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Monday, January 12, 2009

Ayn Rand to the Rescue!


Stephen Moore, author in 1988 of Privatization: A Strategy for Taming the Deficit (hey, how did that pan out?), editor in 1995 of Restoring the Dream: What House Republicans Plan to Do Now to Strengthen the Family, Balance the Budget, and Replace Welfare (hey, how did that pan out?), co-author with Julian Simon (extropian transhumanist hero -- not surprising, I always describe the extropians as the Ayn Raelian branch of Robot Cultism after all) in 2000 of It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years (hey, how's that panning out?), and author in 2004 of Bullish On Bush: How George Bush's Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger (hey, how did that pan out?), provides insight as to how a person so completely wrong about everything all the time can still keep on bulldozing forward saying completely wrong things with such sublime indifference to reality… The answer, in a nutshell? He is a fan of Ayn Rand. In Friday's Wall Street Journal Moore opines:
Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read "Atlas Shrugged" a "virgin." Being conversant in Ayn Rand's classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only "Atlas" were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

The Comments over at Sadly, No! occasioned by this surreal confection are priceless.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've seen Stephen Moore several times on Bill Maher's show. He's batshit crazy. He's in complete denial about the collapse of conservatism. He's one of those Tax Cut Fundamentalists for whom tax cuts are THE only issue. The world could collapse around him as long as he got his tax cuts. He also said last fall, on Maher's show, that Sarah Palin is the future of the Republican Party. Quite a statement from a former think tank founder on such an arrogant anti-intellectual.

Dale Carrico said...

He also said last fall, on Maher's show, that Sarah Palin is the future of the Republican Party.

If only.

Anonymous said...

If only.

I'm curious. Since I assume you don't support a dominant-party system (even if the party in power was an unabashedly progressive Democratic Party), what ideology would you realistically prefer the Republican party adopts if it isn't secular libertarianism? Would European-style Christian democracy (right-wing on moral and cultural issues while left-wing on labour and economic issues) be the lesser evil?

P.S. This might a be good opportunity to explain what you see as the differences between paleoconservatism and neoconservatism... ;)

Dale Carrico said...

what ideology would you realistically prefer the Republican party adopt

There is not a single realistic scenario in which I would be consulted in the matter and so nothing realistic is likely to come of the experiment. Here's hoping the next incarnation of Republicanism is a little less batshit crazy on the racist, sexist, homophobic, militarist, elitist, and theocratic fronts, I guess. If they are, perhaps fewer people will suffer -- of course, if they don't, they look to be marginalized for the time being into a ineffectual rump party anyway. I can't say that it makes much sense to me to devote too much time to daydreams on this score.

Of course, I find no fully comfortable home in either of America's dominant parties but, like many radical democrats in the left Netroots, I know that there are definitive institutional barriers to the emergence of third parties with the power to effect any kind of real progressive change in the United States and so we focus on nudging the left wing of the possible ever leftward through a strengthening of the Progressive Anti-Corporatist Anti-Militarist Dirty Fucking Hippy factions of the Democratic Party itself, ugly and frustrating though this path is -- through organizing (small campaign donor aggregation, incumbent challenges where desirable, etc), education (framing, critique, rapid media response), and agitation (petitions, campaigns, boycotts, legislation sponsorship, and so on) -- struggling to facilitate universal single-payer health care, universal basic income guarantees, lifelong education, steeply progressive property and income taxes, regulation of production and trade in the service of sustainability, workplace democracy through collective bargaining.

That's "realistic," in my view. Who has time to daydream about an ideal or even preferred opposition when one is fighting at the edge of one's means just to make our supposed allies honor their commitments, constituents, and basic good sense?

Anonymous said...

I'd just like to add, concerning Stephen Moore, that in the four or five times I've seen him on Maher's show, the most annoying thing about him is the way he resorts to idiotic cackling rather than reasoned arguments whenever Maher or the other guests confront him on a conservative position that he can't defend. That is his only defense. He's an ideologue, not an intellectual, and even among the not-so-intellectual challenges of Maher and his cohorts, he has repeatedly demonstrated his inability to counter facts and arguments.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a good video of the cackling (all of Tullycast's videos have been removed from YouTube), but I was able to find this one example of Moore on Maher's show (hopefully it's still up by the time you click it).

That video demonstrates all the major characteristics of Stephen Moore that you need to know. His immediate recourse to tax cuts. Then he mentions ACORN, another superficial talking point, and he doesn't know what it stands for. A gem is around 8:10 when he mentions how "hot" Sarah Palin is, and Dana Gould calls her an "evangelical dominatrix" for repressed social conservatives. The rest of Gould's comments are also priceless.

Warning: you may need to take an anti-emetic before watching that.

Anonymous said...

Here's a kos post pertinent to our discussion about the future of the GOP:

The Death of the Moderate Republican

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/1/14/1203/65128/800/683635