Back in high school -- the time when many of us read Ayn Rand -- her books were low-grade reading along the lines of prolific junk-writer, Jacqueline Susann. Take Ayn Rand seriously? No. She wrote gripping stuff but she was stuck in a fantasy world of off-the-scale individualism. She didn't have the intellectual heft. Now she does, or some think she does.
What would Ayn Rand think of Paul Ryan? Serious people want to know.
He described the novelist of heroic capitalism as “the reason I got into public service.” But what would Rand think of Mr. Ryan?
While Rand, an atheist, did enjoy a good Christmas celebration for its cheerful commercialism, she would have scoffed at the idea of public service. And though Mr. Ryan’s advocacy of steep cuts in government spending would have pleased her, she would have vehemently opposed his social conservatism and hawkish foreign policy. She would have denounced Mr. Ryan as she denounced Ronald Reagan, for trying “to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.”
Mr. Ryan’s youthful, feverish embrace of Rand and his clumsy attempts to distance himself from her is more than the flip-flopping of an ambitious politician: it is a window into the ideological fissures at the heart of modern conservatism. ...NYT
I don't think our generation was wrong to dismiss Ayn Rand as a pulp novelist, albeit a great read when you're about 15 -- or just "youthful and feverish." But most of us outgrow that kind of stuff. Not, evidently, many Americans who may not be stupid but who clearly don't want to let go of the youthful egotism that makes belief in Rand's political ideas possible -- her "black and white world view," as the Times op-ed writer puts it. Or her justification of selfishness.
"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." Someone needs to remind Paul Ryan of that wisdom.
Ayn Rand would detest the person -- the little autocrat -- Paul Ryan has become.
Years before Roe v. Wade, Rand called abortion “a moral right which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved.” She condemned the military draft and American involvement in Vietnam. She warned against recreational drugs but thought government had no right to ban them. These aspects of Rand do not fit with a political view that weds fiscal and social conservatism.
Mr. Ryan’s selection as Mr. Romney’s running mate is the kind of stinging rebuke of the welfare state that Rand hoped to see during her lifetime. But Mr. Ryan is also what she called “a conservative in the worst sense of the word.” As a woman in a man’s world, a Jewish atheist in a country dominated by Christianity and a refugee from a totalitarian state, Rand knew it was not enough to promote individual freedom in the economic realm alone. If Mr. Ryan becomes the next vice president, it wouldn’t be her dream come true, but her nightmare. ...NYT
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I'm not the only one to associate Ayn Rand with adolescence. Maureen Dowd is on the same track. And she sums up Ryan's hypocrisy brilliantly.
His long infatuation with her makes him seem even younger than he looks with his cowlick because Randism is a state of arrested adolescence, making its disciples feel like heroic teenagers atop a lofty mountain peak.
The secretive, ambiguous Romney was desperate for ideological clarity, so he outsourced his political identity to Ryan, a numbers guy whose numbers don’t add up.
This just proves that Romney will never get over his anxiety about not being conservative enough. As president, he’d still feel the need to prove himself with right-wing Supreme Court picks.
Ryan should stop being so lovable. People who intend to hurt other people should wipe the smile off their faces. ...Maureen Dowd
