Tea Parties And Ayn Rand

The Ayn Rand Factor in the current political debate continues. John Tamny from RealClearMarkets is the latest to show the Ayn Rand influence, starting his column for Forbes with an extended reference to Atlas Shrugged.

Meanwhile, David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine has an interview with Objectivist comic book writer and illustrator Bosch Fawstin. Raised Muslim, Fawstin has since created an anti-Muslim superhero, and the interview covers his journey "From Mohammed to Ayn Rand."

I've already linked to a recent article about renewed interest in a movie version of Atlas Shrugged. Through a reliable source, I heard a little snippet of news that might help the project move forward faster. It looks like the producers are thinking of giving up on Angelina Jolie, who had been attached to the project for a while because she was supposedly interested in playing Dagny Taggart. This hasn't shown up anywhere in the news yet and it may not be final, but that's the latest rumor.

Having a mega-star attached to the film was a good idea, and while I can see how some Objectivists would balk at the choice (because of Jolie's own personality), I thought she was a good enough actress to play the role. Plus, the guys in makeup could have covered up all those tattoos. But the downside of a mega-star is that they are like the gods of Mount Olympus: capricious and elusive. That, along with Jolie's successive pregnancies, has slowed the project down instead of moving it forward. So it's a very good idea to start looking elsewhere.

Meanwhile, more and more people are starting to grasp the real-life parallels to Atlas Shrugged. New York magazine has a new article describing the anger and disillusionment of Wall Streeters who find themselves unfairly vilified and punished.

The article is written with a snide tone, based on the Marxist assumption—implicit throughout the piece but never justified—that Wall Street financiers were "privileged" parasites who didn't earn their wealth. But the author quotes extensively from the Wall Streeters themselves, quoting one, for example, who declares that "JPMorgan and all these guys should go on strike—see what happens to the country without Wall Street." Where do you think he got that idea?

The author describes these people as being influence by a "belief shared on Wall Street but which few have dared to articulate until now: those who select careers in finance play an exceptional role in our society. They distribute capital to where it's most effective, and by some Ayn Rand–ian logic, the virtue of efficient markets distributing capital to where it is most needed justifies extreme salaries—these are the wages of the meritocracy. They see themselves as the fighter pilots of capitalism."

How many of these people will be confirmed in their support for Objectivist ideas by the events of the past six months?

Where we will really begin to see big results, however, is if we can combine this Ayn Rand Factor with the politics of the tea parties. That would be a trend with the potential to stop the Obama agenda cold, and we are already seeing signs that the tea party movement is posing a big political obstacle for the left.

The New York Times reports that even the Democratic Congress is now showing some reluctance to raise the taxes needed to pay for Obama's massive expansion of government.

The administration's central revenue proposal—limiting the value of affluent Americans' itemized deductions, including the one for charitable giving—fell flat in Congress, leaving the White House, at least for now, without $318 billion that it wants to set aside to help cover uninsured Americans. At the same time, lawmakers of both parties have warned against moving too quickly on a plan to auction carbon emission permits to produce more than $600 billion.

The unwillingness to embrace some of the major White House tax and revenue proposals has frustrated administration officials. They note that lawmakers, many of them supporters of the president's ambitious agenda, clamor to hold down the deficit while balking at the proposals to finance his program.

Blogger Jennifer Rubin notes:

Who knew there would be a limit to the amount Congress would be willing to tax and spend? The Congress–Democrats included—are getting nervous about raising taxes to pay for a huge new domestic agenda. When Sen. Kent Conrad cautions that we are talking about "hundreds of billions" for healthcare, one senses that there is perhaps greater distance between the Congress and the White House on spending than between the Congress and all those tea party protesters. Maybe the fact that 435 congressmen and one third of the Senate must face the public in less than two years has the legislators' enthusiasm for another round of spending (and the required tax hikes) running thin.

It was not a surprise to me that there is a solid core of cultural resistance to expanding government, leading to a backlash against the Obama agenda. What has been surprising is that this opposition to statism has gained so much strength so quickly, and that it could even be having an immediate politic impact.