Going Galt
Robert Tracinski is scheduled to appear Thursday, April 29, between 8:00 am and 8:30 am Pacific Time (11:00 am to 11:30 am Eastern Time), on KSFO (AM 560) in San Francisco. Listen live or by podcast at KSFO560.com.
On the other side, you can see it in an awful article in the leftist British newspaper The Guardian by American writer Matt Taibbi, who describes the recent trumped-up case against Goldman Sachs in the following terms:
Morally, however, the Goldman Sachs case may turn into a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that conquered America sometime in the 80s—and in the years since has aped other horrifying American trends such as boybands and reality shows in spreading across the western world like a venereal disease.
Pardon me for not editing out the snarky references to things like "boy bands" (which are unfairly attributed to America—anyone ever heard of Menudo?). I couldn't edit them out because without snide sarcasm and strained attempts at mean-spirited humor, not a single sentence of this article holds together. So with that warning, I'll give you a little bit more of it, and you'll soon see why it's worth it.
The recent financial panic, this author goes on to claim, "had its roots in the lunatic greed-centered objectivist religion, fostered back in the 50s and 60s by ponderous émigré novelist Ayn Rand."
While, outside of America, Russian-born Rand is probably best known for being the unfunniest person western civilization has seen since maybe Goebbels or Jack the Ripper (63 out of 100 colobus monkeys recently forced to read Atlas Shrugged in a laboratory setting died of boredom-induced aneurysms) [Ayn Rand isn't funny, but this stuff about colobus monkeys is supposed to be a real side-splitter?—RWT], in America Rand is upheld as an intellectual giant of limitless wisdom. Here in the States, her ideas are roundly worshipped even by people who've never read her books or even heard of her. The rightwing "Tea Party" movement is just one example of an entire demographic that has been inspired to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.Last summer I wrote a brutally negative article about Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone magazine (I called the bank a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity")….
On the other side of the debate were the people who argued Goldman wasn't guilty of anything except being "too smart" and really, really good at making money. This side of the argument was based almost entirely on the Randian belief system….
In the Randian ethos, called objectivism, the only real morality is self-interest, and society is divided into groups who are efficiently self-interested (i.e., the rich) and the "parasites" and "moochers" who wish to take their earnings through taxes, which are an unjust use of force in Randian politics….
People have to understand this Randian mindset is now ingrained in the American character. You have to live here to see it. There's a hatred toward "moochers" and "parasites"—the Tea Party movement, which is mainly a bunch of pissed off suburban white people whining about minorities consuming social services, describes the battle as being between "water-carriers" and "water-drinkers." And regulation of any kind is deeply resisted, even after a disaster as sweeping as the 2008 crash.
This article partly understates Ayn Rand's influence (more than a few of the tea partiers have read her and been directly influenced by her ideas) and partly overstates it (Ayn Rand is not universally "worshipped" as an "intellectual giant"—not yet), but it mostly misstates it, getting the direction of the influence wrong. It's not so much that the "Randian mindset is now ingrained in the American character," but rather that the American character is ingrained in the "Randian mindset." Ayn Rand was the only philosopher to look at America's culture of individualism and its enormous achievements, to take it seriously, and to use it as the basis for new philosophical discoveries. She helped to define the meaning of the American spirit and to give it voice. So it is no wonder that her ideas have found a large and receptive audience here.
What is important is not Taibbi's evaluation of Ayn Rand's ideas, but the fact that he recognizes that her issues—producers versus parasites, self-interest versus collectivism, freedom versus force—are at the center of the current contest between opposing world views.
That is something commentators on the right are beginning to realize, too. In a new column, Tony Blankley cites Ayn Rand when defining the Goldman Sachs controversy in the most profound moral terms.
In the last few weeks, I have found myself debating on radio and TV programs whether various financial instruments have any social utility — any "real world" purpose other than "speculation or gambling."…My first instinct was to defend various derivatives as serving useful purposes…
But the very idea of being asked to defend freely entered transactions on the grounds of "social utility" is socialist-Marxist bunk. What in the world is "social utility"? And who gets to say so? Why is making a profit as an athlete or a politician better than making a profit as a banker or insurance salesman?
As Ayn Rand explained so long ago: "When the 'common good' [i.e., social utility] of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals. It is tacitly assumed, in such cases, that 'the common good' means the good of the majority as against the minority or individual."
Note that while Taibbi argues purely by sneers and innuendo, it is the pro-Ayn Rand side that is intellectually confident enough to explicitly name and argue for the underlying moral issues.
Note also that this was published, of all places, in National Review Online, an offshoot of the same publication that tried to purge Ayn Rand from the right back in the 1950s. That's a measure of how much the resistance to Ayn Rand's ideas among conservatives has crumbled. When the chips are down, they know they need her.
It's still not a dominant trend, but increasingly the public debate is "going Galt"—it is being defined in Ayn Rand's terms, putting her ideas at the center of the debate.
Which is precisely where they belong.—RWT
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