Here is the source of much of the Republican idiocy

Ayn Rand.



Ayn Rand teaches that the only valid morality is selfishness. All Randian morality is based on the free market, and property rights are the only rights which are valid. Ownership of property is absolute and gives one the unfettered right to use or dispose of that property in whatever way the owner desires. No one may interfere with this absolute right, including the government or the community.

Ayn Rand explicitly stated that altruism and religious ethics were meaningless and wrong. They are not based on property rights and the free unfettered market and in fact can be used to justify interference with the free market and property rights.

The Fountainhead was published in 1943 and was quickly adopted by conservative American businessmen who were fighting Roosevelt and the New Deal. Rand's philosophy was also very strongly embedded in the Robert Welch's John Birch Society. Interestingly it horrified William F. Buckley.

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Here is the full 27 minute Mike Wallace interview with the Rand woman.

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OK. Here is Christopher Hitchens demolishing Ayn Rand's alleged "Objectivism."



There is really very little to add to what Christopher Hitchens said, but Ayn Rand's idiocy philosophy has been adopted by a number of American individuals who either inherited great wealth they did not earn themselves or were able to claw themselves to the highest regions of monopolistic or oligopolistic big businesses. A very few exceptions were people like Bill Gates who created new markets and had the good fortune to be able to remain at the top of the organizations they created to exploit those markets as Gates was able to do with Microsoft Corporation.

None of these individuals inherently deserve the power they have been given. A few, like Bill Gates, have comported themselves in ways that justify the social and economic power they have obtained. The problem is that when such individuals achieve such power they frequently assume they deserve it and that they should be worshiped for their combination of (mostly)good luck and (to some extent) ability to exploit their position.

Ayn Rand's Objectivism is based on the assumption that they deserve what society gave them and that the privileges they receive because of their social success are beneficial to society in general. Neither assumption is true.

How did America get into the mess it's in now?

TPM Cafe's M. J. Rosenberg provides a letter written by his nephew (Jeremy Gruenbaum) to explain it. The kid says "Blame it all on the baby boomers!" I think he gets a lot of the history right, and I lived through most of it myself.

The key point he makes is that the middle class in America suffered through the Depression, then fought through the most massive war the world has ever seen, and came out on the other side of all that into the 1950's. They felt they deserved the America of the 50's in which they quickly became the richest nation on earth. They knew things could get worse and didn't want to lose what they felt they had earned and go back to the massive struggles they had passed through to get there. Instead they wanted to preserve and pass the rewards they felt they had worked so hard for on to their children. The result was a growing conservative movement that objected to the changing American society and who wanted to return to the halcyon days of the 1950's. The result was the conservative movement that effectively took over the Baby Boom generation and won elections.

Gruenbaum makes a number of very good points. I strongly recommend that you go read the entire post. It is food for a great deal of thought. It also delights me that this is an explanation for the political disaster which has over taken America that does NOT blame the DFHs of the 60's and early 70's.

[Gruenbaum wrote his piece in partial response to an excellent piece by Noah Millman in The American Scene. It, too, is worth reading.]

What's wrong with America? Ask Jon Taplin.

Reagan and the neoconservatives managed to convince their followers that the only thing the government knew how to do well was fight wars. All the rest--building the Interstate Highway System, running Social Security and Medicare--the government must be incompetent. But it is the financing of the National Security State that prevents us from providing a world class universal health care and K-College education system. Nothing else. And until the Democrats are willing to provide a counter-narrative to Glenn Beck's vision of what's wrong with America--one aimed at the working class and not Wall Street--the social contagion of the interregnum's morbid symptoms will continue to spread.

This is the conclusion that Jon Taplin has come to. It's very interesting how he gets there.

I had identified the problem of the culture clash myself, but I had not put the rest of it all together they way he has. His book should be very interesting.

America has become a Fascist nation

How bad is the shift in America towards a right-wing authoritarian government? Take a look at this definition of Fascism by Robert Paxton, read the papers or watch TV and you tell me. Fascism is:

"... a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."

Then he gives some details that I will present as a checklist:

"a form of political behavior marked by

• obsessive preoccupation with community decline,
• humiliation or victimhood and
• by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which
• a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites,
• abandons democratic liberties and
• pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints
• goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Sara Robinson has presented all this and her analysis of how close we actually are to true Fascism. Her analysis is extremely disquieting, if not too surprising as we have watched the Bush/Cheney administration slide rather rapidly in this direction for the last eight years. She bases her analysis on Robert Paxton's five stages of Fascism. They are:
1. The initial creation of fascist movements.
2. Their rooting as parties in a political system.
3. The acquisition of power.
4. The exercise of power.
5. Radicalization or entropy.

Paxton explains what the stages are, and Sara shows how we have achieved each one. If you have time, start with Paxton's explanation. But Sara's analysis is the most focused on today's America which is suffering through the political illness.

Communism in America has always been extremely unlikely. The barriers here against Fascism, however, have always been much less robust. We are now on the very edge of the precipice.