I just read a very interesting article about Straussians (it’s a fairly old article, but new to me). I recommend the whole thing; I learned a lot from it, I think I now understand why neoconservatives have become interested in neuroscience (it’s a way of attacking Enlightenment ideas of the blank slate), for example. It ends with a provocative question:
How has a thinker as radical as Strauss–a thinker so blatantly hostile to democracy and modernity, so deeply suspicious of political liberty and equality, so profoundly skeptical of moral and religious belief–managed to become the intellectual idol of contemporary American conservatism, with its clamorous moralism, its pious parochialism, its shameless populism, and its instinctual suspicion of doubt? Only when we have devised a satisfactory answer to that troubling question will we be capable of rendering a responsible judgment of Leo Strauss’s ideas and their enigmatic legacy to the times in which we live.
A similar question is how has Ayn Rand become an idol to many (less intellectual) conservatives?
The answer is the same: both Strauss and Rand put forward the ideas of deserving elites — for Strauss, it’s philosophers, for Rand, it’s Galtian geniuses. Maybe people have always wanted to believe that they were part of some special awesome elite — and that everyone else is a lazy rube — but I don’t remember this idea getting so much intellectual and pseudo-intellectual play 20 years ago. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.
NonyNony
I recall it being pretty bad in the 80s, when open corporate piracy was kind of new and “junk bonds” were all the rage. The idea being that either you were a winner or a sucker, and suckers deserved to be fleeced. I don’t know if it was much in the way of intellectual play, but definitely pseudo-intellectual play and in pop culture. And the kids who grew up immersed in that are now adults, so there’s that too.
That’s pretty much what I’ve concluded that Randian libertarianism boils down to when you get right down to the brass tacks – there are winners and losers and winners shouldn’t give a rat’s ass about the losers. And the illusion is that anyone can be a winner if they work hard enough at it, which is what makes it able to be sold to the masses.
Violet
These people sound like Calvinists. John Calvin’s idea of The Elect means that some people are the chosen ones.
Will
No big paradox. Strauss’s strategy is simply “play the rubes for chumps” with rhetoric about religion, morality, etc. It’s just the fancy, intellectually dressed up rationale for doing what tyrants have done to keep control since the first city state.
burnspbesq
Strauss is the respectable face of “I got to the top and I’m burning the ladder.”
Cat Lady
-John Kenneth Galbraith
Doesn’t matter who provides it.
Nellcote
Greed is good.
–Gordon Gecko, hero of “Wall Street”
Fang
20 years ago we had economic issues nothing like we see now. I think part of what we see – only part – is the fact our Galtian overlords screwed up big-time and they and their followers are searching for ways to justify their existence.
bleh
Cat Lady beat me to it.
Pretty much all of the self-styled Libertarians I’ve encountered were “born on second base” and were trying to come up with rationales for deserving it.
A sheltered upbringing and (in many cases deliberate) ignorance of history, law, and practical politics helped them considerably in this endeavor, BTW.
_PK_
Rand and Strauss present a philosophy that allows assholes to feel good about being assholes.
Citizen_X
I think it’s just the same ego-stroking appeal made in any luxury car commercial: You deserve this. You’re special; a breed apart. It’s not any more complicated than that.
It is the fact that they’ve managed to remake American society along those lines, however, that gives the idea that much more apparent legitimacy.
dirge
I do, but up to 20 years ago the “deserving elites” and “lazy rubes” were still described in conspicuously racial terms. As the country has (slowly) grown away from that ugly past, the Confederate Party has evolved towards the more enlightened view that slavery isn’t just for black people any more.
burnspbesq
@burnspbesq:
“Strauss is the respectable face of “I got to the top and I’m burning the ladder.”
And I suspect that Strauss would not be terribly happy about the uses to which his writings have been put.
John - A Motley Moose
I see no conflict there. Conservatives are blatantly hostile to democracy and modernity and equaly suspicious of political liberty and equality. And, for all of their professed piety, are equally skeptical of any moral or religious belief that doesn’t match theirs. Sounds like a perfect conservative to me.
San
“Maybe people have always wanted to believe that they were part of some special awesome elite—and that everyone else is a lazy rube”
Yup, pretty much.
“There was a thoughtful pause in the conversation as the assembled Brethren mentally divided the universe into the deserving and the undeserving, and put themselves on the appropriate side.”
Pratchett, Guards!Guards!
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Probably just the rise of the internet.
Jewish Steel
Ask a member of the special awesome elite how they feel about estate tax.
electricgrendel
Maybe it’s the same thing that fuels lottos. People are living in shitty, shitty times. We are saddled with about 40 years of exceptionalism from WWII on, but now live in a country where most of the people literally do not give a shit about anyone else yet finds time to wonder why forces that can only be resisted through solidarity have risen in power. So- they fantasize about being “special” in a member of those forces. It’s a fantasy, and it’s very comforting. Just like winning the lotto.
DougJ
@burnspbesq:
Yes, I think his philosophy is radical but not simplistic in that way.
Judas Escargot
Strauss and Rand put forward the ideas of deserving elites—for Strauss, it’s philosophers, for Rand, it’s Galtian geniuses.
And in both cases, the would-be Galtian Geniuses can’t even get their own narrative straight.
If one actually reads the stories, Rand’s heroes were generally what we’d call ‘Creatives’ now: Inventors, engineers, architects, artists (of course, since she was one), etc, who want to keep all the profits of their creativity. Flawed theory or not, she definitely had these Creatives in mind. Today the archetypical Randroid would be a hedge-fund manager who creates nothing, or a career politician like Paul Ryan, who’s never created much of anything in his life.
On the other hand: Strauss was an atheist, who seemed to agree with Marx about religion-as-opium, but argued (essentially) that the uneducated classes need their opium for the social order to function properly (otherwise they’d have no ‘natural purpose’), so the elites should recognize this fact. This is probably not what most of the fundamentalist right-wing have in mind (though I do think Karl Rove, for example, really is an atheist of this model).
