EDGE: Conservatives And ‘Atlas Shrugged’
Together on Fantasy Island
By Scott Galupo
How can you tell that conservatives have responded to the Obama presidency by retrenching rather than reflecting? By what they apparently are reading in droves.
The Ayn Rand Institute this week announced that sales of the novel “Atlas Shrugged” by the eponymous high priestess of capitalism have tripled in the first four months of 2009 compared to the same period last year — all but guaranteeing a new annual record to top last year’s benchmark of 200,000.
That this turgid, tedious novel, published in 1957, has continually found fellow travelers on the right is a great oddity of American intellectual life. In his dismissive review of the book, Whittaker Chambers, then at National Review, called it “remarkably silly” and “preposterous” — which no doubt suited Miss Rand just fine.
An exile of the Russian Revolution, she had great admiration for America’s Founders. Her early discernment of the evils of Soviet communism was incandescent. Her criticism of 1960s campus leftism was sharp and merciless.
Yet, like the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, she refused to identify herself as a conservative; the movement’s Eisenhower-era toleration of the welfare state rendered it a dead letter, she asserted.
Nor did she hold with the libertarian label, a seemingly more appropriate category for her belief in the individual’s right to freedom from state coercion. Libertarianism for Miss Rand smacked of free-loving hippies and other assorted moral relativists.
Miss Rand was open about the fact that her self-styled philosophy — objectivism — and her belief in unfettered free markets were profoundly radical.
Then, too, there’s Miss Rand’s strident atheism. If she were alive today, she’d be right alongside Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, railing against the moral perversity that results from belief in a deity.
How well I remember reading, as a boy, a syndicated column by an Ayn Rand Institute representative that defended the “this-worldly” aspects of the Winter Solstice, better known in these parts as Christmas. The materialism of the season, he wrote, was a feature, not a bug.
Conservatives’ embrace of “Atlas Shrugged” today is nothing more than blinkered escapist fantasy — rather like a besieged army turning to Norse mythology or J.R.R. Tolkien to boost morale.
There are plenty of sources to turn to in the resistance against a newly ascendant left-liberalism, from Ludwig von Mises to Milton Friedman to Thomas Sowell. But those authors don’t buck up the rightist reader in quite the same way that “Atlas Shrugged” does.
The utilitarian argument for free markets — that they’re the most efficient means of determining the value of scarce resources and allocating them — is a far cry from the sanctification of capitalism one finds in Randism.
From whom else besides Ayn Rand, for instance, can one find such a full-throated defense of so-called Big Business, which in a 1962 lecture she dubbed “America’s persecuted minority”? Indeed, Miss Rand’s writings are catnip for those who seek to deflect any and all blame for the current economic crisis away from the private sector. Like the airtight religious belief system that it essentially is, Randian capitalism can never stumble or fail — it can only be betrayed.
Responding to fears of a federal bank takeover, David Frum wrote on his Web site NewMajority.com in February: “I wonder, though, if we conservatives understand clearly enough why it is a bad thing. It’s not because we are living through an enactment of the early chapters of ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ It’s because the banks are collapsing.”
In September 2008, it was not the titan Atlas whose shoulders were buckling; it was those of government figures such as Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who were holding the system aloft, however ineptly. (In his memorably limpid assessment of the situation, former President George W. Bush said, “This sucker could go down.”)
American conservatism, broadly speaking, has had a remarkable ability to assimilate the expansion of federal power. Quite from the beginning — from the federal assumption of states’ debts after the Revolution to the Louisiana Purchase to Henry Clay-style “internal improvements” of the nation’s infrastructure on through to the New Deal.
Nevertheless the “irritable mental gestures” of the movement, as literary critic Lionel Trilling famously put it, always lurk on the margins. The political theorist and early National Review-ite Frank Meyer, for instance, spied creeping “totalitarianism” in the federal school lunch program.
The resurgence of “Atlas Shrugged” is another of these mental gestures.
However viscerally gratifying the revenge fantasy of “Alas Shrugged” may feel today — in the novel, heroic captains of industry withdraw from the economy in protest of collectivism — it remains just that: a fantasy.
Only in a novel can capitalist-individualists such as John Galt, the fugitive embodiment of Miss Rand’s ideas and ideals, de-link themselves so dramatically and completely from government and society — “stopping the motor of the world,” as she put it in “Atlas Shrugged.”
