Sunday 12 August 2012

Objectively Speaking

When the Republican Convention nominates Paul Ryan for Vice-President, then it will declare the writings of Ayn Rand to be the ideology of the party. Of what, exactly, is Ryan's and the Republicans' Randianism conservative?

In what politically meaningful sense is Ryan a Catholic, rather than a Randian who merely happens to go to Mass for show and notionally to oppose abortions that he imagines occur in some economic, social, cultural and political vacuum?

Not that he himself really does imagine any such thing, of course. The question is now whether or not conservatives and Catholics are as stupid as Randian Ryan and the Randian Republicans think that they are.

Beating a man who openly wants to abolish the whole of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and who has done so since long before the 2008 crash, is, in itself, candy from a baby stuff. But it is no less important to strip him and his of any claim to represent conservative or Catholic opinion. That, too, ought not to be overly difficult to do.

1 comment:

  1. Charity, brother. I suspect Ryan, like most of Rand's admirers, is not an uncritical one. He has before protested against being identified with objectivism, and even his most pro-Randian statements have been along the lines of agreeing with her about the nature of government.

    I take that to mean that national (federal in his case) governments should not seek to "run" large parts of society. They didn't do so in traditional - even traditional Catholic - societies, and where governments have sought to control they have been traditionally criticised by the defenders of the poor. In language she would never have used (but which I suspect Ryan might) the critique of the modern state is that the modern state is the mighty which needs to be brought down from its seat.

    That does not entail agreeing with the rest of Randianism, just as wanting to destroy the modern structure of the state does not mean wanting no government at all. Rand was the classic reformer, in the Chestertonian sense: right about what was wrong (the modern state) but wrong about what was right (Nietschean selfishness).

    Conservative - and Catholic - opinion ought to rally to attack what Rand attacked: the hegmonic state. It ought also, of course, to attack over-mighty commercial interests; the worst of which have flourished by co-opting to themselves the state's hegemony (Halliburton, anybody? G4S? British Gas?).

    Modernity is the context in which abortions happen. Modernity is characterised both by the hegemonic state and by Nietschean selfishness: indeed, they go together. The keynote is irresponsibility to the (in this case unborn) other. An anarcho-capitalist society would encourage such irresponsibility, but so would the spoiled infant society kept from maturity by an indulgent parent-government. Indeed, in terms of social relations we might be hard pressed to distinguish the two.

    In that sense Ryan's intentions are not conservative: the analysis of his small-p party is that we have already left too much behind. The question is how to recover the things which conservative value. Obama's campaign says of Ryan this week that "we can't go backward." The sainted GKC (a determined opponent of capitalists and statists alike) pointed out that one both can and should.

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