There’s a third leg to the tripod, too, which I haven’t figured out yet: Roman Catholicism. Paul Ryan’s a Catholic. Robert Novak, Newt Gingrich and other neocons– a surprising number of converts, late in life. And we now have at least 3 Opus Dei Catholics on the Supreme Court. I was raised RC myself and have no clue why this is: I’m just barely old enough to remember what Liberation Theology is, and I remember my religious upbringing as being pretty liberal by today’s standards. So whatever they’re converting to, it’s not the RC of my youth.
Suffern ACE
@Fang:
Yep. I’m going to guess that when the CW history is finally written about the failure, it will just be that the overclass purposely broke things because they were heroically going Galt, when in reality, they just screwed up and didn’t know how to fix things.
cleek
the whole “Noble lie” thing really works if you want to use government to enrich yourself while getting the rubes to cheer you along.
i remember reading commenters at Tacitus and ObWi who thoroughly believed that the Iraq war was just and necessary even though the stated reasons were bullshit, and that this deception was OK because the public just wouldn’t understand or appreciate the real reasons for the war. so, our elites were fully justified in lying to us.
they would cite Strauss when making their case.
haven’t seen those people for a while.
beltane
@Judas Escargot: The total co-option of the Roman Catholic church by the forces of reactionary capitalist materialism is one of the more interesting phenomena of our lifetimes. While the church always tended to serve the interests of the ruling elite, there was once a wider spectrum of thought than there is today.
It is somewhat ironic that by aligning with the far-right for the purpose of defeating communism, the RC church has destroyed itself as a player in the hearts and minds of educated people in the developed world. At a time when our world is in desperate need of a powerful counterweight to the soulless, lucre worshiping nihilism of late-stage capitalism, the Catholic Church has utterly abandoned its responsibility to its calling.
Nicole
I’m in the middle of reading “Ayn Rand and the World She Made,” which is a pretty good biography of her- I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; her life makes for more entertaining and salacious reading than anything in any of her novels and I read all four of them (Don’t judge me; I had a big crush on a boy who was a huge Randite and back then I’d do anything to get the object of my crush to notice me. I learned to juggle for another one. Seriously.). The thing about Rand is that she was a Russian Jew whose upper-middle-class family lost everything in the Revolution. So, a member of a persecuted minority who was financially well-off and ended up poor as a result of a movement towards Communism. Add to that that she was whip-smart, socially awkward, short, chubby and not very attractive and it’s not at all surprising that she wrote the kind of stuff she did.
So, while I understand from where her paranoia, feelings of superiority and hatred of anything that to her, smelled of communism (which included the New Deal, religion and apparently raising children) originated, I scratch my head over the paranoia, feelings of superiority and hatred of anything resembling compassion exhibited by her fans, most of whom in my experience are men, American and WASPs.
Davis X. Machina
@Judas Escargot, @beltane:
For the RC church of your youth, find out wherever the nuns are working, and go watch.
It’s still out there, it’s just ignoring the boss.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
See for example, the history of Christianity.
elf
seems to me to describe the last and possibly this administration pretty well
beltane
@Nicole: It’s very easy to understand why pampered, upper-class WASP males would embrace the writing of a bitter refugee like Ayn Rand. They are, without exception, mediocrities, cowardly, intellectually lazy, and brimming over with a sneering sense of entitlement. The only thing these people lack is an ideology that provides them with a justification for their undeserved affluence and somewhat parasitic existence. Ayn Rand provides them with this in spade.
In the old days, the ruling elite used to base their privilege on claims of noble descent from superior lineages, a claim that was expected to be proven through occasional feats of bravery in battle. Our chubby, suburban-bred Galtians would be as likely to display feats of bravery in battle as they would be to fly to Jupiter.
ruemara
Any of you a fan of the better sci-fi being written out there? I mean, of course, the stuff for teens, usually English authors but there are few. I finished the Pendragon series around the start of the mid term elections ramp up. These guys are all Ravinians. They’ll sign up be a part of the elite, they’ll support any evil thing that targets ‘those people’, until they start to fear that it may happen to them. And then, like all cowards, they’ll shut up and wait for someone else to bail them out. It was the easiest recommendation I could make to anyone to get a sense of what the mind set of these people were.
Short Bus Bully
Ayn Rand is the official apologist for the Feudal Aristocracy and all its brilliance. It’s for all those who were born on 3rd base and need to justify to the world that their sense of entitlement is justified.
Someone said it earlier: Rand and Strauss are all about defending open selfishness. If you want to compare that to the teachings of Jesus you could make the argument that Rand and her followers are the Anti-Jesus (there’s another name for that personage that I can’t seem to recall…).
I’ve put forward that argument to several Rand fans, including my highly religious in-laws and had heads spin around nearly 360 degrees. Good times.
Mike in NC
@beltane:
It was probably only a matter of time until two authoritarian organizations in this country — the Catholic church and the Republican party — found enough in common to join forces. The common ground being total opposition to any form of birth control, which dates approximately to the early 1980s.
When I was growing up, I didn’t know of a single Catholic who was Republican. Apparently now most are, including Boehner, some members of the Supreme Court, and probably quite a large percentage of the Tea Party followers.
Nicole
@Short Bus Bully: Heh. I’d like to be at your in-laws’ to see that. Rand was pretty scathing about religion in her novels- I remember scratching my head, reading them as a teenager. In her novels the Jesus freaks are all socialist liberals and by the time I was reading them, in the 1980’s, the Religious Right was in full swing. I wonder how she’d have felt about that. I think a lot of the Christian-identifying folk who claim to adore her books haven’t actually read them.
MikeAdamson
Thanks for the pointer Doug.
