#Why the rise of the Randroids is good news for Progressives

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Bring it on, Ayn Rand geeks
Why the rise of a libertarian right is good news for progressives

By Michael Lind

Mar. 16, 2010

A new right is being born, following the death of the older conservative
movement. Fortunately for the left, the next American right is dominated
by libertarians like Ron Paul and Paul Ryan, who worship at the shrine of
Ayn Rand.

Why is this great news for progressives? The American conservative
movement enjoyed its successes only after William F. Buckley Jr. expelled
Rand and her followers from the movement in the late 1950s. Reflecting
the vanity of their guru, the Randians have long insisted that
"objectivists" are not libertarians. (Pssst: They are!) The non-Randian
libertarians split with the mainstream conservative movement in the
1960s, complaining that conservatives were too interventionist in foreign
policy and too soft on big government at home. Having lost the
libertarian isolationists, the conservatives went on to success after
success, dominating the presidency after 1968 and Congress in 1994.

Buckley's "movement conservatism" sought to unite the anti-communist,
socially conservative and free-market wings of the right on the basis of
an ideology of "fusionism" cooked up by National Review editor Frank
Meyer. This did not work, and by the 1980s there were three distinct
political-intellectual movements on the right: the neoconservatives
(originally pro-Cold War social democrats and liberals), the religious
right and the libertarians. The coalition survived the end of the Cold
War, but not the presidency of George W. Bush.

What we are seeing now, in the second decade of the 21st century, is the
rise of the libertarian right, at the expense of the neocons and social
conservatives.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, many former neoconservatives, like
the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan and yours truly, concluded that we could
resume the project, interrupted by the Cold War, of building a
Rooseveltian liberal internationalist order, based on a great-power
concert and international law. A remnant of the Cold War neocons, based
at the American Enterprise Institute and Rupert Murdoch's the Weekly
Standard, rejected this in favor of a project to convert America's
temporary Cold War primacy into a militarized, permanent Pax Americana.

The neocons were marginalized under Clinton, but 9/11 gave them an excuse
to carry out projects such as the invasion of Iraq and the encirclement
of Iran, neither of which had anything to do with jihadism, under the
Orwellian label of "World War IV." When Bush embraced their agenda and
invaded Iraq, conservative voters initially rallied behind the flag, but
by the second Bush term the public had turned against the Iraq war, the
neocons were purged and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a realist, was
brought into the Bush administration as trustee in bankruptcy. The
neocons have been sidelined again, possibly forever.

The religious right, too, is in decline. Protestant evangelicals were
never as numerous or as electorally powerful as Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson claimed. The Protestant religious right benefited from a
backlash against the cultural liberalism of the 1960s on the part of
working-class and middle-class white Americans. That backlash, however,
appears to have been a generational phenomenon. Younger Americans are
less racist, more educated, more secular and more liberal on social
issues. Archie and Edith Bunker have passed away, and Gloria and the
Meathead voted for Obama.

It is hardly surprising, then, that libertarianism is the beneficiary by
default of the relative decline of its rivals on the right,
neoconservatism and the religious right.

It is merciful, perhaps, that Buckley did not live to see the detested
Ayn Rand become the central intellectual figure on the right. Until
recently the only prominent conservative known to have been influenced at
one point by the Evita of the nerds was Alan Greenspan, and he was given
a pass for a youthful indiscretion. Now two of the stars of the emergent
right, Ron Paul and Paul Ryan, are professed disciples of the Mary Baker
Eddy of egotism. "The reason I got involved in public service, by and
large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,"
Ryan told a convention of Randians in 2005. Ron Paul named his son Rand
Paul.

Glenn Beck, another rising star on the right, sounds Randian in his
denunciation of the idea of Christian social justice as misleading
progressive propaganda. It was Rand's hatred of religion and her praise
of selfishness that irked Buckley and the movement conservatives, who
were more concerned about preserving what they saw as Western
civilization from communism and relativism than with creating a free-
market utopia.

All of this is great news for American progressivism. In the last third
of the 20th century, many liberals who supported New Deal economic
policies defected to the right on the basis of the Cold War or the
culture war. Now that the Cold War and the culture war are over, what
remains is the class war. And in the class war, the libertarians are on
the side of the classes.

Consider Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future." As the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities has pointed out, it would raise taxes on middle-
class Americans while dramatically lowering them on the über-rich. Ryan
would use a national value-added tax (a good idea) to replace income,
capital gains and estate taxes (a terrible idea). He would privatize
Social Security and replace Medicare with vouchers, and then allow
inflation to eat away at the value of the vouchers. Oh, and despite his
claims, his Rand-inspired redistribution of income upward to the
virtuously selfish rich would not eliminate the deficit.

