By JENNIFER BURNS
Palo Alto, Calif.
EARLY in his Congressional career, Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin
representative and presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee,
would give out copies of Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” as Christmas
presents. 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.
Rand’s atheism and social libertarianism have long placed her in an
uneasy position in the pantheon of conservative heroes, but she has
proved irresistible to those who came of age in the baby boom and after.
They found her iconoclasm thrilling, and her admirers poured into Barry
M. Goldwater’s doomed 1964 presidential campaign, the Libertarian Party
and the Cato Institute. After her death, in 1982, it became even easier
for her admirers to ignore the parts of her message they didn’t like
and focus on her advocacy of unfettered capitalism and her celebration
of the individual.
Mr. Ryan is particularly taken by Rand’s black-and-white worldview. “The
fight we are in here,” he once told a group of her adherents, “is a
fight of individualism versus collectivism.” If she were alive, he said,
Rand would do “a great job in showing us just how wrong what government
is doing is.”
Rand’s anti-government argument rested on another binary opposition,
between “producers” who create wealth and “moochers” who feed off them.
This theme has endeared Rand, and Mr. Ryan, to the Tea Party, whose
members believe they are the only ones who deserve government aid.
Yet when his embrace of Rand drew fire from Catholic leaders, Mr. Ryan
reversed course with a speed that would make his running mate, Mitt
Romney, proud. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he told National Review earlier
this year. “Give me Thomas Aquinas.” He claimed that his austere budget
was motivated by the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which holds
that issues should be handled at the most local level possible, rather
than Rand’s anti-government views.
This retreat to religion would have infuriated Rand, who believed it was
impossible to separate government policies from their moral and
philosophical underpinnings. Policies motivated by Christian values,
which she called “the best kindergarten of communism possible,” were
inherently corrupt.
Free-market capitalism, she said, needed a new, secular morality of
selfishness, one she promoted in her novels, nonfiction and newsletters.
Conservative contemporaries would have none of it: William F. Buckley
Jr. criticized her “desiccated philosophy” and Whittaker Chambers dubbed
her “Big Sister.”
Mr. Ryan’s rise is a telling index of how far conservatism has evolved
from its founding principles. The creators of the movement embraced the
free market, but shied from Rand’s promotion of capitalism as a moral
system. They emphasized the practical benefits of capitalism, not its
ethics. Their fidelity to Christianity grew into a staunch social
conservatism that Rand fought against in vain.
Mr. Ryan has attempted a similar pirouette, but it is too late: driven
by the fever of the Tea Party and drawing upon a wellspring of
enthusiasm for Rand, politicians like Mr. Ryan have set the philosophy
of “Atlas Shrugged” at the core of modern Republicanism.
In so doing, modern conservatives ignore the fundamental principles that
animated Rand: personal as well as economic freedom. Her philosophy
sprang from her deep belief in the autonomy and independence of each
individual. This meant that individuals could not depend on government
for retirement savings or medical care. But it also meant that
individuals must be free from government interference in their personal
lives.
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.
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