Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Monday, December 18th, 2017

It’s Ayn Rand’s America now: How the GOP stripped the country of its last shred of morality

Author:     NEAL GABLER
Source:     Raw Story/Moyers & Company
Publication Date:     16 DEC 2017 AT 11:14 ET
Link: It’s Ayn Rand’s America now: How the GOP stripped the country of its last shred of morality
Stephan:   When I was about 15 I read Atlas Shrugged and found it fascinating. By the time I was 19, and in my first year at University, and my fifth year of civil rights activism, I knew it to be simplistic crap. By 25 I found it hard to believe that anyone my age or older could possible believe anything Ayn Rand said. Her philosophy is probably one of the most pernicious mindsets to come out of the 20th century.  Yet she is still, in some quarters, very influential; for instance with the Speaker of the House of the United States and most of the Republican congress. The current tax bill is proof of that.

Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and trash novelist Ayn Rand.

If you have any doubts that the phenomenon of Donald Trump was a long time a’coming, you have only to read a piece that Gore Vidal wrote for Esquire magazine in July 1961, when the conservative movement was just beginning and even Barry Goldwater was hardly a glint in Republicans’ eyes.

Vidal’s target was Paul Ryan’s idol, and the idol of so many modern conservatives: the trash novelist and crackpot philosopher Ayn Rand, whom Vidal quotes thusly:

“It was the morality of altruism that undercut America and is now destroying her.

“Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom… or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery, etc.

“To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation […]

Read the Full Article

1 Comment

  1. Mark R on Tuesday, December 19, 2017 at 10:51 pm

    Yes it is simplistic and flawed, second only to the garbage we call liberalism and conservatism which has literally resulted in the ongoing destruction of our civilization and possibly our planet.