Ayn Rand: the Tea Party’s Miscast Matriarch
By PAM MARTENS at CounterPunch
Gary Weiss, long time Wall Street reporter and author, has written a new book, due out this week from St. Martin’s Press, on the rising influence of Ayn Rand in modern politics. Titled Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, the book removes the propaganda mask that has been so adroitly affixed to Alan Greenspan’s page-boy coiffed goddess of laissez-faire capitalism and the Tea Party’s mother ship.
While lecturing others for most of her life on the meaning of morality, Rand had extramarital sex for more than a decade with a younger man who worked for her. His wife was among her inner circle of friends and Rand herself was married. A believer in acquiescence to selfish desires, Rand published a 1964 collection of essays with Nathaniel Branden titled The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. Adding particular poignancy to the title, Branden was the young subordinate with whom she was sleeping.
Rand, and her supporters, including Alan Greenspan, viewed altruism as evil: altruism is evil, selfishness is good. And tens of millions of dollars of corporate money is backing that philosophy today in America, no doubt to give obscenely paid CEOs a sip of Rand’s guilt-free narcissism while stoking the fires for more deregulation of a country just crawling back from the crippling effects of deregulation. This is the mindless irrationality of Rand’s brand of rationality.
According to Weiss, Ayn Rand built her Objectivist philosophy that permeates today’s Tea Party around individual self interest and eliminating government run social welfare programs, but she herself was on Medicare and Social Security.
Even after the attack at Pearl Harbor, Rand was against the U.S. entering World War II. She viewed government force as evil, but her own followers were regularly purged, shunned and vilified. She was an atheist, as are all true Objectivists, according to the grande dame of radical capitalism.
Alan Greenspan, the man who chaired the Federal Reserve Board for 18 years, guiding U.S. monetary policy under four presidents, was a member of Rand’s Collective in New York City, which Weiss likens to a cult: “For much of its existence the Collective was for all intents and purposes a cult. It had an unquestioned leader, it demanded absolute loyalty, it intruded into the personal lives of its members, it had its own rote expressions and catchphrases, it expelled transgressors for deviation from accepted norms, and expellees were ‘fair game’ for vicious personal attacks.”
More troubling about Greenspan, who during his term as Fed Chair, aided in the gutting of critical Wall Street regulations, including the repeal of the depression-era Glass-Steagall Act which barred the merger of insured deposit banks with investment banks and brokerage firms, was his blind loyalty to Rand’s cultish propaganda.
Keep reading: Ayn Rand: the Tea Party’s Miscast Matriarch » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.
