Friday, April 06, 2012

Review of Weiss' "Ayn Rand Nation"

Gary Weiss' new tome, Ayn Rand Nation, looks to be the first critical examination of Rand from the Left that we've seen since Ellis' Is Objectivism a Religion? It's well written, well researched, and, despite all the anti-market innuendo, makes for an absorbing read. Its main value is the glimpse it gives us into the lives of several prominent Objectivists. A secondary virtue of the book is that it provides a critique of Rand's doctrinaire laissez-faire capitalism from a strong pro-regulation, pro-big government view. Sometimes Weiss' arguments are very good; sometimes they are not so good. The books main weaknesses is that it tries to squeeze Objectivism and the Tea Party into a left-wing narrative that is, in many important respects, not in accord with the facts.

Weiss' main thesis is that Rand is much more influential than people realize and that, unless she is vigorously opposed by morally enlightened individuals (i.e., people who agree with Mr. Weiss), American society will be hijacked by Objectivism. He quotes ARI Director Yaron Brook's blueprint for the future: ""A hundred years from now, I think Objectivism will be the dominant secular philosophy in the United States." Weiss believes that Brook's prediction "makes logical sense." I suspect Weiss regards the threat of Objectivism as credible because he buys into the way Rand frames the debate between left and right. Weiss gives credence to the left-wing carricature of conservatism as a mean, anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-welfare state ideology. He believes, for instance, that the Tea Party advocates full "laissez-faire" capitalism, and describes Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to save Medicare "an incremental step toward a goal long favored by Objectivists — abolition of Medicare." For Weiss, right-wing economic ideology is merely a rationalization for the predatory and callous behavior of business elites on Wall Street, and he spends much of Ayn Rand Nation attempting to explain why decent people in the Tea Party buy into an ideology which, he contends, is not in their self-interest. He fails to realize that when Tea Partiers complain about over-regulation or high taxes, they are not thinking exclusively in terms of Sarbanes–Oxley or Dodd-Frank. Indeed, they may not be thinking of Wall Street at all, but of Main Street. Starting a business not only involves huge financial risks (as many businesses fail, something leftist critics of the market such as Weiss blithely ignore), but may involve wading through oceans of bureaucratic red tape. While middle class families struggle to pay their mortgages, tax burdens remain onerous. Meanwhile, local, state, and federal governments continue to amass regulations. California recently passed a law that requires child seats until a kid is at least 4'9" tall or nine years old. On the Federal level we have the immense regulatory burden of Obamacare, which is threatening to make health care unaffordable to the middle class. Regulations are so complex that they can neither be followed nor enforced. Instead, they merely give bureaucrats arbitrary power over the citizenry, as we see with the EPA, where we find public officials declaring this or that piece of private property a "wetlands," much to the detriment to the titular owners of the property. While such laws (or bureaucratic meddling) may be "well-meaning," they do come off as rather patronizing and heavy-handed, if not actually harmful and tyrannical. They are poles apart from the pioneer spirit that once prevailed in the land of the free and home of the brave.

In short, what is really driving the Tea Party and the so-called "radical" right is frustration with an overly obtrusive, wasteful, and increasingly debt-engorged government run by bureaucrats who seem to believe that, in the absence of government, most people would be incapable of looking after themselves. Whereas the Tea Party deplores the "nanny-state," Weiss regards government as a necessary and potentially beneficial presence. He paints a dark picture of an Objectivist society sans big government:


In an Objectivist world, roads would go unplowed in the snows of winter, and bridges would fall as the government withdrew from the business of maintaining them.... Airplane traffic would be grounded unless a profit-making capitalist found it in his own selfish interests to fund the air traffic control system. If it could be made profitable, fine. If not, tough luck. The market had spoken.

However undesirable we might find Rand's economic vision, are people really this helpless, this lacking an initiative, this destitute of resourcefulness? If the government didn't plow the roads or pick up the garbage, would these things not be done at all? What would happen if the government was knocked out for a bit by, let's say, an EMP bomb? Are Americans so helpless that they would be unable to survive such an attack? Would they really drown in their own garbage if the government wasn't around to pick it up? One wonders how Americans survived on the frontier, with little if any presence of government at all!