Mark S.
In my experience with conservative Catholics, it seems to me the social issues (most importantly, the big A) get them in the door and then they gradually start accepting all the other Republican bullshit. They are naturally authoritarian, so it’s not a big leap from accepting everything the Church says to accepting everything Rush and Fox News say.
In regards to Strauss, granted I’ve never read him, but he just seems like warmed over Plato, with an overwhelming emphasis on certain books of the Republic. I can see the appeal: everyone likes to think they possess some special, “esoteric” knowledge that the rest of us dolts lack. I guess I don’t see why he inspires such fanatical devotion.
ETA: What Mike in NC said. That describes my parents exactly: Dems until the early 80’s, then hardcore Repubs, all because of social issues.
DW
I think the fondness for Galtian elites results from a kind of feedback loop. For a couple of generations we’ve had a steadily growing gap between elites and ordinary people. That creates an increasing desire among elites for an ideology to justify this gap. At the same time, the increasing distance between elites and the ordinary makes it seem unlikely ordinary people can accomplish much of anything. So pop culture heroes also because increasingly elite and “special” shifting from Rodger Young to Rambo.
As for the Catholic thing, it’s very simple – snobbery. The Catholic Church itself is not elite. Membership is over one billion and theoretically could encompass the entire human race. However, the high level conservatives who convert to Catholicism often join elite groups within the church like Opus Dei. They’re not going to risk rubbing shoulders with proles at Mass. There’s also a priest based in DC who makes a point of trying to convert the rich and powerful based on a misreading of Rodney Stark. The position of Catholicism in America also makes it appealing to conservative intellectuals. Unlike evangelical Protestants, Catholicism doesn’t have white trash connotations. Unlike Mormonism it is not far out of the religious and cultural mainstream. As a bonus, there’s a fair number of liberals who have a particular axe to grind against Catholicism, so a convert can claim an easy martyrdom. On the whole, if you’re a conservative intellectual with upscale aspirations, there are few better religious choices than Catholicism.
Judas Escargot
@Davis X. Machina, @beltane:
For the RC church of your youth, find out wherever the nuns are working, and go watch. It’s still out there, it’s just ignoring the boss.
Not surprising. And I suspect there may be more than a few good Jesuits left out there, too.
A few months ago I watched some English (Anglo-Irish?) documentary on the Jesuits, hosted by the late Cyril Cusack (Netflix streaming plus insomnia can lead to some weird places). As someone who was largely educated by Jesuits, the tone was surprising: A lot of interviewees (and the host) quite literally sneering at the ‘trendy liberalism’ of more recent Jesuitism. Granted, an English Catholic is going to be a very different creature from the Boston-Irish Catholic of my 1970s upbringing, but the contrast was… glaring.
Very odd, since the Jesuit priests of my youth were virtually all fiery left-wing populists. If they were under 30, they were fresh from a stint in some parish in Africa or Latin America. If they were over 30, they’d lecture you on how Marx and Lenin were evil because they had co-opted the goals of Christianity for cynical political purposes, not because of their opposition to any flaws in the existing capitalist order.
I am no longer Catholic nor even Christian, but I still remember and respect the hell out of those men, and (like beltane) wish there were more of them visible these days.
Nicole
@beltane: Yeah, except that the person who encouraged me to read Rand was working poor. Very socially awkward, as I now look at him in retrospect. I knew a lot of working poor and lower-middle-class guys who were Rand fans. I think she appeals to a lot of socially awkward young men who take comfort in her heroes also being socially awkward and that it being something wrong with the rest of society, and not wrong with them. Because there aren’t enough rich people in the world to explain the continued sales of her novels.
Tlachtga
@DW:
Unlike evangelical Protestants, Catholicism doesn’t have white trash connotations.
Really? Ever been to Boston or Philly? ‘Cause my family was Irish Catholic in Philadelphia, and believe me, it wasn’t exactly an elite position. Maybe things are different in different places–i.e. Washington DC–but at least in the rest of the Northeast, I don’t really see what you’re saying.
Scott P.
No? The late 70s-early 80s were much worse than today.
AAA Bonds
Hit Harper’s Magazine up if you want a good (old) article on Strauss:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/06/0080073
Then read everything Scott Horton’s ever written on the subject, starting with:
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/letter_16.html
cyd
It should be pointed out that those “Enlightenment ideas of the blank state” happen to be wrong. After all, philosophers like John Locke did not have the benefit of Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection and subsequent scientific developments.
Menzies
@ruemara:
If I’m reading you right – and if I’m not, I apologize, it’s a weird Sunday – that’s why I stopped reading a lot of sci-fi. Seeing the section for my favorite genre, military sci-fi, filled with the likes of Larry Niven, John Ringo and David Weber, just gets me down.
beltane
@Nicole: I guess the reason these socially awkward young men read Ayn Rand is the same reason some socially awkward young women read romance novels. There will always be a market for fairy tales that promise wish fulfillment.
Davis X. Machina
@Judas Escargot: My 9th grade Religion class — at a certain Boston Jesuit high school — all read The Other America — and when I heard that Michael Harrington was one of the founders of Democratic Socia1ists USA, I ran out and joined. Father Arrupe’s “Men for Others” was our normative document. This tradition was still alive in the late ’80’s when I taught for the Order for a few years. We all knew, our students all knew, the names of the fathers killed in El Salvador — and who killed them and why.
I’ve lost institutional touch with the Jesuits recently, but the few individuals I bump into now and again are still cut from that cloth.
DW
@Mike in NC:
Actually, a lot of Catholics are still Democrats. It’s not just Nancy Pelosi. Bear in mind most Latinos are Catholic. Beyond that, bishops have always been Republican – they’ve just gotten more assertive about it. As a practical matter that’s done more to hurt the Catholic church than help Republicans. The Church looks authoritarian on paper but in practice the bishops have very little real ability to reward or punish Catholics. They’re pretty easy to avoid by leaving the Church or to simply ignore. The Pew charitable trust did a recent survey finding that about a third of Americans have been raised Catholic but only one quarter of adults are Catholic. That’s a pretty extreme loss rate. For every Newt Gingrich the Church picks up they lose a dozen ordinary souls.
