(heh)
Transcending the Liberal-Conservative Paradigm
10 responses to “Transcending the Liberal-Conservative Paradigm”
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Nick has just told me of the loss of life in various states during the recent storms. Hope y’all are okay.
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I didn’t get so much as a drop of rain. It was pretty windy all day Friday and into Saturday, but that was all, even though one of the deaths occurred 40 or so miles (64 km, I think)…maybe 50…northwest of here. Janet was more in the main path but I had an email from her late last night, so she’s ok. Don’t know if the North Carolina storms were near Sally or not. Tornadoes are such pin-point things, though–you can be within a few hundred yards (approximately meters) or so and not be much affected. Thanks for asking.
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I have only recently discovered that Ayn Rand seems to be the darling of the Tea Party. I didn’t get it, but I see now that it’s Economics. One thing I noticed about Objectivists when we were having our little round with them a while back was that frequently they seem to agree with Conservatives about what should be done, but their reasons for doing those things are completely different.
AMDG -
“they seem to agree with Conservatives about what should be done, but their reasons for doing those things are completely different.”
Bingo. There is a huge philosophical division on the right between libertarians and conservatives, as the article I linked to attests, but what you say is the reason that there’s a sometime alliance and overlap between them. One’s attitude toward Rand is for me a good rough litmus test of whether one is an l or a c. You can agree with Rand’s anti-socialism and be a conservative, but not with her philosophy. Most hard-core libertarians, which includes doctrinaire Randians, are as anti-religious as most hard-core leftists, and for, at bottom, very much the same reasons. -
Ok, I should add “conservative as I understand the term” (which is to say, correctly :-)), because there are certainly plenty of people who call themselves conservative who like Rand.
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Randians are “conservatives” with no heart.
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Glad to hear you are okay, but there certainly have been a lot of deaths from those tornadoes. Yes, obviously given the nature of tornados, they are very localised, unlike cyclones, hurricanes etc.
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Yes, and the count keeps rising. Yesterday it was 17, this morning they were saying 35, now they’re saying 45.
I wouldn’t even call the Randians conservatives at all. If I remember correctly Rand herself spat nails at the idea that she was a conservative. But it’s true that there are a lot of people who call themselves conservatives who like her.
A lot of them don’t really buy her complete philosophy, with all its ruthlessness. They really just focus on her anti-collectivism, and I have to admit she has a point there, probably the only actual good point in her work, at least in Atlas Shrugged (the only thing I’ve read, aside from scattered bits on the net). I think a lot of her fans are a bit like the sentimental leftists who moon about “Imagine”–they just think “war is bad, peace is good,” not “in order to make this happen, we’ll need to kill the clergy and the bourgeoisie.” Some conservatives seem to see only the practical individualism and anti-socialism in Rand, not the total package of rationalized contempt for most of the human race. -
“They really just focus on her anti-collectivism, and I have to admit she has a point there, probably the only actual good point in her work”
Conservatives who tout this aspect of Rand’s work should be aware that there are numerous valid critiques of collectivism that do not include such strong anti-religious sentiment. I wonder if the attraction is primarily due to her putting forth of her ideas in fiction, however dismal and didactic. -
I think that’s almost certainly true (that it’s the fiction that does it). As popular as Atlas Shrugged is, only a very small number of people are declared objectivists, and that’s probably about the number who read anything more than her fiction. I suspect the average reader gets more Horatio Alger (and some pop-psych narcissism) than Nietzsche from it.
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