you never know.
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Why beat up on poor Ayn Rand one more time? Barbara Branden depicted her as a woman whose "rationality" drove herself and those around her crazy.
One point often lost, though, in this era of the personal attack: A person’s imperfections do not necessarily invalidate her ideas. And it’s Rand’s ideas that need to be read, discussed, argued about, and, I hope, debunked. I suspect it's a necessary precondition for the debunking of so-called conservatism. (Can't you see Miss Rand vomiting over the expression "compassionate conservatism"?)
Ever since Reagan, those able to hear the dog-whistle frequencies could detect echoes of Ayn Rand's philosophy. You hear it in paeans to the magic of the marketplace, in calls for regulatory relief (not, please note, reform).
In fact, for years it's seemed apparent that we are all Reaganites now. In The Return of Eva Peron, V.S. Naipaul notes that at a certain time in Argentina, everybody -- fascist, socialist, moderate, Catholic -- was a Peronist, even if they could never define what "Peronist" meant.
In America, lucky us, we know what Reaganism means, what conservatism means. We pledge allegiance to one market under the God that Rand herself denied. We think that private is good and public is bad.
Some of us believe these things as a matter of conviction. Others take it as much for granted as oxygen. They don't even follow Miss Rand's best advice: "Check your premises." Witness the spectacle of Democrats praising the Reagan "legacy," or Democrats trying to out-Republican one another. We are like the humans in Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire Falls books, who overthrow their alien overlords but continue to spout the jargon of the aliens' philosophy.
One thing that always disappointed me about libertarians and other Rand-y people is that they usually turn out to be Republicans with better haircuts. They can tolerate the hypocrisy of corporate welfare while hiding behind the rhetoric of free enterprise. Miss Rand can go on record as opposing the Vietnam War, but it never infuriated her like McGovern’s so-called socialism.
Her followers, and those influenced by her, might err on the side of voting for a theocratic warmongering candidate. You’d think there’d be a chance that they might "err" on the side of protecting the environment, righting a past injustice, helping a human being who needs it, or even just making an investment in infrastructure or education without jumping to the conclusion that the next stop is a gulag.
You rarely catch them making that mistake.
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So I’m not quite finished with Ayn Rand yet. Recently I began re-reading her novels, in order of publication.
Her first, the clunky We the Living, I enjoyed for reasons she wouldn’t approve of: Her naturalistic depiction of life in the years after the Russian Revolution. Of the dystopian novel Anthem, the less said the better: They don’t have electricity, but they have a World Government? Rand said one publisher who turned it down said "you don’t understand socialism." She didn’t understand world-building, either.
No, I haven’t quite taken the plunge into Miss Rand’s due of philosophical blockbusters, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I’ve been afraid to read them because of the chance of backsliding. I’m about ready to look into them again, and maybe blog the experience.
There's a short story by T.C. Boyle about a man who was so delighted by a certain kind of bird that he bred them to thrive in their country. In his next life, he is maddened by their screeching din and tries to undo what he doesn't remember doing.
Along the way, I'll ask a question posed by one of the characters in Robertson Davies' novel World of Wonders: "Are we ever forgiven for the follies even of our earliest years?"
I think I can answer that one.