Posted on 06/20/2013 12:48:09 PM PDT by nickcarraway
My item on Rand Paul the other day, predictably, went over quite badly in the libertarian community. The Insomniac Libertarian, in an item wonderfully headlined “Obama Quisling Jonathan Chait Smears Rand Paul,” complains that my Paul piece “never discloses that [my] wife is an Obama campaign operative.” A brief annotated response:
1. I question the relevance of the charge, since Rand Paul is not running against Obama.
2. In point of fact, my wife is not an Obama campaign operative and has never worked for Obama’s campaign, or his administration, or volunteered for his campaign, or any campaign, and does not work in politics at all.
3. I question the headline labeling me an “Obama quisling,” a construction that implies that I have betrayed Obama, which seems to be the opposite of the Insomniac Libertarian’s meaning.
4. For reasons implied by points one through three, I urge the Insomniac Libertarian to familiarize himself with some of the science linking sleep deprivation to impaired brain function.
A more substantive, though still puzzling, retort comes from the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, a frequent bête noire of mine on subjects relating to Ayn Rand and Ron or Rand Paul. Friedersdorf raises two objections to my piece, which traced Rand Paul’s odd admission that he is “not a firm believer in democracy” to his advocacy of Randian thought. Friedersdorf first charges that the intellectual connection between Paul and Rand is sheer paranoia:
Chait takes the quote and turns it into a conspiracy … As I read this, I couldn't help but think of Chait as a left-leaning analog to the character in Bob Dylan's "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues." Those Objectivists were coming around/They were in the air / They were on the Ground/ They wouldn't give me no peace. For two thousand years, critics of unmediated democracy have warned about the masses abusing individuals and minorities. The American system was built from the very beginning to check democratic excesses.
But if Rand Paul distrusts democracy he must've gotten it from Ayn Rand.
A conspiracy? Am I imagining that Rand Paul has been deeply influenced by Ayn Rand? Paul himself has discussed the deep influence her work had on his own thinking. In college he wrote a series of letters and columns either quoting Rand or knocking off her theories. He used a congressional hearing to describe one of her novels at tedious length. How is this a conspiracy? Friedersdorf proceeds to argue that Rand is not really very militant anyway:
It's also interesting that Chait regards Rand's formulation as "militant." Let's look at it again. "I do not believe that a majority can vote a man's life, or property, or freedom away from him." Does Chait believe that a democratic majority should be able to vote a man's life or freedom away? …
In the political press, it happens again and again: libertarian leaning folks are portrayed as if they're radical, extremist ideologues, even when they're expressing ideas that are widely held by Americans across the political spectrum.
Well, here we come to a deeper disagreement about Ayn Rand. My view of her work is pretty well summarized in a review-essay I wrote in 2009, tying together two new biographies of Rand with some of the Randian strains that were gaining new currency in the GOP. My agenda here is not remotely hidden, but maybe I need to put more cards on the table. I've described her worldview as inverted Marxism — a conception of politics as a fundamental struggle between a producer class and a parasite class.
What I really mean is, I find Rand evil. Friedersdorf’s view is certainly far more nuanced and considerably more positive than mine. He’s a nice, intelligent person and a good writer, but we’re not going to agree on this.
Friedersdorf waves away Rand’s (and Rand Paul’s) distrust of democracy as the same fears everybody has about democracy. Well, no. Lots of us consider democracy imperfect or vulnerable, but most of us are very firm believers in democracy. Rand viewed the average person with undisguised contempt, and her theories pointed clearly in the direction of cruelty in the pursuit of its fanatical analysis. A seminal scene in Atlas Shrugged described the ideological errors of a series of characters leading up to their violent deaths, epitomizing the fanatical class warfare hatred it's embodied and which inspired Whitaker Chambers to observe, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To the gas chambers — go!'”
Randism has never been tried as the governing philosophy of a country, so it remains conjecture that her theories would inevitably lead to repression if put into practice at a national level. But we do have a record of the extreme repression with which she ran her own cult, which at its height was a kind of totalitarian ministate. You can read her biographies, or at least my review, to get a sense of the mind-blowing repression, abuse, and corruption with which she terrorized her followers.
