How Ayn Rand Became the New Right’s Version of Marx
Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats
by GEORGE MONBIOT (March 5, 2012)
http://www.commondreams.org/
It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.
Ignoring Rand’s evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken
her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards
reading “Who is John Galt?” and “Rand was right”. Rand, Weiss argues,
provides the unifying ideology which has “distilled vague anger and
unhappiness into a sense of purpose”. She is energetically promoted by
the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is
the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.
But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy:
as Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted
member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US
Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those
published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the
Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you’ll find the philosophy he
brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of
business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as “the ‘greed’ of
the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the
unexcelled protector of the consumer”. As for bankers, their need to
win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with
honor and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a
“superlatively moral system”.
Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru’s philosophy to the
letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining
banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives
trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is
already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has
successfully airbrushed history.
Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the
Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the
wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the ultra-
rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.
http://www.commondreams.org/
Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats
by GEORGE MONBIOT (March 5, 2012)
http://www.commondreams.org/
It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.
Ignoring Rand’s evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken
her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards
reading “Who is John Galt?” and “Rand was right”. Rand, Weiss argues,
provides the unifying ideology which has “distilled vague anger and
unhappiness into a sense of purpose”. She is energetically promoted by
the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is
the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.
But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy:
as Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted
member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US
Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those
published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the
Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you’ll find the philosophy he
brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of
business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as “the ‘greed’ of
the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the
unexcelled protector of the consumer”. As for bankers, their need to
win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with
honor and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a
“superlatively moral system”.
Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru’s philosophy to the
letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining
banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives
trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is
already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has
successfully airbrushed history.
Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the
Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the
wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the ultra-
rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.
http://www.commondreams.org/
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