Tea Party saint Ayn Rand would have hated those low-life, low-brow, sanctimonious scumbags

BurtWorm

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Wed Dec-09-09 11:06 AM
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Tea Party saint Ayn Rand would have hated those low-life, low-brow, sanctimonious scumbags

Edited on Wed Dec-09-09 11:08 AM by BurtWorm

Ironic isn't it? :popcorn:

This is from a review of the new Rand biographies at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, by Ed Kilgore:

http://www.democracyjournal.org/article2.php?ID=6730&limit=0&limit2=1000&page=1

...

Rand went to especially extravagant lengths to deny any association with American conservatism. In 1962, she hurled this anathema in The Objectivist Newsletter: "Objectivists are not ‘conservatives.’ We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for the philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish." She absolutely loathed the central organ of American conservatism, National Review, saying this in 1964:

I consider National Review the worst and most dangerous magazine in America . . . <b>ecause it ties capitalism to religion. The ideological position of National Review amounts, in effect, to the following: In order to accept freedom and capitalism, one has to believe in God or in some form of religion, some form of supernatural mysticism.

And she particularly hated the man who became the Holy Father of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century U.S. conservatism, Ronald Reagan. In 1976, as Burns reports, she urged readers to oppose his campaign for president. "I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan," she wrote, calling him a conservative in "the worst sense of the word," because he backed a mixed economy and opposed abortion rights.

Rand’s disdain for religion was as integral to her philosophy as her disdain for anything that remotely smacked of socialism. That’s made very clear in what she regarded as the most important writing of her life, Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged: "<T>here are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind."

To Rand, those who accepted "enslavement" to God–or for that matter, such conservative totems as family or tradition–had no moral standing to pose as fighters against socialism. This premise, more than any personal weaknesses, probably best explains her violent opposition to partial appropriation of her philosophy to suit the needs of the appropriator. As she said in 1966, "There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction."

Unfortunately for Rand’s posthumous wishes, the appropriation of her philosophy among today’s populist conservatives is full of compromises and incongruous combinations. ...