CSotD: The Ayn Rand Issue
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Jeff Danziger points out a potential issue with the selection of Paul Ryan as runningmate.
His heartless budget proposal will play to a certain dogmatic segment of the population and not a small one. The past few years have demonstrated beyond any doubt that there are a lot of people who will accept a simplistic solution, even if the solution seems, to a disinterested party, counter to their own best interests.
"Keep your government hands off my Medicare" is funny, except for the part where it comes from someone who is entitled — and likely — to vote.
And the economic crisis is slippery. It's easy to present it in simple terms, particularly (as noted here several times) if you purposely confuse microeconomics and macroeconomics, comparing international economics to family budgets, and then pretend that families don't routinely try to balance their budget by increasing revenue with a second job rather than reducing costs by not eating or going to the doctor or heating the house in winter.
But a lot of people have trouble getting their minds around macroeconomics, in large part because much of it is built on Gentlemen's Agreements, which is why even knowledgable people say things like "If you laid 200 economists end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion," and "An economist is like a guy who knows 1,000 ways to make love, but doesn't have a girlfriend."
And as long as we all accept that economics is, at best, fluid and, to put it another way, pretty damned subjective, we can hazard guesses based on past performance, even knowing that it is no guarantee of future outcome.
Where it falls apart is when you have demagogues rise up and insist that their economic theory is fundamentally true. It doesn't matter whether it's Karl Marx or Grover Norquist, or whether they are actually executing unbelievers or simply sending them into conceptual exile.
You may lose a debate over Keynes or Laffer, but there can still be a debate. Once an economic viewpoint is treated on the same dogmatic level as creationism or the beginning of life, you end the debate and it simply becomes an issue of throwing muscle, at which point the strong man wins, even if he's wrong.
Hard times invariably produce simpleminded promises.
But the injection of Ayn Rand into the mix is going to be an important indicator of how simpleminded we have truly become, because, while much of rightwing America is obsessed with fundamental Christianity, or their interpretation of it, Rand was absolutely, specifically opposed to religion.
It's not that she was an atheist, and it's not that her system wouldn't actually work in a religious society.
It's that she was quite aware of the fact that her system was not consistent with Christianity and said so.
Jesus was a good man, Rand said, but his death on behalf of imperfect people was a waste.
Yes. In basic terms, Christ's death on the cross was a waste. Oh, and there is no God.
Rand, however, never put anything in basic terms. She was a master of that flatulent, faux-intellectual language that drunks try to imitate when they call radio talk shows, so she can reject the crucifixtion in a 1964 Playboy interview without infuriating the sorts of people who not only think Big Words mean Big Thoughts, but who believe they are the select, even though life has not provided any proof for that theory.
They looked at the foldout and dreamt of the day they'd have a girl just like that, and they read the words of Ayn Rand and thought about how, when they became millionaires, they weren't ever gonna support any poor people.
And, in both cases, the voice of their preacher was drowned out by their own lustful internal fantasies.
Here is what Rand said. Hard to say whether she or Nancy Scott was further from their grasp.
"Christ, in terms of Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect value was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were Christian, nothing could make me more indignant that that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture."
I do know this: If Jeremiah Wright had said that, it would have been all over the boards by sundown.
The trick, for those who oppose heartless atheistic anti-social economic theories, will lie in persuading people to actually listen to what Paul Ryan has declared as the core of his belief system.
But, as Clay Bennett suggests, that may be quite a task in the world we've built for ourselves.
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