Monk

Paul Ryan, who teamed up with Akin in the House to sponsor harsh anti-abortion bills, may look young and hip and new generation, with his iPod full of heavy metal jams and his cute kids. But he’s just a fresh face on a Taliban creed — the evermore antediluvian, anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-gay conservative core. Amiable in khakis and polo shirts, Ryan is the perfect modern leader to rally medieval Republicans who believe that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs.

-- Maureen Dowd at The New York Times

Ms. Dowd is responding to the Todd Akin controversy, bringing out the argument that it is not the substance of the man that troubles Republicans, including presidential contender Mitt Romeny, but the man's presentation, which was crass enough to offend even semi-educated, anti-poor, racist independents. Americans are not quite that dumb, at least not yet, despite the best efforts of Fox News - maybe the next generation at the rate we are going.

“If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”

-- Paul Ryan

Mr. Cohen gives us a sharp overall view of the role of foreign policy in this year's presidential election, and he agrees with Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan's quote above, but then goes on to argue for the great divergence between the Republican view and, what we may call, the sane view. Romney and Ryan are only more aggressive in their war footing, despite their focus on fiscal stability, which may account for how hard they want to go after programs and benefits for the poor and the middle class, in an attempt to do both wage all the war they want and maintain a strict fiscal discipline. The part of the Republican prescription that is difficult to square with rationality is that they still want to maintain the key Republican signature of cutting taxes for the wealthy. Wars and tax cuts have never gone well together. President Dubya tried it, and, well, we saw how well that worked out, but the rich and the Republicans cannot let go of the dream of both having a great nation and not having to pay anything for it, and are thus the real threat to the integrity and vitality of America.


_ _ _

NEW YORK — I may have missed it but I’ve not seen a war that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan don’t want to fight. Romney vows never to negotiate with the Taliban and declares, “We go anywhere they are and we kill them.” He beats the war drums on Iran. He has a bizarre itch to open a new era of confrontation with Russia.

When he sniffs the possibility of war Romney drops his frequent imitation of the Beatles’ Nowhere Man (“Doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to”). He becomes a Real Man fired up.

After more than a decade of inconclusive U.S. wars, this is not reassuring.

In a similar vein, Ryan, whose experience outside Washington is limited, believes that in Afghanistan, “Now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach.” Said “success” is as hard to identify as the tax loopholes Ryan insists he wants to close.

The big question, of course, is how all this squares with the concerns over the U.S. debt that Romney has placed at the center of the campaign by picking Ryan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost over $1.3 trillion. Several estimates, including one last year from Brown University, suggest the final bill will be $3.7 trillion or higher.

New or rebooted wars are scarcely the fiscal medicine the United States needs.

Ryan seemed to grasp this last year when he declared in a speech in Washington: “If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”

The Wisconsin congressman was right about that.

He continued: “In the coming years, our debt is projected to grow to more than three times the size of our entire economy. This trajectory is catastrophic. By the end of the decade, we will be spending 20 percent of our tax revenue simply paying interest on the debt.”

Yet Romney and Ryan are up for any costly fight. One reason, of course, is that they face a president who, with a bold decision, eliminated America’s mortal enemy, Osama bin Laden, and whose cool review of “kill lists” selecting the next targets of drone attacks hardly suggests a lack of decider’s testosterone. Upping the military ante against this incumbent is not easy. But, as Ryan’s introduction before the U.S.S. Wisconsin suggests, it is something Romney feels he must do in pursuit of his new American Century.

Here we come to the heart of the matter: the desperate Republican quest to portray Obama as a quasi-European intent on the very European business of managed decline rather than renewed American glory.

No fiscal detail — a trillion here, a trillion there — can stand in the way of what Romney has called his “one overwhelming conviction and passion” — that the 21st century be as American as the 20th. Battlefield triumph seems to be part of the Romney-Ryan recipe for this.

Romney has zeroed in on a phrase in a campaign white paper written last fall by the historian Eliot Cohen, who argued that the Obama administration views U.S. decline as a “condition that can and should be managed for the global good rather than reversed.”

Aha! Romney declares: “I do not view America as just one more point on the strategic map, one more power to be balanced. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known.”