What Weiss fails to realize is that the Tea Party is not so much pro-Rand as it is anti-Left. Rand was reflexively anti-left. When the Left accused capitalists of being greedy, Rand answered, "What is wrong with that? Greed is good." When the Left rationalized their intrusions into private wealth and economic liberty on grounds of compassion and altruism, Rand replied by declaring that altruism was evil, the standard, not of life, but of death. Now while Rand's counter arguments are not particularly sophisticated or wise, they at least have the virtue of catharsis. They are emotional reactions expressing a resounding "No!" to the Left. The Tea Party is attracted to some of these Randian memes purely for their cathartic and emotional force. They feel the burden of left-wing government becoming too much to bear and wish to "shrug" it off. "Going Galt" is a Sorelian myth. It would be a mistake to take it too literally, or to read Objectivist dogma into Tea Party angst. How many Tea Partiers really want to abolish social security and medicare? I suspect very few. If their rhetoric suggests otherwise, that's merely because it's an emotional reaction, a release, not a carefully thought-out, deliberated policy.

At the end of his book, Weiss urges his leftist comrades to fight Rand on the battleground of morality:


My Objectivist friends are right that morality needs to become part of the national dialogue. However we feel about Rand, we need to ponder her views and think more philosophically. We need to evaluate our own core values, and understand the moral foundations of the social programs and government agencies that are targeted by the right. Why do we pay for medical care of the poor and elderly? Why do we regulate business? Why do we pave roads and maintain parks and build public schools? Why do we subsidize public radio, mass transit, family planning clinics, and a host of other programs that don’t always benefit ourselves?

What Weiss fails to understand is that this moral duel between Rand and the Left is a tempest over slogans and window dressing. The explicit social moralities of the Left and the Tea Party Right are mere rationalizations, one-sided reactions (or perhaps over-reactions) to legitimate gripes about difficult, sometimes insoluble problems facing the human condition. Social life confronts us with perplexing trade-offs between regulation and efficiency, externalities and regulatory over-reach, local knowledge and central control, and freedom and safety. While these trade-offs have a moral component, casting them in moral terms merely causes us to ignore the difficult issues and trade-offs involved. With the practical considerations swept under moralizing rug, the field is left clear for for less reputable operators, whether they be Wall Street speculators or agenda-driven bureaucrats. We have people in Wall Street, for example, who desire "laissez-faire," not because they actually want such a system (they don't), but merely because they do not want the government rooting out their corrupt practices. And likewise, we have regulators who, far from desiring to create conditions in which honest people can earn a living and help grow the economy, wish merely to build their bureaucratic empires and further their anti-business agendas. Always, when examining the various political and economic factions which make up a nation, one must look beyond the ideologies with which each faction attempts to justify itself and ferret out the actual behavior that is being justified.

12 comments:

Neil Parille said...

Greg,

Excellent review. There is, as you note, a lot of good stuff in the book. It's almost like a (more accurate) updating of Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult.

And my blog post (which ARCHN also posted) on the McCaskey schism is mentioned, best of all.

The worst part of the book is that while Weiss tries to be "fair and balanced" and even sympathetic to Rand you can detect an undercurrent of contempt for her.

For example, Weiss talks about how John Allison said that the US shouldn't have been involved in WWII. Weiss says, "Here I was, a few days before Yom Kippur, discussing whether there was something fouled up about the war that kept Nazi Germany from turning more of my relatives into soap."

Putting aside the urban legend about the Nazis turning Jews into soap, the reader can almost hear Weiss saying, "Damn I wish Rand weren't Jewish."

-Neil Parille

Daniel Barnes said...

And here I was, just tapping away at my own belated review of the book. Greg's made most of my points for me, fortunately.

tombr said...

Very interesting review; I was not minded to review it or read it myself, since some reviews already suggest that this might be a dumb hatchet job on Rand rather than an insightful piece about her influence on the current debate.

From my reading, most Tea Parties and their sympathisers are annoyed at high taxes and regulations and worried about debt and joblessness. Some might be motivated by Rand's critique, and find her portrayal of Big Government in Atlas to have been uncannily accurate (it was), but I think this is an argument that can be taken too far.

In a way, sympathisers with Rand's ideas (if not all of them) can take it as a compliment that Rand still matters so much to some people that they feel it necessary to write such books.

I wonder if they will still do this in a 100 years. Possibly.

Anonymous said...

Has anyone heard about the latest schism? Seems that Diana Hsieh and Jim Valiant are not speaking any longer, over Hsieh's "toleration" of "defamatory" 3rd party comments about Peikoff, or something like that.

I try not to waste time checking Objectivist blogs anymore, but I'm glad I caught this. It's hilarious. I never thought THOSE two hardliners would part ways.

I would love to see DH or anyone else answer the question, "What is it about Objectivism that attracts rude, snide, petty, political moralizers?" In the past two years there have been more breakups, minor and major, than I can count. Don't tell me it's all just a big coincidence.

