Biggest loser didn’t even run
The world is a different place this morning. The world’s most durable democracy has elected an African-American as its president. Let those European nations so quick to disparage America ask themselves if they’re ready to match this act of political maturity. Is France, for example, ready to make a Franco-Algerian its head of state?
But the American election is not merely a demonstration of comity, it is a plebiscite on the pretentious and profoundly amoral nostrums of the novelist and theorist Ayn Rand (inset). The American people have rejected her winner-take-all trash talk and reasserted their fundamental compassion for one another. Will the Christian right now embrace this triumph of the Christian ethos over selfishness?
Ayn Rand’s ideas, woodenly put in her novel The Fountainhead, have gone hand-in-glove with the free-market misadventure Ronald Reagan hawked like the corporate spokesman he always was. Her anti-Christian me-first message was prettied up as trickle-down, laissez-faire economics. The middle class and the poor were supposed to get the crumbs off the tables of the rich.
But the greedy rich combed up the crumbs, along with their riches, and parked them in untaxable offshore havens, and the rest of us got poorer, sicker and more desperate.
This abomination, wrapped in glitz and sold by Alan Greenspan, Rand’s disciple, and Phil Gramm and others, has now been discredited at the polls. The voters have not only said no to hatred, divisiveness and selfishness, they have said yes to intelligence, compassion and racial harmony. They have voted for their own interests and against the cheap thrills of culture war. True, the popular vote reflects the lingering poisons of the culture warriors, but the majority of voters have opted for a grander vision.
And the world notices. For eight years we have baffled and disheartened foreign admirers and encouraged our enemies by affirming their malignant view of us, but this morning the essential dynamism of American democracy cannot fail to dazzle our severest critics.
Rand’s odious ideas were never any good to anyone but those who don’t give a damn about their fellows, and it was always to the Christian right’s disgrace that it winked at her blatantly unchristian message. It is not only unchristian, it is out of concert with any of the world’s religions.
In sending Barack Obama to the White House the American people have said, We’re not the hateful, small-minded people the Republicans have been counting on us to be. We want to give each other a hand, we want prosperity for all of us, not just the arrogant rich. We are tolerant of dissent. We live in one nation indivisible, not a red country and a blue country. We are not secessionists. We intend to work together. Capitalism yes, piracy no.
The people have voted smart and alert. The Republicans should turn from their harmful let’s you-and-him fight tactics and return to their pre-1960s heritage of common-sense business, fiscal vigilance and big-tent civility. Dividing the country and trying to wrap the squalid tactic in the flag hasn’t fooled the majority this time.—DM
Yes! I wish I had had the wisdom to see it this way, back in the 70’s when I read The Fountainhead. While it was a source of confusion for me for a while, I’m glad I was able to forget its poison.
— Brent
Oh, and one more thing — celebrate!
Dear Brent, my original response to The Fountainhead was that it was bad writing. I never got past my distaste for its style to consider
its philosophy until many years later. What a snob I was! When I revisited Rand in my old age I marveled at what strange bedfellows her work had acquired—people who called themselves moralists and people of faith winking at such blatant amorality. Why, I wondered, why this hypocrisy? I don’t know, but we all see many things we can’t explain.—DM
Your opening paragraph, in essence, says “political maturity” is achieved by the election of an “African-American”. When that rhetoric of carefully couched language is parsed, you might just as well have said “political maturity” means electing a “nigger”. That disgusting perspective is now the main focus of the media. Wake up, people he is a charismatic mulatto with a socialist anti-American (”American” in the Founders’ sense) agenda.
Further, your attack of Rand demonstrates a profound misunderstanding or misrepresentation of her reviews.
Rand was deeply opposed to Reagan.
Reality demonstrates that the “trickle-down” economics you deride truly works. The poor in America were better off than the middle class in most other nations. That is why millions of people around the world flocked to America, as immigrants seeking the ideal that their productive efforts would be theirs to benefit from. Over the last 100 yrs, America’s administrations have systematically reduced that hope, in taxes and in regulation (as I pointed out here in the first comment below djelloul’s post.
Djelloul fails to understand that the freer a people are economically, the more charitable they will be. Indeed, Americans have been more charitable (per capita) than most other nations. That charity, readily accepted by Rand, also served to make America great. The recipients knew that they were being helped so they could be productive. They saw it as a help up, not as an entitlement right for the empty fact of having been born.
Djelloul has dismissed, for the sake of the above diatribe, the fact that Greenspan was not following Rand’s principles and morals but was actively pursuing the opposite. He joined in with the American administration’s heavy handed interference in the housing and mortgage market —54,000 regulations in the last twelve years is hardly Randian, laissez-faire capitalism.
Djelloul’s (and Obama’s) “grander vision” is no more mature than a 14-year-old with the idea that if one took all they could from the rich the poor would be rich too: with no regard for the producers who created the wealth the poor depended on. The obvious long term consequence is that the producers won’t be producing, and the poor will not get the same ‘hand outs’. That is, in the long term, under djelloul’s socialism, the poor will lose the most!
