For Mitt Romney and us, Ayn Rand is poor role model
For Mitt Romney and us, Ayn Rand is poor role model
September 23, 2012|Bill White
Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate has ramped up interest in the author/philosopher Ayn Rand.
Ryan is backing away from her these days, mostly because of her atheism and other inconvenient social views, but he has proclaimed more than once over the years that she inspired his economic vision and his decision to get into public service.
I suspect I’m more typical of those who have been influenced at one time or another by Rand. As a young Republican teenage devotee of conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr., I read “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” her two meganovels. I thought they were inspiring stuff.
Eventually, I grew up. I never lost my regard for Buckley, but I figured out that Russian immigrant Rand’s vision of the world was preposterous. I went back and reread both those books as an adult — actually, “Atlas Shrugged” defeated me the second time, but I really tried — and found that although elements of the stories remained fascinating, her heroes are impossible superpeople who walk around delivering endless speeches, while the rest of the world is populated by numskulls and sellouts who try to tear them down for no logical reason.
Her I-centric, every-person-for-himself philosophy may have made a certain degree of sense in a fantasy world full of conniving crooks and spongers. In the real world, it’s a formula for moral, economic and societal disaster.
I would argue that if you’re looking for literary inspiration on the subject of real moral courage, a better source would be Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
There’s a line in there that I think is wonderful advice for all of us, and I’ve tried to apply it to my own life. In fact, when I was asked on a radio program one time which movie quote resonated most with me, I chose that one.
“You never really understand a person until you look at things from his point of view,” Atticus Finch tells his daughter Scout. “Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
If all of us did that, I suspect we’d be less likely to demonize one another, even in politics. Unfortunately, Mitt Romney’s latest campaign disaster highlights an attitude that sounds a lot more like Ayn than Atticus — and it’s disturbingly popular.
Someone recorded him telling a group of wealthy donors “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right? There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it … These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect.
“… And so my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives …”
——-> Continued
Actually, Rand’s superhero was inspired by a sociopath serial killer