AAA Bonds
@Mike in NC:
Actually, American Catholics are far more Democratic-friendly than American Protestants.
Take 2004: Kerry lost Catholics overall by only 5% – compared to a 19% gap for Protestants.
Then take 2008: Obama won a majority of the Catholic vote (54%).
The real issue is that a large amount of American Catholics are political liberals, but it also helps that the Church itself is not a “conservative” organization in the Republican sense. The Church actively supports:
1) the Palestinian cause,
2) organized labor,
3) fair treatment of illegal immigrants,
4) the anti-war movement,
5) the anti-death-penalty movement,
6) criticism of capitalism as a worldly system.
Above, DW does a decent job explaining why so many Republicans are drawn to Catholicism late in life anyway: an orderly conversion experience that, nowadays, provides Christian bonafides to Protestant voters – and a politicized American Catholic elite that doesn’t represent the Church.
Important stuff to remember:
a) if a pro-choice Catholic is a ‘bad Catholic’ by catechism, a pro-death-penalty Catholic is as well.
b) there are a lot of moderate-to-liberal Catholics in the United States, and they are a crucial bloc for national elections.
AAA Bonds
Oh, and one more thing worth noting: the Church is actively environmentalist in its interpretation of Genesis. I have family working for a diocese and let me tell you, they are not kidding around with this green stuff.
Mnemosyne
@Menzies:
If you’ve never seen it (and you probably have, because it’s an internet classic) the ultimate critical appraisal of Ringo is right here. It’s hilarious and made me resolve to never, ever read one of Ringo’s books.
Hob
@Judas Escargot: If one actually reads the stories, Rand’s heroes were generally what we’d call ‘Creatives’ now: Inventors, engineers, architects, artists (of course, since she was one), etc, who want to keep all the profits of their creativity.
That’s only true of John Galt himself, and maybe the guy in Anthem. Most of Rand’s other heroes would more accurately be described as “creatives” who care more about imposing their will on others than making money (Roark), or who are very successful and don’t face any serious challenge to ownership of their work but aren’t sufficiently appreciated for being awesome (Rearden), or people who are just good at making money and aren’t particularly creative at all (Taggart). The only thing they have in common is her ideology, and she has only contempt for creative types who don’t share her ideology.
Karmakin
@Violet:
This is it actually.
Over the last 30 years, the reaction of Christianity to “encroachment” by other religions/belief systems/ideas, has generally been to embrace fundamentalist religious belief. One of these fundamental ideas is that god is an active influence in our universe and can directly do things to change our world.
This belief, when you look at the world makes it perfectly “logical” that god not only doesn’t disapprove of social/economic stratification, he desires it. And as such, it’s not enough that the poor simply be poor, they have to be actively punished for the crime of being poor. People who are different, need to be actively punished for it. Etc.
And because this was approved by religious leaders, who by our society are given the role of “moral experts”, it’s something that gained a lot of traction, even among those outside of those religious beliefs, again because selfishness is VERY attractive, and here we are justifying it.
And it’s even gaining traction in RC leadership, which is insane because it’s basically blasphemy.
I (and others) call it neo-calvinism, and it’s a social/political poison. (It was heavily promoted via Amway channels during the 80’s/90’s…keep that in mind when you see their ads these days)
Janet Strange
@DW: Love your analysis. Sure as hell explains the Newt.
For more on the toxic strain of Straussism in the Catholic Church, it’s important to understand the Carlists. (A matter of some interest to me since I attended UD when Kendall and Wilhelmson were teaching there, though I fled before graduating.)
For example:
AAA Bonds
If you want the closest you’ll get to the straight dope on this issue, check out the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey:
http://religions.pewforum.org/
And also some preliminary findings on 2010 and religion:
http://pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/Religion-in-the-2010-Election-A-Preliminary-Look.aspx
Even in Republican-friendly 2010, Catholic support for Democrats was significantly higher than that of Protestants overall.
Also, while white Catholics split 60-40 in favor of Republicans in 2010, the same group went 50-50 in the 2006 elections.
This suggests that even when the Hispanic/Latino Catholic vote is set aside (that vote, of course, remains Democratic-leaning), Catholics are still a group that Democrats can capture in national elections.
monkeyboy
Dougj:
The generation immediately following the “hippie generation” was known as the Me generation. (by “me generation” I mean those who came of age during the decline of the hippies, not those hippies who traded in their tie-dies and pot for suits and cocaine).
The me generation had a lot of “fuck compassion and social concerns – how do I get ahead”. I can’t think of a single Disco song that had a pro social-consciousness message.
Scott P.
Larry Niven writes military sci-fi? That’s certainly not how I think of him. Maybe you’re thinking of the stuff he co-wrote with Jerry Pournelle, who if you’ve read his stuff straight is a proto-fascist. Niven waters him down considerably.
Nicole
@beltane: Heh. Excellent point. And it made me think of a quip Rand made about the sex scenes in The Fountainhead– when asked whether they came from, she said, “Wishful thinking.”
Carl Nyberg
Put Friedrich Nietzsche on the list of intellectuals who were skeptical of egalitarianism.
At least one Republican I know went through a Nietzsche phase.
Another Bob
So even if we understood why Republicans are assholes, what would it matter? They’ll still be assholes. Dick Cheney doesn’t deserve understanding, he deserves a shit pie in the face and a criminal prosecution. Greedy, selfish bastards will inevitably construct a bogus, self-serving philosophy to soothe their whoring souls. Fuck ’em. Who cares how they do it?
