• • The Catholic Left, Desperate for a Win 
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Among those stoking the outrage and indignation in the run up to Congressman Paul Ryan’s visit to Georgetown University this morning was a group called Catholics United. Catholics United thinks that Congressman Ryan’s budget is “an outrageous slap in the face to our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens,” being, as it so obviously is, “based on the anti-Christian ideals of social Darwinist Ayn Rand.”  

• • • Ryan Shrugged 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | “You know you’ve arrived in politics when you have an urban legend about you, and this one is mine,” chuckles Representative Paul Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman, as we discuss his purported obsession with author and philosopher Ayn Rand. Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, recently called Ryan “an Ayn Rand devotee” who wants to “slash benefits for the poor.” New York magazine once alleged that Ryan “requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s gospel of capitalism. President Obama has blasted the Ryan budget as Republican “social Darwinism.” These Rand-related slams, Ryan says, are inaccurate and part of an effort on the left to paint him as a cold-hearted Objectivist. Ryan’s actual philosophy, as reported by my colleague, Brian Bolduc, couldn’t be further from the caricature.  

• • • Ryan Isn’t a Randian 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Image  | [Paul] Ryan is no bigger a fan of Rand’s than he is of just about any major defender of free markets. He did call Rand the “reason I got involved in public service,” but in a specific context. Speaking at a dinner hosted by the Atlas Society in 2005, Ryan was praising one aspect of Rand’s work, not swallowing her philosophy whole. “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill,” he said, “ . . . is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict — individualism versus collectivism.” He applied this principle to the then-hot topic of Social Security: “If we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing Social Security, think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist. They will be an owner of society.”  

• • Conservatives in Time 
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[Richard] Land writes, “Hard conservatives oppose the social conservatives’ pro-life, pro-traditional marriage agenda. They find Ayn Rand’s ideas attractive.” You can see the problem already. One of Land’s two great examples of hard conservatism, Buckley, was both pro-life and (famously!) anti-Rand. His other example, Goldwater, was pro-life for a good chunk of his career.  

• Move Over, Nascar! 
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Watch any UFC fight. It is conservatism, capitalism at its core, illustrated through a sport. [....] [T]here is no team — it is all focused on the individual and his personal responsibility (Ayn Rand would be front and center at a fight).  

• • Michael D. O’Brien’s New Epic 
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A better parallel for O’Brien than the Ludlum-Dostoevsky combination might be another writer of colossally long books that excite readers about ideas: Think of him as a conservative-Catholic version of Ayn Rand. He has given me more readerly joy over the years than Ayn Rand ever did, so I believe it would be entirely just for him to become a cult-favorite writer on the level she reached.  

• Norway’s Terrorism in Context 
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In the past, one had the cold comfort of knowing that deranged acts such as his were carried out by individuals under the sway of extremist ideologies. Not so Behring Breivik. This terrorist lists among his favorite authors George Orwell, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Ayn Rand, and William James. The disconnect between Behring Breivik’s mainstream political conservatism and his psychological derangement presents a shocking new dilemma and challenge.  

• • Mother Jones vs. the Koch Brothers 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | I wonder what Rand would say about BB&T’s receipt of TARP funds.  

• • • What if audiences shrug? 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  | Who is John Aglialoro? He’s the founding chairman of UM Holdings Inc. — a collector, restorer, and dealer of businesses for three decades running who has presided over everything from an airline to an oil company. [....] That he lionizes the productive class, and that he has managed to ascend to it, are “directly correlated,” he says, with being “zapped” by the writings of Ayn Rand in the early 1970s. And so it makes sense that 40 years later he is co-writer, co-financier, and custodian of the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s novel of statist oppression and capitalist revolt.  

• • Media Matters’ war on Fox News 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Leaving aside for the moment the unfortunate resemblance of many of the names of [Media Matters for America] staffers to those of the moochers and looters in Ayn Rand’s mean-spirited “novel,” Atlas Shrugged — Wesley Mouch, Floyd Ferris, and Balph Eubank — here’s a typical example of 501(c)3 non-partisan, tax-exempt columnizing, from a drone heroic people’s writer named Karl Frisch, who can turn a weather story into an attack on, well, Fox News.  

• Meeting the press, &C. 
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As far as I know, “CPAC” stands for “Conservative Political Action Conference.” And yet reports say that last week’s proceedings were dominated by libertarians, Paulistas — heckling Cheney, calling him a war criminal, and so on. Fine. But can’t they have their own meetings and rallies? What are they doing at a Conservative Political Action Conference? If you’re going to be proudly anti-conservative — you know, be it. Don’t go skulking around at conservative conferences. I’m not sure many people show up at Randian events yelling about God, marital fidelity, charitableness, and other backward stuff.  

• • Miss Rand as inoculator 
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In Impromptus today, I touch on some ticklish questions, including Muslims, ‘birthers,’ and Randians (oh my!). Needless to say, such topics provoke a little mail. I wanted to share with you a note about Ayn Rand, which I thought was charming.  

