Tornado Alley (PROG)

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US Republican leaders love Ayn Rand’s controversial philosophy—and are increasingly misinterpreting it

https://qz.com/882493/donald-trump-paul-ryan-and-andy-puzder-say-they-love-ayn-rands-controversial-philosophy-heres-what-us-republicans-keep-getting-wrong-about-it/

If Rand were alive today, what do you think she would say about Trump?

The Trump campaign was in many ways a rejection of Randian economics. Basically he said, “I am going to help you. The American worker needs the help of the government to get better trade deals, to bring back jobs; I’m going to do that.”

He didn’t say, “Everything’s fine, the free market is going to work great.” He basically said, “The free market is broken, you guys have been getting screwed by elites, and I’m going to get on the phone with Business and tell them what’s what.”

That is totally anti-Rand.

The way he has interacted with business leaders; she would be irate. During her lifetime Kennedy did something very similar with the steel companies. Steel companies raised their prices, and president Kennedy got on his soap box and said this is inappropriate et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and the steel companies backed down. Rand thought that was a complete and total abuse of political power, and Kennedy had no business doing that. It was chilling, it was dangerous.

She would say exactly the same thing about the Carrier deal, about all the threats that Trump has made. I think she would find them deeply, deeply problematic.

But then you have this cabinet emerging where people are said to be avid Rand fans. It’s very curious. It’s sort of a reshaping of Rand in a new way, and this time the issue is not related to atheism; this time some of the free market capitalism, that seems to have been shaved off. There’s not much left of Rand once you slice that off.

Has she been completely distorted?

““What is left is…the elevation of the capitalist entrepreneur individualist as the true leader of society, as the true change agent of society.””

What is left is something that’s run under the radar: the elevation of the business person, the elevation of the capitalist entrepreneur individualist as the true leader of society, as the true change agent of society. That has been a piece of her appeal for a long time.

For a long time she has been beloved by disruptors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, people who see themselves as shaping the future, taking risky bets, moving out in front of everyone else, relying only on their own instincts, intuition, and knowledge, and going against the grain.

What Rand did very deliberately is to create a portrait of American business, American commercial life, American industry, as a creative and challenging and dynamic field of human endeavor. And also a moral place. Where, to grow a business and have an idea and see that idea come to fruition, come to reality, was essentially a moral thing to do.

It was not selfish; it was self-actualization, and it was performing to your highest potential in the world.

After a certain point Rand’s atheism becomes a liability. There’s often a move to take Randian ideas and say they come from somewhere else, or to combine them with religious ideas. So until this past year, that’s been the conservative move around Rand, the way she’s been sort of coopted, tamed, and managed.

A good example of this is Paul Ryan. He is someone who is very much in the mold of that young conservative in the ’60s, although he was not of that generation. He came of age looking for a philosophy, a set of ideas that would help him understand what is the correct role of government in society, and he found Rand’s ideas. He found them very powerful.

““Rand was adamantly pro-choice.” ”

For many years he would give Atlas Shrugged as a Christmas present, which is ironic: The Atlas Shrugged Christmas present. He gave it to his staffers as well. You can see the plans he’s made in terms of the Ryan budget, the attempt to privatize certain government programs, they’re very much in line with the Randian philosophy. The way you free the individual, the way you grow a free society, is by stripping the government down and shrinking the government as much as possible.

As soon as Ryan got nominated for vice president in 2012, he basically erased his Randian roots as much as he possibly could. He claimed that his true inspiration was St. Thomas Aquinas.

What’s interesting about Rand is that she was so clear that you couldn’t and shouldn’t do that with her philosophy. And she launched campaign after campaign against conservatives in her lifetime, and warned explicitly that religious conservatism was the most dangerous thing of all.