But the upshot is that I strongly dispute Friedersdorf’s premise that Rand’s theories are a variant of democracy, any more than Marx’s are. In fact, I find the existence of powerful elected officials who praise her theories every bit as disturbing to contemplate as elected officials who praise Marxism. Even if you take care to note some doctrinal differences with Rand, in my view we are talking about a demented, hateful cult leader and intellectual fraud. People who think she had a lot of really good ideas should not be anywhere near power.
gunner...
To be fair, please post a picture of yourself here, so we can see what standard you are suing to judge “butt ugly”.
We can then have a quick vote to see how you stack up...
Usually one must go to Daily Kos or Democratic Underground to read that sort of thing. You are educated enough to see your ad hominem, but you and Jonathan Chait make a nice pair. Hey, this logical fallacy thing is fun!
Ayn Rand was a nut. But it doesn’t change the fact that Rand Paul is right about Syria and the NSA. If you can’t refute the message, attack the messenger.
Besides, I never said she was evil.
I do say she was a hypocrite.
Still waiting for a rationale discussion of the main Rand ideas... I noticed you avoided that again. In fact, you attacked the messenger again.
This is a lame substitute for thinking.
Summoning DU is like crying “Someone disagrees with me in MY sandbox! Waaaaahhhhh!”
She tried to write into “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” a religious supporting character who would be supporting of the various protagonists.
It was hard for her to get past the ‘why does the morality our decisions matter, if we propose and G-d disposes?’
A morality that could not be measured, could not be judged by man, could not be supported by reason, didn’t work for her.
Others look at religious teachings as good teachings. It is bad to lie, steal and murder, so any G-d that tells you to not lie, steal or murder should be on the same side as the moral people.
There is some hint of redemption when the government drone ‘non-absolute’ dies defending Hank Rearden’s factory, in the mind of Hank Rearden:
“Somewhere, he thought, there was the boy’s mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler’s caution, who had obeyed with a zealot’s fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs—then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think. Had she fed him tainted refuse, he thought, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal.
He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is his mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.
....
Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest—and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings.”
“Summoning DU is like crying “Someone disagrees with me in MY sandbox! Waaaaahhhhh!”
Never the less, an accurate comparison to your approach on this thread.
Do a little reading up off the right-wing-o-sphere.
You’ll learn nothing when surrounded by personality cultists like dwell around here.
Nor will you from me. I’m just screwing around with their little minds while waiting for the wife to come home from shopping.
Read my #30, babe.
You people take anonymous commenting on internet forum much too seriously.
“an” internet forum
I hate this laptop
The politics of Ayn Rand rests on a context of
1) life is the standard of morality
2) rationality is the means of achieving it
3) rationality requires that every man should live for his own self interest
4) rationality requires that he should live by principles
5) rationality requires that he should possess integrity,and be honest, independent,just,productive and proud.
6) he should not initiate force against the innocent.
7) respect for individual rights is the minimum requirement necessary for living a rational life in a rational society.
This context is the beginning of a politics that prevents totalitarianism and repression rather than causing it.
That is a very eloquent defense of fallacious reasoning. Tell us more about Rothbard and Hayek. If we can find something about them that is distasteful, will it invalidate their views?
Wait, what?
Are you suggesting that I have to be physically attractive to assert that someone is butt-ugly?
Really?
So if you drive past a road-killed skunk you wouldn't say it stunk unless you stunk just as bad yourself?
I don’t really care.
Just screwing with you.
Unwilling to address your fallacy? I don’t blame you, it was pretty blatant.
I think you just saved me from myself.......
:-)
“If a person is going to preach ethics, as the Randians claim she does, that person has to be immaculate.”
Therefore the only human being that was, or ever will be, qualified to speak about ethics is Jesus Christ. OK, gotcha. Hence, ethics should never be discussed.
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