• Agreeing to be agreeable 
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Atlas Shrugged  | You see, my beloved amigos across the aisle, we’ve got you all sussed out. We understand, far better than you, what animates you. We sense the dark and stormy nights of your souls, your inchoate, racist agita over our First Black President if you don’t count Billy Jeff Blythe III, your love of corporate plutocrats and your sheer loathing for the Little Guy, whom you would like to see ripped to pieces by the Thracian women, rent asunder by rabid weasels and forced to read Atlas Shrugged in its entirety, including the John Galt speech.  

• • Wisconsin wrap: Johnson impresses in 2nd debate 
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Atlas Shrugged  | After stumbling a bit in his first ever political debate last Friday, GOP Senate hopeful Ron Johnson put in an impressive performance tonight. [....] [O]ne of the panelists asked about Johnson’s outspoken admiration for Ayn Rand and in particular her work “Atlas Shrugged.” Johnson very articulately described how the book ought to serve as a warning about what can happen when too many members of society become reliant on too few producers, while Feingold played the populist card and accused Johnson of thinking producers are “better than the rest of us.”  

• The Tea-Party tradition 
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The last time I was in D.C., I spoke at the Wednesday Meeting run by Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Here, gathered under one roof, was Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy”: vaster, indeed, than I had ever imagined. Think-tankers rubbed shoulders with congressional aides, contrarian columnists with right-wing academics, Ayn Rand devotees with anti-health-reform campaigners, Republican candidates with sympathetic businessmen. Although there were many ideological and stylistic differences among those present, they were all there to advance a common cause. I kept thinking of Bismarck’s remark about the German socialists: “We march separately, but we fight together.”  

• • • To the archives, Batman! 
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Atlas Shrugged  | If you go through the [National Review] archives ([...] you’ll find a lot about Rand. Not all of it is negative. Terry Teachout wrote two pieces about her one in 1982 another 25 years later, both of which are sentimental about her influence on him when he was 16. Florence King, in her unique way, seems to have had a soft spot for Rand over the years, as did Joe Sobran. William F. Buckley was decidedly opposed to Objectivism and aware that Rand’s anger at him was deep and personal, but he nonetheless talked honestly, even admiringly, about her success, despite being firmly in the Chambers camp. M. Stanton Evans did a big piece on her role on college campuses in 1967. Here’s the description of the article from the magazine: “Ayn Rand is big on campus, a cult. Stanton Evan explains why, analyzes her position, concludes she is right and wrong, but more wrong than right.”  

• • • A final word on Ayn Rand . . . 
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Atheism  |The Fountainhead  | . . . from Mr. Lester Joe Santos, a hermit who dwells in a cave in the desert of the American Southwest. On rare occasion he sends epigrammatic critiques of my labors. One cannot be sure he actually exists, and certainly I give no promise. “Mr. Steorts,” says he, It seems that what you believe, but have not written directly, is this. Ayn Rand wants to glorify the heroic in man. Whittaker Chambers thinks this must come at the expense of God. But it all depends on what “glorify” and “heroic” are taken to mean. Rand denies God’s existence because she is enslaved by a certain definition of it. She then fills the concept of the absolute, which ought to have been empty, with her ego and its “reason.” Thus embarked on the path of gravest temptation, she speaks—beware it!—of “man-worship.” And she is all the more dangerous for her power to make highly concentrated symbols.  

• • • Ayn Rand on Sex 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Sex, for Rand, is the way women romantically give themselves to superior men. It is an act of possession of the woman by the man, willed by her as a gift given in admiration for the man and his capacity to create and achieve. Good men in turn desire women who are capable themselves and who, more importantly, honestly admire and seek to serve their ability. Bad men desire women who can make them feel as if they ought to be admired whether they are genuinely admirable or not. It has never been quite clear to me why in Rand’s world the most desirable men don’t sleep with other achieving men (even though Rand would be appalled by the idea). I mean, Hank Rearden invented a new metal that will revolutionize the world; Dagny was just, you know, a pretty competent railroad executive — for a woman.  

• • • Re: Ayn Rand and Whittaker Chambers 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  | Many thanks to Richard Reinsch for his comments on my Ayn Rand/Whittaker Chambers piece. [....]I can endorse Reinsch’s statement that Chambers was not reading Rand in a “narrow” political sense. I simply think Chambers was wrong about the underlying connection between metaphysics and politics as well. I thank Mr. Reinsch again for his thoughts, which are certainly worthy of respect and consideration, and for giving me this opportunity to elaborate my own.  

• • • Ayn Rand and Whittaker Chambers 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | While I find Rand’s evangelistic atheism off-putting in the extreme, I believe Chambers is [...] wrong to claim that her system is “a forthright philosophic materialism.” Insofar as I am familiar with her writings and public statements, she had nothing kind to say about materialists. Certainly she rejected much that conventionally accompanies materialism; for example, she believed in the freedom of the will in contradistinction to causal determinism. And a minor theme of Atlas Shrugged is that its heroes, though denounced as materialists, are more capable of enjoying spiritual pleasures (“spiritual” here understood in a non-religious sense — she has in mind the capacity e.g. to love, or to feel profound aesthetic appreciation) than are their denouncers. I think the correct assessment is that Rand rejected any division at all between body and mind, material and spiritual (another instance of her indebtedness to Nietzsche, which Chambers perceptively noted).