Nicole
@Hob:
I would disagree with that- Roark was portrayed as someone who wanted to build his buildings his way- if anything, he just wanted the rest of humanity to stay out of his way. Rearden was depicted as a self-made man who creates a new metal alloy superior to anything else on the market (and then is denied the right to sell it) and Taggart (I assume you mean Dagny and not James) was very good at operating a railroad. The thrust of that endless novel was that creative people have no motivation to create in a world where the state could take away the fruits of their creative energy. (But really, you could make the same argument about a natural disaster- why write a play if an earthquake might someday come along and swallow up your manuscript? Life is full of uncertainties, but not in Rand’s world, that’s for sure.)
eemom
@Nicole:
I really appreciate the human face you have put on Rand and some of her acolytes. We’re all susceptible to mindless demonization of those whose ideas we deplore, and I’ll admit it never even occurred to me to consider where Rand herself “came from.”
Ahem.
Sooooo…….since you’re reading this bio……DID she actually diddle Alan Greenspan, or not?
Inquiring minds, etc. etc.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom:
Ew.
Brachiator
@DougJ:
These ideas may have been tamped down by a more liberal period in American history, but they were always out there. The smoldering flame was kept alive by magazines like Reason and National Review.
A recent profile of Rose Lane, daughter of Little House author Laura Ingalls Wilder reveals some of the surprising roots of libertarian thought (Wilder Women: The mother and daughter behind the Little House stories).
Lane edited Wilder’s work so completely that she might be considered to be a co-author. One idea that was considerably softened, but shared by both mther and daughter, was the idea of the settlers as exceptionalists, despite the often hard life and outright failures of some of the people who sought to make a life in the rugged heartland in the 19th century.
And curiously enough, these “rugged individualists” don’t see people other then their own tribe, and often conveniently forget or dismiss the social safety net that helped them at their most vulnerable.
This latest eruption of Galtian values is, for some, that old time religion.
smith
@Short Bus Bully:
Do your highly religious in-laws know that Rand was a proud and devout atheist who despised all religions and considered religion an “insult” to an intelligent person?
It always makes me laugh at how many ultra-religious people I know who are Rand fans and conveniently “forget” how violently anti-religion in general she was.
Bill Murray
@Scott P.:
But they were also 30 years ago
Roy G
Regarding Rand, at first, I was mystified at first why my favorite college professor completely dissed her – just as I was mystified at an earlier age why Ted Nugent was never included in any lists of the Greatest Guitarists Ever;)
TheMightyTrowel
@Brachiator: I feel so dirty now. I read all those books, repeatedly and compusively, when i was a small child.
Nicole
@eemom: Thanks. I’m a big believer in our environments influencing us (probably one of the reasons I’m such a screaming liberal) and am always interested in where people come from. I’m not a fan of Rand’s novels, though I confess to enjoying The Fountainhead in the same way I enjoyed Valley of the Dolls and Gone With the Wind, and there are some writers that tickle my interest enough to learn about them (come to think of it, I’ve also read biographies of Jacqueline Susann and Margaret Mitchell). For all that Ayn Rand convinced herself she sprang, fully formed, into existence, she was very much a product of her culture and time and a lot of her writing is clearly her getting even with people who hurt her growing up. Nowadays, what I find most interesting about her writing is her command of English, which she didn’t begin learning until she was in her late teens.
As for Greenspan, she called him “The Undertaker” behind his back. Heh. She did have an affair with one of her very handsome acolytes when she was in her fifties and he was in his early twenties (and both married). She dedicated Atlas Shrugged to him and to her husband. When the guy left her for someone his own age she. freaked. out.
Hob
@Nicole: I’m not sure what you’re disagreeing with. Dagny Taggart wasn’t “creative” unless you’re just using that word to mean “good at doing something.” Roark was creative, but he wasn’t motivated by profit– which is what Judas was talking about– and he wasn’t in conflict with “the state.” Rearden was an inventor, and he did profit exclusively from his invention– that is until the state attempted to nationalize all patents on everything; that could indeed be seen as putting a damper on invention, but once Rand has her villains going full-out Stalinist it’s hard to see the heroes as really illustrating anything about the risks of liberalism.
MAJeff
@Brachiator:
Living in NoDak, that rings so completely true. We are, to the best of my knowledge, the only one of the fifty states with a state-owned and run bank.
http://www.banknd.nd.gov/
SOCIALISM!
We have multiple military bases, and the Pomeroy/Conrad/Dorgan trio was very good about bringing federal money in here.
SOCIALISM!
We’ve also got tons of right-wing, teabagging, “rugged individualists” who think that Rush and Glenn and Michele and Sarah are teh shit.
If it weren’t for an oil boom, we’d be suffering like everyone else, but these crackers think their immune because of their rugged conservative responsible individualism.
Nicole
@Hob: I think it depends on what one construes as “creative.” The character of Dagny pushes for a new railroad line into Colorado, or whichever Libertarian paradise Rand used (it’s been 20 years or so since I opened one of Rand’s books) which is creating something. Rand certainly saw her as a mover and shaker, a creator of something. My point was that Readen wasn’t annoyed about not being recognized for being so very awesome (none of Rand’s heroes ever care what the unwashed masses think of them) and created something and that Roark also, as an architect, was creating something.
I don’t disagree with you about how the “heroes” come across; again, I’m not a fan; but Rand herself saw them as creators, regardless of how you and I interpret them. And she wouldn’t have cared how we interpreted them. (Or rather, she would have been very upset that we didn’t get what she was trying to say, and so would have told everyone she didn’t care what we thought of her because she couldn’t ever admit to hurt fee fees.)