Ryan, likewise, has said that some — read the Obama administration — have decided “that the choice we face is over how, not whether, to manage our nation’s decline.” But these “calls to surrender” must be rejected; the United States is “a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today.”

I believe in the enduring centrality of American power; I don’t believe the nation’s immense capacity for renewal is exhausted. But more war is not the “necessary” choice for the United States today if fiscal and foreign policy are to be taken off their “collision course.” The 2014 timetable for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan is right; war with Iran is avoidable; the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan, wars without victories, must be learned. And even all the right choices for the United States will not alter the rise of India and China or make the 21st century America’s as the 20th was.

Obama, as Joseph Lelyveld wrote in a recent New York Review of Books essay, has two major foreign policy achievements: “Getting American forces out of Iraq and compressing his predecessor’s expansive, grandiose-sounding ‘Global War on Terror’ into a narrowly focused, unremitting campaign against the remnants of the Qaeda network, relying largely on high-tech intelligence gathering and pilotless drones.”

These are sober achievements for sobering times. Economic turnaround is Job 1 for the next president. It will not be fostered by delusion, nostalgia or military overreach.

-- Roger Cohen at The New York Times

The Times has given us a sharply cutting editorial by Jennifer Burns, the author of "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right", in which she explores the curious turns of Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's vice-president selection. Ms. Burns discusses the ideological tensions in American conservatism between economic liberty and social liberty, and how Mr. Ryan has struggled between his discipleship to Ayn Rand and the Christian demands of the Republlcan Party. We will take it down in whole.


_ _ _

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.

-- Jeffifer Burns at The New York Times

Even "The Economist" magazine, a libertarian rag, hits on our Republicans.

Our prejudice is firmly in favour of a leaner state, but the Republicans need to recognise, as their intellectual forebears did from Adam Smith to Abraham Lincoln, that government has an important role to play in a capitalist economy, providing public goods and a safety net. Teddy Roosevelt broke up over-mighty companies, rather than doling out tax breaks to them. Why on earth are people who champion a small state supporting an expensive war on drugs that has filled the prisons to bursting point without reducing the supply of narcotics?

Perhaps the problem, other than unmitigated greed, is that their new inellectual light is Ayn Rand, which is a bit of a falling off from Smith and Lincoln. Of course, she probably would agree that this War on Drugs is misguided, but the Republicans still need to secure votes and must hit on popular hot-button issues, and, well, putting as many blacks and latinos away in prison can never be an entirely bad policy, as far as they are concerned, and is worth every penny.

(Source: Sully's Dish)

Heh, political activists are starting to hit hard on the dissonace among Republican leaders for their professed allegiance, on one hand, to Christianity and the Bible, and on the other hand, to Ayn Rand and her anti-faith creed that idealizes selfishness. I wouldn't call this a major earthquake for Republicans, but it is something they should be stumbling over, something they should have to deal with. They should not be able to have it all ways.


LJ

================

June 13, 2011

An interesting article going further, drawing a link between Ayn Rand and Satanism.

_ _ _

Over the past few years, Anton LaVey and his book The Satanic Bible has grown increasingly popular, selling thousands of new copies. His impact has been especially pronounced in our nation’s capital. One U.S. senator has publicly confessed to being a fan of the The Satanic Bible while another calls it his “foundation book.” On the other side of Congress, a representative speaks highly of LaVey and recommends that his staffers read the book.

A leading radio host called LaVey “brilliant” and quotations from the The Satanic Bible can be glimpsed on placards at political rallies. More recently, a respected theologian dared to criticize the founder of the Church of Satan in the pages of a religious and cultural journal and was roundly criticized by dozens of fellow Christians.

Surprisingly little concern, much less outrage, has erupted over this phenomenon. Shouldn’t we be appalled by the ascendancy of this evangelist of anti-Christian philosophy? Shouldn’t we all—especially we Christians—be mobilizing to counter the malevolent force of this man on our culture and politics?

As you’ve probably guessed by this point, I’m not really talking about LaVey but about his mentor, Ayn Rand. The ascendency of LaVey and his embrace by “conservative” leaders would indeed cause paroxysms of indignation. Yet, while the two figures’ philosophies are nearly identical, Rand appears to have received a pass. Why is that?

