Ayn Rand And The Republican’s Deal With The Devil!

The Republican Party has made a wrong turn in recent years and is headed for a cliff that wasn’t on the map a few years ago. The wrong turn happened when they fully embraced the ideas of Ayn Rand and let her fictionalized world invade reality. I’m posting a couple of clips of Ayn Rand herself, telling us those ideas that the modern Republican Party has embraced so fully. As we Democrats bring these ideas to light over the next year and a half of the election, it should be fun watching as some Republicans try to turn the steering wheel away from the cliff, while the die-hard’s, like Paul Ryan, fight them to the death. ThinkProgress put together this great mashup of Rand’s ideas intermixed with those Republicans embracing her very radical ideas.

That clip just touches on some of her madness. The inspiration for this post is from a piece by David Johnson and I found it at SetYouFree News.  I’ve admitted that up until recently, I didn’t know a hell of a lot about Ayn Rand and her writings. What I have learned is pretty scary, considering the Republicans have embraced her work so much. And my god, the hypocrisy they are exhibiting is just off the hook.

One very revealing thing about the mind of Ayn Rand that David Johnson wrote in his piece is Ms. Rand’s admiration of William Hickman, an American criminal responsible for the kidnapping, murder and dismemberment of Marion Parker, a 12-year-old girl in the 1920′s. From David Johnson’s piece…(emphasis his)

Rand’s work is very popular among conservatives now. It forms a core justification for their “on your own” philosophy praising the wealthy and discarding the rest. So it is useful to explore the formation and core of this philosophy. Early in her writings Rand became fascinated with a serial killer named William Hickman.Rand wrote that the serial killer was an “ideal man,” a superior form of human because he didn’t let society impose their morals on him. He didn’t worry about what others thought and just did as he pleased.”Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” Rand wrote. Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’” She considered these to be good qualities! And so does her cult.

This is the foundation of the modern “tea party” conservative thinking. So when you look at the modern capitalism that has grown up around Rand’s philosophy and the big corporations that are chewing up the planet to enrich a very few at the expense of the rest of us, and think it seems sort of psychopathic, maybe that’s because it literally is.

As her ideas become better known, with little help from the major media outlets, the backlash is beginning for the Republican Party. Paul Ryan’s budget plan pushed the issues and ideas that these Republican’s embrace into the spotlight. It was a monumentally stupid idea for the GOP, and I’m so happy they did it. At the core of Ayn Rand’s philosophy (a generous word for it) is “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” (from Wikipedia) That is a polite way of saying selfishness. Or every “man” for himself, I’ve got mine, fuck you. And her rigidity in that belief reminds me very much of the rigidity in the Republican Party on many things, including the concept of taxes. It seems the ultimate goal of the Republican Party is to return to frontier justice, eliminate the government, or at least all of it’s power, and let everyone fend for themselves.

We will see how this full embrace of Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand works out for them. It could very well cause a split between the Religious community and the Republican Party, which I’ve thought all along was not a good fit. Selfishness wasn’t one of Christ’s teachings from what I remember. Here is a clip of Ayn Rand talking about religion on the Phil Donahue show…

Something makes me think that the full embrace of Ayn Rand by so many leaders in the Republican Party is going to come back to haunt them. I certainly hope so.