Nicole
@TheMightyTrowel:I remember being very disappointed in The First Four Years because it didn’t read like a Little House book. I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with it, but I knew it wasn’t right. Years later I found out it had been found in the attic after LIW died and had never been revised. Which now I think means her daughter never got to collaborate on it. Ah, Rose. You might have been a crazy Libertarian, but you sure could co-write a children’s book.
agrippa
It is not new by any means. It is the old story of justifying rule by the opitimates’. It went on the classical world, and on down to day.
Strauss put old wine in a new bottle.
Mnemosyne
@Nicole:
They made that part of her life into a movie with Helen Mirren a few years ago: The Passion of Ayn Rand, though it sounds like Eric Stolz was a wee bit too old to be playing Nathaniel Branden.
Judas Escargot
@Hob:
Roark was creative, but he wasn’t motivated by profit—which is what Judas was talking about
Judas, regretfully, misspoke: You’re correct about Roark (from what I remember, I last read The Fountainhead almost 20 years ago) in that he was all about control over his creation, not just dollars and cents. But this just reinforces my claim that Rand thought of herself as being for the ‘Creatives’ and not the grifters.
Roark blows up the building he designed, rather than let the ‘Second-Handers’ pollute his vision. Seeing as those second-handers were the ones who paid for the building (Roark was an architect, working on commission after all), I doubt today’s glibertarians would find themselves on Roark’s side in real life.
Even the just-wealthy people in her books tended to be financiers in the 19th/20th cent. model: Using their wealth to build railroads, dig mines or invent perpetual motion machines. I don’t consider the current crop of “financiers” on Wall Street –essentially middlemen, soaking their beak as the Italians say– to be of this model at all.
In any case, the fact that a career politician like Paul Ryan (or any of the other glibertarians we so love to mock here for that matter) can seriously try to equate themselves as Galtian heroes is the most ridiculous thing about Objectivism today.
Sensible people must mock them for this at every opportunity, if only to dilute their toxic memes.
eemom
@Mnemosyne:
a very versatile fellow though, Eric Stolz. From the deformed teenager Rocky Dennis in “Mask,” to the bathrobed drug dealer in “Pulp Fiction,” to Laurie’s tutor/Meg’s husband in “Little Women”……and now, you say, Ayn Rand’s lover. Interesting.
Good thing the rumors about Greenspan weren’t true; they’d’ve had a devil of a time finding an actor ugly enough to play him.
Parmenides
@cleek:
The misunderstanding of the Noble Lie has always bothered me. In my reading of the Republic, Plato is using the lie as the basis for the legitimacy of the the state’s social and political order. It is called a lie when it is introduced. I personally thought it was a commentary on the political legitimacy of any state or ruling order.
There is always a tension in Plato about the proper way to be part of a political or social state. Even though Plato goes out of his way to show Socrates as the model Athenian he also shows that he is completely on his own as a person. He might serve in the army but he does not need to believe that the battle or the war is the correct thing to do in order to serve properly. For Socrates, as Plato presents him, it is proper to defend the state because you are part of it and it shapes you but that does not mean that the governing apparatus of the state is proper and correct.
The Noble Lie is that any state has an inherent legitimacy. The closest the enlightenment got was the idea that the state exists because of the will of the people. But it abstracts will to the whole without giving a real mechanism for the individual will to contribute to the people’s will.
quaint irene
Hey, it worked for Harry Potter. (“You’re a wizard, Harry!)
srv
@Judas Escargot: Today’s libertarians fancy themselves as Roark (aka Frank Lloyd Wright), but they aren’t artists. They’re just assholes who want a reason to be apart or be rich and act Galt.
YellowJournalism
@dirge:
Poor is the new black, after all.
Brachiator
@Parmenides:
But here is the conumdrum (and perhaps where philosophers tie themselves into knots): human beings are inherently social animals. Creating a state, creating government, represents a formal, conscious, deliberate attempt to take control of part of who we are.
By the way, I’ve only read The Fountainhead. Does any of Rand’s heroes have children or raise a family in any of her novels?
Parmenides
@Brachiator:
That Humans are inherently social gives us the fact of the state but it doesn’t give us its shape. What gives anyone the actual authority to control someone else’s life. Plato’s answer was nothing.
Your right though that that conundrum ties philosophers in knots. Its actually supposed to. Plato never wrote down definitive answers, anytime he does, at least outside of the laws, something is contradicting his answer somewhat. In the discussion of poetry in The Republic Socrates says that they won’t allow any Poetry that pretends to speak in the words of someone other than the author. That admonition is written in a dialogue which is entirely pretends to speak in the words of someone other than the author.
Oh and Ayn Rand is an idiot. Saying that your philosophy is based on the principal of identity is weak. Strauss is of limited importance since he’s not particularly fun to read and his interpretations of old books isn’t particularly interesting and are actually somewhat banal. Strauss railed against democracy and the enlightenment from the position of a professor. His stupid followers took his ideas and then went into democratic government.
IM
Strauss is a minor offshot of the young or revolutionary conservatives in Germany pre 1933. He couldn’t, to his great regret, join in the fun after 1933 because he was jewish.
There were other cases of this sort, like Kantorowitz, but Kantorowitz at least repented his earlier views. Strauss always stayed in the Nietzsche – Schmitt – Jünger – Spengler mold.
HyperIon
and in the south, it’s white people.
Brachiator
@Parmenides:
True, but for me this fact of human existence renders questions about the legitimacy of the state moot.
I suppose I could read this as a weak attaboy for democracy, though obviously Plato does not appear to particularly endorse any specific form of government, if I recall my ancient reading of The Republic correctly.
Delia
@HyperIon:
But this brings us back to the original contradiction. Both the Straussians and the Randians want to be atheistic aristocrats of the highest order to play their game (though I’ve been trying all afternoon to visualize Bill Kristol getting his jollies from the contemplation of pure philosophy and I think I’m going to have nightmares tonight). We all know they’re using the rubes at the tea parties for their own purposes, but how long can it last?