Anon69 said...

>>Don't tell me it's all just a big coincidence<<

Of course it isn't a coincidence. Rand herself demanded moralizing, as well as independent rational judgment. The only way that schisms could possibly be avoided, given those two demands, would have been if Objectivist epistemology was so ironclad that every free thinker practicing Objectivism came to the same conclusions given a common set of facts. This never happens, because the supposedly rational epistemology was only ever sketched in the ITOE, and even what was described there is either gravely inaccurate or inadequate. Behind that there is the impression fostered by Peikoff that mastery requires decades, even a lifetime, of constant study (and expensive lecture tapes). To me, the failure of Objectivist epistemology is the linchpin behind the unworkability of Objectivism in practice, and I hope Greg will produce an "Objectivism and Epistemology" series soon.

Daniel Barnes said...

Anon69:
>To me, the failure of Objectivist epistemology is the linchpin behind the unworkability of Objectivism in practice

Anon69 is on the money. I've always marveled at the way Objectivists - starting with Rand herself - think it's the most brilliant part of her system. She even referred to herself an "epistemologist"(!) Yet it's easily the most feeble part of her system. The ITOE "makes sense" in a college-dorm bull session kind of way if you don't think about it too much. But any closer inspection doesn't pass the laugh test. I mean, there's nothing wrong with doing a single slim, obscure volume on which your intellectual reputation rests - look at Wittgenstein when he was alive. But the ITOE is so bad only an Objectivist could love it.

Michael Prescott said...

"In the past two years there have been more breakups, minor and major, than I can count. Don't tell me it's all just a big coincidence."

I suspect that the proliferation of schisms in recent history reflects the fact that the leader of the orthodox movement, Leonard Peikoff, is getting on in years. People are undoubtedly starting to think in terms of a successor, and I'd bet that competing camps are forming around different candidates. As with any succession struggle, there will be ugly machinations behind the scenes, old animosities rekindled, and old scores to be settled. I'm not sure it has much to do with the specifics of Rand's philosophy; the pattern can probably be observed in any small circle of rivals all seeking the same prize.

bulbul said...

fails to realize that when Tea Partiers complain about over-regulation or high taxes, they are not thinking exclusively in terms of Sarbanes–Oxley or Dodd-Frank
Indeed, because neither of those have anything to do with taxation, nor do they provide an example of regulation that your average Tea Partier even knows about.

carricature of conservatism as a mean, anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-welfare state ideology
I'm sorry, but how is that a caricature and not an accurate description? All those things pretty much define modern-day US conservatism, starting with the famous quote about drowning the government in the bathtub, through complaints about regulation (just read your own post) all the way to implicit and explicit attempts at dismantling Social Security.

Starting a business ... may involve wading through oceans of bureaucratic red tape.
As a former independent businessman myself, I would submit that it almost always does, but again, this is not something you hear from the Tea Partiers. And no, I don't count Joe the Plumber.

While middle class families struggle to pay their mortgages, tax burdens remain onerous.
Do they really? As we are regularly reminded by conservatives, half of America pays no income taxes and the rich have their supposedly well- tax-breaks. And tax rates in general are at historic lows.

California recently passed a law that requires child seats until a kid is at least 4'9" tall or nine years old.
Really? Is this the best example of evil regulation you could come up with? And do you seriously mean to describe EPA as tyrannical? I believe there's a "Princess Bride" quote for that.

They are poles apart from the pioneer spirit that once prevailed in the land of the free and home of the brave.
A refreshing argument, yet sadly temporarily misplaced. This isn't the early 19th century and America is no longer an empty land just waiting to be taken.

How many Tea Partiers really want to abolish social security and medicare?
A good question, but isn't that exactly what us leftists - including Weiss, judging by his comments on Tea Partiers voting against their own interests - are saying? The Tea Partiers don't really want to abolish Social Security and Medicare, because those programs work and they themselves often make use of them. Yet they keep saying they do and, most importantly, keep electing politicians who are attempting just that.

... are people really this helpless, this lacking an initiative, this destitute of resourcefulness?
No, but they can be and often are selfish which, as you recall, Objectivists do not see as a vice. Sure, people would clean up their own section of the street and take out their own garbage. But living as most of us do in the city or in the suburbs means that we can't just deposit the junk or the garbage anywhere outside of our property, because that's somebody else's property (again, this is not the 19th century and we don't live on isolated farms anymore). And presto, you need coordination, you need cooperation, and for that you usually need rules and leadership. Even under the most catastrofic conditions (say, a home owners' association meeting), those usually emerge, but about five seconds after they do, there also emerge protoconservatives decrying rules as interference and leadership as dictatorship. Have you never attended a condo board meeting or a local town hall?