Perhaps most are unaware of the connection, though LaVey wasn’t shy about admitting his debt to his inspiration. “I give people Ayn Rand with trappings,” he once told the Washington Post. On another occasion he acknowledged that his brand of Satanism was “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ceremony and ritual added.” Indeed, the influence is so apparent that LaVey has been accused of plagiarizing part of his “Nine Satanic Statements” from the John Galt speech in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Devotees of Rand may object to my outlining the association between the two. They will say I am proposing “guilt by association,” a form of the ad hominem fallacy. But I am not attacking Rand for the overlap of her views with LaVey’s; I am saying that, at their core, they are the same philosophy. LaVey was able to recognize what many conservatives fail to see: Rand’s doctrines are satanic.

I realize that even to invoke that infernal word conjures images of black masses, human sacrifices, and record needles broken trying to play “Stairway to Heaven” backwards. But satanism is more banal and more attractive than the parody created by LeVay. Real satanism has been around since the beginning of history, selling an appealing message: Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.

You can replace the pentagrams of LeVayian Satanism with the dollar sign of the Objectivists without changing much of the substance separating the two. The ideas are largely the same, though the movements’ aesthetics are different. One appeals to, we might say, the Young Libertarians, and the other attracts the Future Wiccans of America.

What is harder to understand is why both ideologies appeal to Christians and conservatives. My guess is that these groups are committing what I’d call the fallacy of personal compatibility. This fallacy occurs when a person thinks that because one subscribes to both “Belief X” and “Belief Y,” the two beliefs must therefore be compatible. For example, a person may claim that “life has meaning” and that “everything that exists is made of matter” even though the two claims are not compatible (unless “meaning” is made of matter). This take on the fallacy has long been committed by atheists. Now it appears to be growing in popularity among conservatives and Christians as well.

But to be a follower of both Rand and Christ is not possible. The original Objectivist was a type of self-professed anti-Christ who hated Christianity and the self-sacrificial love of its founder. She recognized that those Christians who claimed to share her views didn’t seem to understand what she was saying.

Many conservatives admire Rand because she was anti-collectivist. But that is like admiring Stalin because he opposed Nazism. Stalin was against the Nazis because he wanted to make the world safe for Communism. Likewise, Rand stands against collectivism because she wants the freedom to abolish Judeo-Christian morality. Conservative Christians who embrace her as the “enemy-of-my-enemy” seem to forget that she considered us the enemy.

Even if this were not the case, though, what would warrant the current influence of her thought within the conservative movement? Rand was a third-rate writer who was too arrogant to recognize her own ignorance (she believed she was the third greatest philosopher in history, behind only Aristotle and Aquinas). She misunderstood almost every concept she engaged with—from capitalism to freedom—and wrote nothing that had not been treated before by better thinkers. We don’t need her any more than we need LeVay.

Few conservatives will fall completely under Rand’s diabolic sway. But we are sustaining a climate in which not a few gullible souls believe she is worth taking seriously. Are we willing to be held responsible for pushing them to adopt an anti-Christian worldview? If so, perhaps instead of recommending Atlas Shrugged, we should simply hand out copies of The Satanic Bible. If they’re going to align with a satanic cult, they might as well join the one that has the better holidays.

Joe Carter is Web Editor of First Things and the co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator. His previous articles for “On the Square” can be found here.

-- Joe Carter for FirstThings.com

WASHINGTON – Dick Cheney made clear Sunday he'd rather follow firebrand broadcaster Rush Limbaugh than former Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell into political battle over the future of the Republican Party.

...

Asked about recent verbal broadsides between Limbaugh and Powell, Cheney said, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh. My take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn't know he was still a Republican."

-- AP

Maybe the G.O.P. will be able to hold their next political convention at a Motel 6 or possibly a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Maybe Cheney should just hope he doesn't wind up in prison, or maybe even Guantanamo.

One especially nasty operator was loaned by the college Republicans to the campaign to defeat the Democratic candidate for state treasurer in Illinois in 1970, Al Dixon. Dixon was having a formal reception to open his Chicago headquarters. This kid assumed an alias, volunteered for the campagin, stole the candidate's stationery, and distributed a thousand fake invitations - they promised "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing" - at communes, rock concerts, and street corners where Chicago's drunken hoboes congregated. The kid's name was Karl Rove. The RNC soon hired him at $9,200 a year to give seminars on his techniques.