There was a conservative Christian in Dubya’s administration named David Kuo. I think he was in charge of the faith-based initiatives or something. Whatever you think of his beliefs he was apparently very sincere about wanting to help the poor and he quit the job and wrote a book when he decided he was being played for a sucker. I know the American public is getting dumber by the day, but I just wonder what will happen if the yokels finally wake up and figure out they’re being played.
Delia
@Brachiator:
My recollection, also ancient, is that Plato specifically did not like democracy since it had brought Athens to disaster during the Peloponnesian War.
Mark S.
@Delia:
More generally, he thought that because most people are idiots they will elect demagogues who will soon turn the state into a dictatorship.
I’m not sure he was completely wrong about that.
Brachiator
@Delia:
Good point. And yet, an irony seems to be that the Greeks, for all their sophistication, seemed to have a weak spot for rule by aristocrats, and also could not find a way to reconcile the wildly divergent perspectives of the Spartans and the Athenians in order to deal with their common foe, the Persians.
When I get really crazy philosophical, I see the stupid insistence that liberal and conservative ideology are the only ones that could ever matter and cannot be reconciled as variations on an old, futile theme.
And then there is Alcibiades, friend to Socrates, who played the Spartans, Athenians, and Persians against each other, and perhaps ultimately helped seal the fate of the ancient Greeks.
J Edgar
@Brachiator:
By the way, I’ve only read The Fountainhead. Does any of Rand’s heroes have children or raise a family in any of her novels?
As someone who read all the Ayn Rand stories and newsletters, really and truly, I’m certain this is the funniest thing I will hear in all of 2011.
BrianM
@beltane: Sadly, I know a few Randians who are in fact really smart and really accomplished. I wish it were as simple as you say.
Delia
@Brachiator:
Yeah, there’s always one of those. It’s a comfort in a way. Any time you get those snotty philosopher-kings or generals or aristocrats who think they’re too good for anyone else, some shark like Alcibiades turns up and screws everybody. Sort of reminds you what the human race is all about.
Which reminds me: back when everyone was talking about Roark and hero-architects, I dug up
The Architect Sketch
Brachiator
@J Edgar: RE: By the way, I’ve only read The Fountainhead. Does any of Rand’s heroes have children or raise a family in any of her novels?
The question was semi-rhetorical. I’ve known some objectivists who asserted that they could raise perfectly heroic rugged individualistic children, but I was never quite sure where they got this notion from, since for everything else they had some Rand citation, but not for this. In reading about her work, I never came across much about the subject.
Otherwise, Randosity appears to erupt at late adolescence or early adulthood and is largely unconnected from family life.
But as someone who has read all the Randian body of work, surely you could take some time and enlighten us all.
jake the snake
@Delia:
The thesis of I. F. Stone’s book about Socrates is that
he was executed because of his opposition to Athenian
Democracy. Most of what we think we know about Socrates comes from Plato.
J Edgar
@Brachiator:
Sorry, I couldn’t say more then because I was laughing so much. Her heroes are always orphaned before they become their own person, and that is really the end of any family thoughts. None of the good guys/girls have any children, want any children, or have any contact with children.
There is sex, but there is no idle time with sexual thoughts (“She imagined him naked” NOT) or fantasies. The good guys/girls just do it, and then move on.
I guess some would say there are sexual longings, but I wouldn’t call it that. Sorry, it’s too painful and stupid to elaborate now. It’s like debating the sexiness of Sarah Palin.
In 30 years, I have never come across any critique of the role of family in the Randian universe, other than the Barbara Branden book. It’s just non-existent.
The worship of Rand, with her athetistic, pro-abortion, and null-family beliefs, by heavy-duty Christians is just mind-boggling. I guess it is just about the superiority.
Tom Betz
@Dougj — These ideas have been strong — and been mocked — for much longer than 20 years.
One word: “Network”.
Joe Buck
Rand is basically a Marxist. That is, she accepts much of his analysis of the economic situation, agrees that economics is central to politics, and agrees that there’s a class struggle between the owners and the workers. The only difference is that she roots for the owners, claiming that the owners deserve all of the spoils.
DW
@J Edgar:
Kids by nature shoot Randian fantasies to hell. Once you bring in children the whole glorious vision of autonomous individuals gets shot to hell. Children are dependent on adults and raising children is pretty much a one sided exchange – children will rarely do as much for parents as their parents did for them. So it’s hard to maintain the fantasy of extreme individualism once you introduce children. You can’t claim you’re free of all claims by other human beings any more. This is even more true in the modern age when it takes far longer and far more labor to raise a child into adulthood.
As for Christians and Rand, that’s just the secular American faith in individualism, tossed in with a bit of racism to justify why “good” people should get government help but “bad” people shouldn’t. Others have pointed out it’s all an illusion – a lot of the Tea Party/Randian crowd live in regions or work at jobs heavily dependent on government spending and a lot more are elderly who owe their reasonably comfortable lives to social security and Medicare, but think that somehow doesn’t count. As a side note – Randian philosophy is pretty hostile to Catholic thinking which tends to emphasize the individual’s relation to the community.
Sara Paretsky’s Notes in a Time of Silence has a good essay that ties together Laura Ingalls Wilder, Raymond Chandler and the American myth of individualism. She doesn’t work in Rand though.
Delia
@DW:
Well, the American faith in individualism isn’t exactly biblical Christianity, which is more communitarian. You note that further down for the Catholics, but it’s true for mainstream Protestants, too. Except, I guess, for the crazy, off-the-deep-end fundies who think they can be buddies with the Randians and the Straussians who have appointed themselves everybody’s overlords.
