Last week, reading Donald Luskin’s Journal op-ed on Ayn Rand, I was deeply shocked and saddened by this sentence:
Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) insists that all his staffers read “Atlas Shrugged.”
Guess what? Turns out it’s not true!
This morning, Ben Domenech – having seen the same assertion in another source – reports:
Always skeptical about the offhand, unsourced anecdote from Beam’s piece (which wasn’t even focused on Ryan), I reached out to several former Ryan staffers yesterday to ask them whether the Budget Chairman had required them to read Rand. While everyone knows Ryan is indeed a personal fan of Rand’s work, not a single one of them said Ryan had required them to read the books. Responses include: “I had already read it prior to working for him, but it is by no means a requirement for employment,” and “Saying he ‘requires’ his staff to read it is definitely stretching the truth,” and the flat out denial: “We are not required to read Rand.”
Domenech documents numerous places in the left-leaning media and blogosphere where various forms of this story – sometimes it’s The Fountainhead rather than Atlas Shrugged - have been uncritically circulated as evidence of Republican extremism. From his post, it looks like Domenech (a fan of Rand) is unaware of Luskin’s having also uncritically repeated it as evidence of Republican good sense.
Domenech also recalls how the paranoid left used to delight itself with simliar horror stories about the alleged deep Randianism of the Reagan administration, reproducing an amusing passage from a 1987 Maureen Dowd column. (Isn’t it reassuring to know that in a world of crisis and catastrophe where all the basic structures of our civilization seem vulnerable to instant destruction at any moment, there are some things you really can always count on?)
I’m deeply grateful to Domenech for doing the basic reportorial work of fact-checking that neither the paranoiac left nor Luskin were apparently able to rouse themselves to do.
April 20th, 2011 | 10:53 am
It wouldn’t be a bad idea if they all did read Atlas Shrugged, or the Fountainhead. You may reject the philosophy of objectivism without denying that Ayn Rand discerned correctly certain totalitarian threads in what passes for modern liberalism.
April 20th, 2011 | 1:06 pm
It’s odd that Ryan, a Catholic as I understand, has any use for Rand. But even Cal Thomas thinks we should all rush off to see the new Rand movie, Atlas Shrugged. It seems that Randian individualism is a good club to beat the collectivist left. Tthe Church as as opposed to her fatuous brand of individualism and materialism as is any leftist.
April 20th, 2011 | 1:21 pm
Yah, well, some of us get tired of the Church’s fatuous brand of collectivism, too.
April 20th, 2011 | 2:20 pm
Catholics can read Rand, they just can’t pretend to square Rand with Catholic teaching (and Rand herself would have been rather aggressively the first to agree).
April 20th, 2011 | 3:17 pm
This would seem to be one of those “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” moments, but whereas Tertullian felt that Hellenism had nothing in common with, and thus nothing to offer Christiantianity, a century or so later the great Cappodocians, Basil the Great, Greogry Nanzianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, where using Greek philosophical terminology and constructs to better define the nature of the Holy Trinity. While Ayn Rand is no Aristotle or Plato, there are aspects of her work which can be applied by Catholics, regardless of whether she herself would have approved. The USCCB and other modern Catholic theologians of course think nothing of mining through Marx and neo-Marxian scholars for ideas to support their theology–and with a lot less success, too, one might add.
April 20th, 2011 | 3:21 pm
But why bother with Rand when you can learn all the same things from far superior sources? To the extent that Rand offers insight on the evils and dangers of collectivism, others have made the same case far better, and without hobbling it all at one leg to naive moral and metaphysical reductionism. There’s no comparative advantage to getting this stuff from Rand.
April 20th, 2011 | 3:52 pm
Stuart
Sadly, no. Her work is locked-tight cultic ideology, not open-ended freeware. There is nothing useful there that is not better found elsewhere in freer form. To the extent Rep Paul wants to market himself as a Faithful Catholic(TM), he would be well advised to shelve Atlas Shrugged as anything other than a piece of fiction.
April 20th, 2011 | 7:39 pm
The collectivist left? Vs. What? The selfish right? Should that be the adjective?
I will always use such a label in the future.
April 20th, 2011 | 11:21 pm
Dan, keep thinking — there are better logical opposites for “collectivist” than “selfish.”
April 21st, 2011 | 2:41 am
I thought that Whittiker Chambers, in the pages of National Review, effectively dispatched Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” (to use the term loosely), to borrow a phrase from Ronald Reagan’s description of Chamber’s former fling, communism, to the intellectual “ashheap”?
Sadly, Rand’s nonsense, even though Chambers, and, I might add, william F.Buckley, effectively refuted it, light years ago, seems to, like a bad virus, that’s almost immune to eradication, rear its ugly head in the form of Paul Ryan’s political philosophy.
An excellent article, regarding Rand’s influence, on Paul Ryan, in NEWSWEEK, by Johnathon Chait, is rather illuminating, as is Chait’s article, in THE NEW REPUBLIC that, effectively refutes Ryan’s plans to fix the deficit.
Just as the Democratic Party, must fully purge itself, of any vestige of Marxism, the Republican Party, must purge itself, of the noxious nonsense, of Ayn Rand.
April 21st, 2011 | 8:48 pm
Rep. Ryan lists “Mere Christianity” and “Atlas Shrugged” on his facebook page as two of his favourite books (oil and water!). Even if his staffers might not be asked to read it, the toxic, anti-Christian ideology is still there.
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