The media is building Ryan up as a serious thinker. Build him up even
more, I say. Give him a Nobel Prize, like Obama's. Make him the face of
the Republican Party. Progressives should want Ryan and Paul and the Cato
Institute to define the next American right. That will ensure its
minority status for decades.

Before Buckley and the movement conservatives took the right in another
direction in the 1950s, this country had a libertarian, isolationist
right, the right of Robert A. Taft and Alf Landon. Thanks to their
opposition to the New Deal, U.S. entry in World War II and the Cold War,
the libertarian isolationists turned the Republicans into the minority
party between 1932 and 1968. The only Republican to be elected in that
era, Dwight Eisenhower, ran for the presidency in 1952 to save the GOP
from Taftian isolationism and dismissively rejected suggestions that the
Republicans try to repeal New Deal programs like Social Security.

Richard Nixon, like Ike, was a modern Republican whose formula for a
Republican majority was big government on behalf of the middle class plus
a hawkish foreign policy and moderate social traditionalism. The
neoconservative writer David Frum has argued that this is the only
possible combination that can produce an enduring Republican majority. I
agree, and it is therefore with delight that I observe the rise of
radical libertarianism in the GOP.

True, thanks to the popular backlash against the bailouts and the
unpopular healthcare bill, the Democrats will suffer losses in the
midterm elections. The Randian right will claim that Republican gains in
Congress are proof that the American people share their goal of
abolishing Social Security and Medicare. They should be encouraged in
that belief.

After all, the public has repeatedly rejected any attempts to privatize
Social Security or slash Medicare benefits. Reagan denounced both
entitlements, but as president he raised taxes to support Social Security
and refused to touch Medicare. Under George W. Bush, a Republican
Congress passed the Medicare drug benefit, which, for all its concessions
to the pharma lobby, was the biggest expansion of socialized medicine in
the U.S. since Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law.

When Bush supported the partial privatization of Social Security, the
proposal was so unpopular with the public that the Republican majority in
Congress never allowed it to come to a vote. Bush touched the third rail
of American politics -- and was promptly electrocuted. Last but not
least, one of the arguments that Republicans opportunistically used to
mobilize popular opposition to the Democratic healthcare bill was the
claim that it would lead to cuts in Medicare for the elderly.

AARP vs. the objectivists. That's not a fight, it's a massacre.

There is not the slightest chance that either Social Security or Medicare
will be privatized in an America where the proportion of the elderly in
the electorate will continue to expand. Any attempt to means-test Social
Security for the middle class, rather than the rich alone, will be
quickly punished by the voters. The most that the right can do would be
to use indexing tricks to allow inflation to reduce the value of Social
Security, but surely progressives and centrists will be around to point
this out.

Medicare will not be replaced by Ryan's scheme of inflation-diminished
vouchers. But there is a genuine danger that the Democrats, along with
the Republicans, will continue to put medical price controls off the
table and instead will try to reduce benefits to pay for the inflated
rewards of American physicians (other than primary care doctors),
insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies.

Other countries that do not have single-payer systems have avoided
cancerous cost inflation by means of "all-payer regulation," in which the
government sets the prices ("fee schedules") of all medical services and
goods, private as well as public. Obama and the Democrats are too
intimidated by the health industry lobby even to talk about the primary
method of health cost containment used everywhere else, as well as in the
state of Maryland, which has its own successful rate-setting system.

But interest in all-payer regulation is growing, and in the next decade
or two, if it comes down to a choice between government regulation of
medical prices and the immiseration of middle-class voters, my bet would
be on regulation.

The biggest danger is that Democrats will misinterpret the coming
electoral setbacks to mean that they need to move in a libertarian
direction. That would repeat the mistake made by Bill Clinton, Al Gore
and the other New Democrats during the Reagan era. It was their failure
to understand that foreign policy and the culture war, not conservative
economic policies, were the basis for Republican victories -- that, and
the fact that they did Wall Street's bidding for Wall Street's campaign
contributions -- that inspired these neoliberals to move to the right on
economics: "The era of big government is over."

Obama's instinct is to appease those who attack him, so there is a danger
that he might move (further) to the market fundamentalist right. But
Obama is not the Democratic Party, and the party's progressive base is
increasingly hostile to Carter-Clinton-Obama neoliberalism.

So bring it on, geeky disciples of Ayn Rand. Gird thy loins and put on
thy Spock ears. Demand the abolition of Social Security and Medicare!
Call for reducing the U.S. military to the Coast Guard! Insist on tolling
every highway and street in America and selling America's infrastructure
assets to foreign corporations and foreign sovereign wealth funds! Go
Galt!

Bring it on! Even confined to a wheelchair, Franklin Roosevelt can defeat
Ayn Rand.