Glenn has been covering these “Tea Party” tax protests for a while now. It’s an interesting phenomenon. For one thing, it’s a bit odd to see conservatives and minarchist libertarians out protesting, and one wonders what other changes this may portend. The way the Debt Star has caught on, we may look back on this as the first 4chan revolution. There’s also a definite Randian flavor to these protests, with numerous references to the suddenly resurgent Atlas Shrugged (or as great intellect and literary critic Matthew Yglesias calls it, the “stupid book” by that “stupid woman” with the “stupid ideas”; rarely has any text not attributed to Jesus Christ inspired such hostility from the left).
There’s little question the largely pro-socialism media are not interested; a few hundred Iraq protestors garnered far more attention this week than any of the much larger tax protests. It’s also possible these are simply not very visible from the media’s port-listing cocoon, where most of the press corps seems to have chosen their career with the (often explicit) mission of getting the government to do something for social justice through public pressure. It’s possible most journalists don’t know many conservatives, so they may just be mostly unaware of the Tea Party phenomenon.
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I’m sure the MSM is choosing not to cover — first rule for any activist is let the local media know what you’re up to, where and when.
Uhm, who’s Taggart?
Dean, Dean, Dean…
I weep for you, my friend.
Naugh. Big media has a positive talent for ignoring the conservative to liberal elephant in the room. Buckley used to call this invincible ignorance.
Great, great, you’re all smarter than me. Now, what’s Taggart?
Dean,
Dagny Taggart, main character of “Atlas Shrugged”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagny_Taggart
No, not smarter, just better read in objectivist literature. Whether that’s a good thing or bad thing you be the judge.
I’d estimate that I’ve read _Atlas Shrugged_ over thirty times. My parents bought me a copy when I was ~16 and I’ve still got it, although it’s really tattered now. It’s not an exaggeration to say it was one of the most important books of my life.
I do, however, think there are big things about which Rand was fundamentally incorrect (“stupid” is deliberately pejorative, I’m willing to stick with “wrong”). One major one: she believes people are fundamentally rational and have the foresight to understand how their current actions will affect their future self-interest. I think the current crisis demonstrates only too well that people can be short-sighted and reason inconsistently when their emotions are involved (which, honestly, is always in the real world).
Ah. I never cared for Ayn Rand’s work. I see it as a sort of funhouse mirror inversion of Marxism–and since Marxism is utter insanity, a funhouse mirror version of it might look sane at first glance but won’t hold up to close scrutiny.
Still, she was a remarkable woman.
What books of hers have you read? Be careful not to dismiss her based on other people’s criticisms of her work. If Atlas Shrugged is too intimidating, try We The Living.
Rand was above all an anti-Marxist, and one of the great evangelists of human freedom. I’d say she’s been vindicated by history, and then some.
I think the current crisis demonstrates only too well that people can be short-sighted and reason inconsistently when their emotions are involved
Rand never argued that free markets were perfect, nor does anyone else. Markets are always prone to bubbles and busts. They’re just the least worst system.
This recession is very mild in absolute terms: no one is going hungry or unclothed; today, the poverty line is roughly where the median income was in the 1950s. The reason for that is the decades of gradual improvements the free markets have given us.
I find her prose stultifyingly boring. I have, literally, ZERO interest in reading anything more of hers. I find Objectivism to be objectively wrong, as do many intelligent people of the right and the left. It’s nice that she defended capitalism in an era where it needed defending, but she was far from the only person doing that, and in the meantime, she espoused a lot of really daffy garbage.
Yes, she was anti-Marxist–as I say, her philosophy strikes me as a funhouse mirror of Marxism, because it’s one hideous philosophy constructed purely in reaction to the other hideous philosophy.
She was vindicated for defending capitalism as capitalism is obviously better than communism. She was also vindicated for telling the truth about just how evil communism was. But again, that’s not something she was alone in. And it’s not like she was vindicated on everything she said. Just read The Roots of War. World War I and II DID result in an expansion of democracy, but not in her reckoning. And, she defends with business interests that urged us not to go to war against Hitler. How embarrassing for her.
Part of this may be all the run-ins I’ve had with Objectivists, who (with only rare exception) seem to be quite as mad as hatters to me. Like communists, they’re stark raving bonkers.
Whittaker Chambers and National Review were right, so far as I can tell.
What books of hers have you actually read?
What “daffy” or “hideous” things do you imagine she espoused?
Whittaker Chambers was once a Communist and never really renounced Marxist values, only Communist methods. His essay is entirely ridiculous and predictable. For instance, he claims Rand worships power, but Rand makes it clear that the competent are powerless before the looters. He claims she “plumps for a technocratic elite” that will usher in “dictatorship” but this is so absurdly out of the step with the book’s message of individual rights as to make one wonder if he even read the text.
It’s true the Randian absolutists have a lot of silly ideas, like disbanding the FDA or ending anti-trust laws. But that has little to do with Rand herself, who understood the difference between proper regulation and stifling gov’t control, and the difference between monopoly and free markets.
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