Rand Paul’s intellectual godmother: Ayn Rand
While we’re all working out who Rand Paul is, and why he’s so friendly to BP, but so unfriendly to black people who wanted to eat at Woolworth’s (not to mention the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act or the minimum wage) it’s helpful to understand one of the bases of his philosophy, which he actually says isn’t Libertarianism, but rather “Constitutional conservatism” — with apologies to Dave Weigel, who’s been waging a fairly lonely battle to defend Paul on the CRA question. (In fact, I’ve discovered, thanks to an email I got from actual Libertarian candidate Alex Snitiker, that Libertarians do not in fact consider themselves to be conservatives (or liberals, or any category in between. And they are certainly not Republicans, their role in the tea party movement, which IS Republican, notwithstanding.)
Both Paul (and fellow travelers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck) have a philosophy that they and their followers claim flows from the teachings of Ayn Rand, the Russian-American philosopher who pioneered a theory of moral and economic behavior based on a kind of enlightened selfishness and laissez-faire economics, which achieved maximum velocity in her novels “The Fountainhead” (1943) and even moreso, “Atlas Shrugged” (1957). In the latter novel, the “productive” members of a society mired in socialism go on strike to stop their gifts and genius being exploited by the government for the benefit of the dumb and the broke. IMHO, when trying to understand Rand Paul (and his father), you’re probably going to get further studying Ayn Rand (who, btw, Rand Paul is NOT named after), than looking at Libertarianism.
So to get your started, check out this interview with Ms. Rand by a cigarette smoking Mike Wallace back in 1959 (before the collectivists stopped a guy from smoking on TV.) The takeaway: we are NOT our brother’s keeper, or as Ms. Rand put it: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” See if you see echoes of the Paul-Beck-Limbaugh ethos of total faith in corporate power, and total fealty to “rational self-interest” in this clip, which is actually the second part of the interview:
Sorry I’m doing this out of order, but let’s wheel back. In part one of the interview, Rand denounces “self-sacrifice” and the idea of a “moral duty to serve others.” Call it the doctrine of pure self-interest:
And in part three, Rand attempts to explain the individual welfare she lavishes on her starving artist husband, and her belief in “private roads, private post offices, and private schools,” funded by the benevolent industrialists who will discover enough enlightened self-interest to kindly allow us to have such roads, post offices and schools to use (until, of course, they decide they don’t want to let us use them anymore. She doesn’t address that…)
To summarize, Rand believed that a man’s “highest morality is the pursuit of his own happiness,” and she elevated “righteous self-interest” above everything else, and dismissed such ideas as faith or brotherhood — everything that Christians (which Beck claims to be) say they believe — in a way that completely mirrors Beck’s revulsion at the idea of “social justice,” and the Christian theologies of compassion and stewardship of the earth, which Beck directly equates with Marxism. As a sidebar, Beck, who is Mormon, claims to be in common cause with evangelical Christianity, or at least the conservative version, which has adopted the Randian view of economics and fealty to corporations, and which shares Beck’s mission of delegitimizing Barack Obama (and restoring pro-corporate Republicans to power.) But Beck, Rand Paul, Ann Coulter and other Christo-conservatives’ belief system is in many ways anti-Christian, if you believe the New Testament Christianity as described in the Book of Matthew (though I’m sure they would say there’s no contradiction, because they believe in voluntary, rather than compulsory, charity.) It’s fascinating stuff — a group of hyper-Christian activists who have basically taken on board a philosophy that seems to be the opposite of Jesus’ teachings, which turns Jesus’ philosophy on its head by worshiping the money changers and damning the poor, and which was put forward by a Russian atheist. That seems to me to be a contradiction that the modern conservative movement hasn’t grappled with, and probably won’t any time soon.
Which brings us to this rather ironic clip, from 1961, in which Rand, who again, was an avowed atheist, makes plain that religion, capitalism and politics should be separated, and that conservatives are guilty of blending the two. She also calls out one group by name: neoconservatives, saying that they are irrationally “using the old as the standard of value,” romancing the past, and using religion to justify capitalism. Glenn Beck, permission to have your meltdown:
And last but not least, take a look at what Rand had to say about racism. This one is not Rand herself speaking, but rather the person who put this video together reads from her essay, “the virtue of selfishness.” Here it is:
Last but not least, a clip from Rand’s bio, which helps to explain her interest in individualism and laissez-faire capitalism:
Novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her family lived in a large, comfortable apartment above the chemist shop owned by her father.
From her earliest years, the girl felt alienated from the dark, brooding atmosphere of Russia, but loved the bright world projected in stories appearing in foreign magazines. At age nine she made the conscious decision to become a writer.
In her teens, she discovered the works of great romantic writers such as Victor Hugo and Edmond Rostand. But as her private vision of human potential expanded, the social horizons of human possibility were shrinking around her. In February 1917 she witnessed the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her balcony. Soon, a communist gang nationalized her father’s shop. Almost overnight, her family was reduced to crushing poverty.
Well there you go.
Meanwhile, what do Rand Paul, Prince Bandar and Louis Farrakhan have in common? (And the answer is not that all three were iffy on integration…)
And Weigel collects some interesting critiques of Rand Paul and the CRA by and from Libertarians.
Related: utilitarian theory (taking me back to Ec. 10!)
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This is the most intelligent cohesive piece I have read to date on this serious issue of Rand Paul. Rachel Maddow, relentless as she was, exposed his agenda not 24 hrs. after his victory, and Joan has brought to light the actual connections that pull this story together. Thanks to you both for the true journalism we all need to stay informed of what in my humble opinion is Dangerous to our country, and it’s freedom.
[...] the whole thing here. And while I have my doubts that Rand Paul is an actual Libertarian, as opposed to your garden variety Ayn Rand-worshipping [...]
[...] persecution complexes. Of course, on the other hand, there are enough powerful people out there pushing Ayn Rand and her ideas at us, that its always worth reminding ourselves how ludicrous she is. (Here, for [...]