-- "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" by Rick Perlstein

It does kinda tell us a lot about Dubya's presidency.

WASHINGTON – Months after its debut, "Hillary: The Movie" faces nine of the nation's toughest critics: the Supreme Court.

The justices' review of the slashing documentary financed by longtime critics of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton could bring more than just a thumbs up or thumbs down. It may settle the question of whether the government can regulate a politically charged film as a campaign ad.

...

Bossie said Moore's success is what inspired him. "Michael Moore forced me to recognize the power of documentary film," said Bossie, who was involved in the House's investigation of Bill Clinton that led to the president's impeachment and trial.

-- Jesse J. Holland for the Associated Press

When I was first readig the article, I was trying to think what made this different from, say, Michael Moore's films, which I recall being run at politically sensitive times. But then one reads that it was an issue that was resolved when Moore said that he wouldn't run ads during the campaign season. I imagine another difference might be that Moore's films are more amusing, but I haven't seen "Hillary: The Movie."

In any case, I prefer to err on the side of free speech, and would favor just the regulation that the financial backers and the parties involved in the film be known, that this should not be an intolerable demand for any movie doing business in our land, much less ostensibly political movies. Just give us more information and transparency so people know what they are seeing.

At any rate, we should be seeing a lot more Republican porn in the future. This guy, Bossie, says that he has fifteen more films in the loop, one of them titled "Stimulate This" about the recent stimulus package pushed by the Obama administration.

Personally, I don't care for Moore's films, save for his first big one, "Roger and Me", and I don't expect I will care for Bossie's artistic efforts either. If I want to watch porn, it needs to have some hot babes getting down and dirty, and although I gather that there are indeed some Hillary-inspired porn movies along those lines, Bossie's movie is not one of them.

___ ___ ___

March 24, 2009

An other AP story brings out the fact that the campaign laws do not apply to DVDs, theaters, or the Internet, which explains why Michael Moore's movies were only questioned anent the TV ads for his movies. It also goes to show that Moore can at least get his films aired in theaters, though I suppose some hardline conservatives would retort that only goes to show how liberal the media is, save the miracle of talk radio.

David Brooks gives us a good take on the civil war among conservative Republicans. You can feel the personal edge to it, since Brooks is one of the ones being left out of their reindeer games.

Though, I'm not so confident about his forecast that ultimately the moderates will get the upper-hand. I'm afraid the Ayn Randians and Christianists are too deeply rooted in Americana and will maintain the dominant voice, and that they are only now in the minority opposition thanks to a cratering economy. I'm afraid are Culture War is not behind us and we remain a divided nation.

One might think that the civil war in the Republican Party would be between the libertarians and the Christianists, but they are presumably only embracing each other that much closer now that they are an embattled minority. The tensions between those camps come out when their Party is in the ascendancy as they fight for priority and the spoils.

( Brooks )

P.J. O'Rourke offers his own brand of humorous lamentations.

♠
In 1974, a group of economists and journalists got together in a bar and launched supply-side economics. It was a superb political and economic package. It addressed a big problem: stagflation. It had a clear policy focus: marginal tax rates. It celebrated a certain sort of personality: the risk-taking entrepreneur. It made it clear that the new, growth-oriented Republican Party would be different from the old, green-eyeshade one.

Supply-side economics had a good run, but continual tax cuts can no longer be the centerpiece of Republican economic policy. The demographics have changed. The U.S. is an aging society. We have made expensive promises to our seniors. We can’t keep those promises at the current tax levels, let alone at reduced ones. As David Frum writes in “Comeback,” his indispensable new book: “In the face of such a huge fiscal gap, the days of broad, across-the-board, middle-class tax cutting are over.”

The political situation has changed, too. Republicans used to appeal to the investor class with economic policies and the working class with values, crime and welfare policies. But that formula has broken down. The workers are walking away from the G.O.P., and the only way to win them back is by listening to their economic concerns.

-- David Brooks for The New York Times

Brooks is not saying that the Democrats have won the policy debates, but it would be nice to hear something other than tax cuts and Jesus from the Republicans.

xXx