The unseen hand in the 2010 election is that of Ayn Rand, whose Atlas Shrugged has become a fundamental text for the Tea Partiers. They are buying her book in record numbers, and telling each other to be like the book's hero, John Galt. Ron Johnson tells George Will that the book inspired him to run against Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. Rand Paul (Rand is short for Randal; he was not named after the author) calls himself a "big fan." Rep. Paul Ryan, senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, hands out copies of Atlas Shrugged as gifts.
In an irony akin to the tea partiers' call to keep the government's hands off their medicare, people in the real world that Ayn Rand would pick as her heroes are behaving like the villains in her book, and vice-versa.
In Ayn Rand's fantasy world, her villains make definitive, though wildly inaccurate, statements about people, while wishing that the laws of physics could be changed by politics and pull. In the real world, every Republican candidate for senator rejects the scientific evidence of global climate change, while several hint darkly, and a few say openly, that they do not believe President Obama is a native-born American. Rand's villains talk of violence if her heroes don't behave; back in the real world, we have Sharron Angle muttering about "Second Amendment solutions" while Joe Miller's hired thugs manhandle a reporter and Rand Paul's supporters stomp on a protestor's head. Dick Cheney reprised the role of Ayn Rand's Dr. Ferris in devising new ways to torture people, while George W. Bush echoed, perhaps accidently, Cuffy Meigs when he said to Bob Woodward: "History, we don't know. We'll all be dead."
In Ayn Rand's world, John Galt makes a sixty-page speech that leaves his audience stunned by the power of his words. In the real world, only Fidel Castro tried to get away with that.
In the world of Atlas Shrugged, absurd government regulations cause economic collapse; in the real world of Bush, Cheney, and Henry Paulson, it was the absence of working financial regulations that allowed banks to gamble recklessly with our money. We only averted a world-wide depression because Bush, finally, agreed to step in. John Galt would have let the economy collapse – because in Rand's world, the free market, left to itself, fixes all problems, solves all difficulties, and rewards and punishes as people deserve. How many Wall Street gamblers has the real world free market punished lately? Insurance companies who kick people off their rolls when they get sick? Coal mining magnates who skimp on safety rules? The free market rewards those who make money, no matter how. It's government that seeks redress when its citizens' lives are ruined.
None of this matters to the Tea Partiers, of course. Anyone who believes that health care reform includes "death panels" or that the Establishment clause is not in the First Amendment is not going to be swayed by rational argument, nor by any evidence. They have created a fantasy world like unto Galt's Gulch where, if government would only stop taxing the rich, the world would become productive for all.
Writers and their readers can indulge themselves in escapist fantasies. In the real world, the complex, complicated, difficult, dangerous world of 2010, we as a country cannot afford such indulgences.