Rand did care about the poor, and she knew that it was the poor who needed economic separation from the state more than any other group. Heck, the poor include many great minds. But the principle is, “don’t rein in great minds“!
There is no doubt that the American administration has behaved egregiously over the last 75 years, but their behavior was the antithesis of what Rand stood for. They flirted with wicked dictators, they routinely engaged in, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “foreign adventures” that he cogently argued were not the proper role of an American government. Sure, it was American administrations that behaved that way, but it was not Jefferson or Rand’s America, it was the very political collectivism that Djelloul is advocating for.
When Djelloul writes, “We want to give each other a hand, we want prosperity for all of us, not just the arrogant rich.” he is saying, “those with ability” should provide for “those with need”. His use of “arrogant” is the sociopath’s method of justifying his immoral/criminal action. Hegel, Marx and Stalin succeeded in turning that sociopathy into a political system. “Depraved” is too kind a word.
The Fountainhead, rightly, speaks to the young. It says, “live to your own vision”. It says, “You are no-one’s slave”. It says, “Do what you most desire, to the absolute best of your ability.” It says, “do not compromise on your ideals”. Notice that Roark did help Keating when he believed it made sense to do so. Contrary to your interpretation of The Fountainhead Roark was charitable to Keating, but Keating cheated him.
You wrote, “We want to give each other a hand, we want prosperity for all of us, not just the arrogant rich. We are tolerant of dissent. We live in one nation indivisible, not a red country and a blue country. We are not secessionists. We intend to work together. Capitalism yes, piracy no.
You are absolutely right on that, but be careful. Socialism is not the alternative, instead the alternative is recognizing piratical regulations by government are the problem, the solution is more freedom. Sure, CEO’s of large financial corporations altered their game according to the rules of government, to make a profit, but the evil lies first in government rules. Government has the (improper) power to distort the market.
Do not blame the victim of that market manipulation.
Read, or re-read, Rand with intellectual honesty. Thus far you have not done so.
Tragically, both presidential candidates believe that robbing Peter to pay Paul. That is, they both believe sacrifice of self to others (socialism) is the real solution. That is the diametric opposite of what made America great by the 1930s.
My ambition for many years—I’m 74 now—has been to grow up before I die. I’m afraid I must agree with you, Richard, that my ambition seems forlorn. You and I must agree to disagree. I would perhaps take your advice about reconsidering Rand with an open mind, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be any more able now than I was earlier to endure her stick figures and wooden prose.—DM
I did not discover Rand until I was 35, that was 22 years ago. Four years before that, I had read both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and thought the plot ideas were interesting. That was all that held me. The characters seemed like stick figures and all the ‘philosophizing’ seemed of little value, even for character development.
Then, someone said something that suggested to me I had really missed things that they had seen in Atlas. That prompted me to read the book a second time. Instead of reading for the plot, I read it for meaning. I was astonished. How could I have been so inept at reading!!? By grade ten I had been pegged as a post graduate level reader by the English Dept at my high school. I routinely read tomes written for adults, about religion, about politics and so forth. By grade 13, the last year of high school here, I was reading Scientific American from cover to cover every month, as well as reading still more books, and completing my schoolwork, and more.
In that second reading the characters suddenly jumped out at me. Not only were they NOT wooden, they were profound representations of very real human characteristics. I did not need details of what they looked like, or how much pain they suffered, or what they ate, it was only the essential elements of what they did and thought that mattered.
I realized I had never before read a book with so many layers or levels, ever. I also realized that my own method of reading was improper. I was not being suitably judgmental, and I was not examining my own ideas in any genuinely challenging way. I had to read it again, just to find out what else I had missed.
Yes, I am 17 years younger than you, and I hope to live another 45 years (wow). However, I do hope you will cease to misrepresent Rand’s ideas until you have read her more carefully. Just don’t say anything if you really thing reading her again is a ridiculous suggestion. On the other hand, people in their 80s have been know to pursue degrees, and even PhDs. Knowing what I know now, I would rather study Rand than waste time in any University program.
Rand is this millennium’s Aristotle. In 319 BC, I would rather have died as a complete unknown who had attended Aristotle’s Lyceum, than as some heroic warrior or political leader to be forever mentioned in history books. I have a similar opportunity with Rand, and I am making as much of it as I can. I have read nearly everything she has written (not unreleased archive material, of course), I learn from her best students, and I know what they mean when they speak or write. I recognize the intellectual mistakes made by people who attack them, or who attack Rand. Many of those attacks mirror the mindset of the antagonists (irrational subjectivists) in her novels. They echo, in their own words, of course, certain errors in economics, education, art, politics, ethics etc. She has indeed shown me a sunlit world, and the greatness Men can achieve in the short time they spend here.
If I was 90 I would want to die being able to say, “I too, know!“
Thank you, Richard.—DM