4jkb4ia
DougJ, 17 years ago I was in a political theory course where the translations of Bloom and Mansfield were used simply because they were the best. And “The Closing of the American Mind” had been out for years by that point. Although I have not made a study of this, if you were a movement conservative it was easy to overlook Bloom’s blatant elitism because the book gave you a cudgel to attack universities which you wanted to do in the first place and to attack The Sixties in the person of professors and students. Similarly if you support Strauss you support a key to creating an intellectual elite which is mainly interested in the conditions for philosophizing. If you are involved in politics you have the field to yourself as far as engaging the people.
anonforthis
I’ve read most of Strauss’ published work and I took several classes from some of his students or those closely affiliated with him at the University of Chicago (Bloom, Cropsey, and others) and I really can’t reconcile this statement with his work – even as a gross simplification.
I understand that there are people who call themselves “Straussians” who believe and say some pretty revolting things, but they, too, misrepresent his legacy.
I’d recommend “Thoughts on Machiavelli” as a good introduction to his work, assuming one has a working knowledge of Machiavelli.
Brachiator
@J Edgar:
I suspected as much. Thanks for the clarification.
Here you may sell Rand somewhat short, at least with respect to The Fountainhead. I knew a woman who was seriously aroused by the rough sex and ongoing relationship between Roark and Dominique in that novel.
Carl Nyberg
@Delia:
There are two ways to look at government.
One way is to want government to uplift people who are deserving, doing something worthwhile or who are like you.
The other way is to want government to harm and penalize people you don’t like.
If you don’t believe government can help people like you then using government to oppress and harass people you don’t like makes more sense.
The “liberals” have been tricked and manipulated into defending the status quo instead of making the case for something better.
This allows the authoritarian Right Wing to make the case that government isn’t doing much and it should be more focused on the military and law enforcement.
slightly_peeved
@DW:
And if neocons/randroids expect neuroscience, or any other study of human behaviour, to tell them otherwise, I’d expect them to be disappointed.
bjacques
Yummy thread. The Harper’s link way up there is a pay link, but the Balkinization piece is great. I’ve been giving Strauss too much credit.
I used to think he was just an Enlightenment philosopher who lost his faith and then his nerve, figuring that democracies had to learn to beat fascism at its own game, even if it meant playing dirty. Instead, it’s more like he was down with the fascists until they turned on him. And, yeah, he appeals to half-smart guys who got their asses kicked in school but clearly not often enough. That appeal is multigenerational, not just for those of the Me Decade.
If Ayn Rand looked like Helen Mirren, I’d probably still be a fan, especially with that liquid Russian accent like in “2010.” Rrrowwwrrr!
Paul in KY
@Mike in NC: What happened was a radical pushback by the church hierarchy against the reforms of John XXIII.
The election of John Paul II signaled the effective end of Vatican II & the church siding with the DFHers.
Chris
@Davis X. Machina:
This.
What I saw at the Catholic Student Association at my college was that the people in the community who were movement conservatives were also the ones who loved climbing ladders and jockeying for the influential positions (in the CSA and then bigger things like the Knights of Colombus).
The people in the community who were liberals, moderates or apolitical, on the other hand, didn’t like the bullshit. They weren’t into climbing ladders, they just wanted to serve, whether it was the on-campus community, surrounding churches, or poor people in the inner city.
So basically, plenty of good Catholics, but the hierarchy climbers tend to be bad guys. (Not a problem limited to the RCC).
Chris
@Davis X. Machina:
This.
What I saw at the Catholic Student Association at my college was that the people in the community who were movement conservatives were also the ones who loved climbing ladders and jockeying for the influential positions (in the CSA and then bigger things like the Knights of Colombus).
The people in the community who were liberals, moderates or apolitical, on the other hand, didn’t like the bullshit. They weren’t into climbing ladders, they just wanted to serve, whether it was the on-campus community, surrounding churches, or poor people in the inner city.
So basically, plenty of good Catholics, but the hierarchy climbers tend to be bad guys. (Not a problem limited to the RCC).
Chris
@Menzies:
Try John Scalzi, if you haven’t already. I discovered him over Thanksgiving and really enjoyed “Old Man’s War” – it’s military fiction, but certainly not gung-ho bullshit of the kind you seem to be criticizing.
Also, I’d add Orson Scott Card to your list of sci-fi authors gone batshit insane. The “Empire” duology isn’t technically sci-fi, but it’s really, really, really bad. I’ll try and remember him fondly for “Ender’s Game”…
Chris
@Delia:
One day, the evangelical community is finally going to wake up and realize that they’ve been completely boned. It won’t happen for decades, but it will happen.
What happens then? I wonder if something like the Southern Strategy in reverse might happen, actually. The evangelical fire to stop society’s ills isn’t necessarily anti-liberal; remember abolition and Progressivism? It’s just speculation, but I wonder if the potential for a Religious Left might be there (like I said, decades in the future at best, this isn’t something right around the corner).
someguy
Because George Wallace wasn’t available.
Parmenides
For most conservatives as long as the form is kept then the content can be lost. Think of all the people screaming about relativism and then attacking science as just one view of reality.
Chris
Oh. And one last thing, that just occurred to me, re the “how did Strauss and Rand become conservative heroes?” debate;
It’s worth mentioning that virtually none of the conservatives’ idols lives up to the values conservatives pin on them.
Jesus got along with the poor, the outcasts and the hated foreigners, demanded altruism from his followers and oh, by the way, that little thing about the camel and the eye of the needle.
The Founding Fathers were either deists or religiously tolerant, one of them coining the phrase “separation of church and state” while another signed the Treaty of Tripoli (“As the United States is not, in any sense, founded upon the Christian religion…”)
Adam Smith called for both progressive taxation and government regulation, and criticized atmospheres in which the rich flaunted their contempt for the poor. Etc, etc, etc…
The True Conservative Role Model exists only in their imagination. An even more interesting question is, why do conservatives keep clinging to idols who would clearly hate what they stood for, and how do they come to believe these guys would be on their side?