Mired in fantasy, intoxicated by legend, embittered in non-reality: This is no way for an opposition party to act.
At least not one that has any hope of relevance or vitality.
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Rambling incoherent column.
Sounds like the writer is nervous and worried….
Yes, we should do what the democrats think it best we do….is the writer pelosi in disguise?
I have long said that the worst we could do, as the ACCDF is not shooting up the White House but detaching from the society (either going to succeeding states or succeeding ourselves). What better way to destroy it all, burn it down, then to retreat in good order, let the cities go up in flames then have the program, smarts and strength to rebuild.
I mean, so Obama is out of the picture. The framework that empowered him would still be there. Pelosi and the system that supported and elected her would still be there.
It’s harsh but what else is there?
Sure, I am going to try my hardest to be elected governor of MA but then what? There’s a whole system that needs to be pulled out by the roots and burned.
That is where the hard work will be.
As I tell my students, hitting someone is easy. Not hitting them is the hard part.
Think about it.
Scott Galupo is an idiot.
Disastrous Government meddling in the economy always begins with the formation of a Central Banking system.
In our case that would be the RE-ESTABLISMENT of the Central Bank, aka the Federal Reserve in 1913.
Then the economy just spirals out of control when politician’s meddling mess it up to the breaking point.
In our case it took nearly a century, 4 major Wars, 1 Depression and multiple recessions. All but the Wars wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have a Central Bank.
A Central Bank issues money with debt (interest) attached to it. During the Carter Presidency that debt (interest) was almost 20% per year.
Start thinking of that debt (interest)as a TAX ON YOUR WEALTH (INCOME)! Because in the end it’s the same thing. Your wealth being confiscated, by the Federal Government whose trying to inflate their way out of a budget shortfall caused by deficit spending.
Pres. Carter and the Dems in Congress back then didn’t come anywhere close to the deficit spending we’re seeing now and in ‘79 & ‘80 interest rates were through the roof.
The rocket engine of inflation is warming up and by 2011 or 2012 WE WILL SEE INTEREST RATES OF 20+ %.
There is simply no way that can not happen…
For what it’s worth, I just purchased and started reading “Atlas Shrugged” this week.
Is Galupo the word for ostrich in some obscure African dialect
Let’s all thank the nice Liberal for telling us (again) what to read and what to think about it… and never mind that he did so in such a turgid and tedious way.
This article is ridiculous. Atlas Shrugged is a prophetic vision of our future as either an immoral mixed capitalist or socialist society. Laissez faire capitalism is the only moral economic system. These ideas will change your life!
From Atlas Shrugged:
“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?
“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions–and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made–before it can be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.’
uh, someone wrote me this commment about the Dame some times ago
“It appears that this “philosophical Dame” is the muse of the capitalist elite. ”
Nah… Ayn Rand is more of a schoolchild thing, the kind of thing some kids in college take very seriously - like Marcuse albeit less violent.
The ‘capitalist elite’ is too busy lobbying the government to gain special contracts and advantages over their competitors, and also fooling their boards into giving them more pay to bother about ‘absolute’ self-reliance. ‘Self-reliance’ is good for the workers they fire - that is all.
The “author” of this “piece” (as in piece of crap) proceeds from a false assumption. (several in fact, but I’ll only point out a couple) First, he assumes that a conservative MUST agree with EVERY opinion of a writer since they chose to read them. This is patently untrue, since nearly every rational person takes an eclectic view on the books and authors they read. Second, he assumes that ALL conservatives are literalists, who cannot see that SOME of the ideas in a book apply to today’s situations while others do not. There are a lot of other problems in this “person’s” “logic”, but I am not much of a typist, so I will sign off for now.
I read the book two years ago and it helped me to understand the wonders of capitalism and helped further shape my personal principles.
Patriots would never ‘Go Galt’ because we have responsibilities to others (family, friends, community, Country, our descendants)
However, capital is definitely going galt. Investors won’t invest, the stock market has trillions waiting on the sideline for this class of fools to finally act like adults. And the natural tendency of any thinking adult is to become very conservative with spending when they feel like their financial security is at risk.
What I do believe is this administration has gotten their mulligan and the gloves are now coming off from all sides. after he makes a complete fool of himself in Egypt and Dresden, the firestorm of patriotic fervor is going to begin his inevitable fall. As Rudyard Kipling said in “If” my brothers, “HOLD ON”.