/continued/

bulbul said...

The Tea Party ... feel the burden of left-wing government becoming too much to bear and wish to "shrug" it off.
That's the operative word: "feel". The same way my grandmother "feels" cold even in a 100-degree weather or the same way one "feels" an amputated limb, in that it's just an illusion. It is plain to see that the Tea Partiers are feeling pain and I suspect mostly for good reason. But it's not the left-wing government that's causing the pain, mostly because there is no left-wing government in the US. But more importantly, the Tea Party arose in early 2009, after 8 years of right-wing government which proved to be disastrous for the US and the world at large. So yes, much of that pain they feel was caused by the government, but not the left. The 24/7 propaganda machine the likes of which the world has never seen tapped into that pain and channelled and directed it the way its coporate masters wanted, towards imaginary Marxists and socialists all embodied by, ohwhatacoincidence, a black man.
All of that assumes that the Tea Party actually is a legitimate popular movement. I have my doubts.

people in Wall Street ... who desire "laissez-faire," ... merely because they do not want the government rooting out their corrupt practices.
Well, who would have thought, something we can agree on.

we have regulators who ... wish merely to build their bureaucratic empires and further their anti-business agendas
And we were so close... So the right pretends to believe in something (laissez-faire) just because it would give them a practical advantage (not going to jail), but the left does something (regulation) not for its practical advantages, but because it furthers their ideology (bureaucratic empire-building and anti-business, whatever the heck that is). Oh yes, sounds very fair and balanced.

I have just discovered your blog and I see that you provide some very thoughtful analysis of Objectivism which I will peruse with much pleasure. But this review is for the most part nothing but a bunch of untruths, half-truths and strawmen - quite ironic, considering your references to "accord with the facts" in the first paragraph. What a waste.

gregnyquist said...

So the right pretends to believe in something (laissez-faire) just because it would give them a practical advantage (not going to jail), but the left does something (regulation) not for its practical advantages, but because it furthers their ideology (bureaucratic empire-building and anti-business, whatever the heck that is). Oh yes, sounds very fair and balanced.

I don't mind being condemned, but i would prefer to be condemned for what I actually believed, rather than some feeble caricature. We don't do all the Right vs. Left, Hatfield vs. McCoy stuff at ARCHNBlog. Nor do we attempt to be "fair and balanced," if that means striking some kind of balance between two opposing ideological positions, both of which may suffer from various biases and astigmatisms. What kind of balance can possibly be achieved between two errors? In short, we just don't do ideology at ARCHNBlog, so those looking to have their ideological prejudices bolstered best look elsewhere. We want to be able to interpret facts without the necessity of making them conform with this or that ideological mantra.

bulbul said...

What kind of balance can possibly be achieved between two errors
No, this is not the balance I was talking about. I was referring to the faux-balance so typical of the US media and public forum where if one side is guilty of a wrongdoing, the other side must ipso facto be equally guilty of something else. Except it usually isn't. Your comparison was a perfect example: in your opinion, the rightist who profess laissez-faire do not do so for any moral reasons, but only because they don't want to be punished for their crimes. But the leftists (= regulators) are just as hypocritical when they claim the only purpose of their policies is to improve people's lifes, because all they really want is to do is build bureaucratic empires and destroy business. In your view, the right-wingers have committed actual crimes while the left is guilty of believing in something (assuming your portrayal of the left make sense and is accurate, which it bloody well doesn't and isn't) and yet you claim they are both just as bad. Why? Well, this brings me to my second rejoinder.

We want to be able to interpret facts without the necessity of making them conform with this or that ideological mantra.
And yet the very language you use is filled to the brim with the terminology specific to a particular ideological mantra: pro-regulation, big-government, left-wing, left-wing government, tax burden, tyrannical, anti-business - all of that just in this post. Don't get me started on the "religion in Europe" canard.
So pardon me, but if it quacks like a duck, it's a bloody duck. You sound like a conservative, so you probably are a conservative. That's ok - I didn't come here to have my ideological back scratched. In fact, on this particular subject, I would welcome a view from the right. But please do not pretend you are something you're not, i.e. neutral.

Francois Tremblay said...

"despite all the anti-market innuendo"

*snicker*
What are you, some kind of ancap?