Timothy Snyder
at New York Review of Books on the "Grand Old Marxists":
A specter is haunting the Republican National Convention—the specter
of ideology. The novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982) and the economist
Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992) are the house deities of many American
libertarians, much of the Tea Party, and Paul Ryan in particular. The
two thinkers were quite different...Yet, in popularized
form, their arguments together provide the intellectual touchstone for
Ryan and many others on the right wing of the Republican Party, people
whose enthusiasm Mitt Romney needs.
The irony of today is that these two thinkers, in their struggle
against the Marxist left of the mid-twentieth century, relied on some of
the same underlying assumptions as Marxism itself: that politics is a
matter of one simple truth, that the state will eventually cease to
matter, and that a vanguard of intellectuals is needed to bring about a
utopia that can be known in advance. The paradoxical result is a
Republican Party ticket that embraces outdated ideology, taking some of
the worst from the twentieth century and presenting it as a plan for the
twenty-first.
Romney’s choice of an ideologist as his running mate made a kind of
sense. Romney the financier made hundreds of millions of dollars in an
apparent single-minded pursuit of returns on investment; but as a
politician he has been less noted for deep principles then for
expediently changing his positions...
 |
| Rand in reality... |
Insofar as he is a man of
principle, the principle seems to be is that rich people should not pay
taxes. His fidelity to this principle is beyond reproach, which raises
certain moral questions. Paying taxes, after all, is one of our very few
civic obligations. By refusing to release his tax returns, Romney is
likely trying to keep embarrassing tax dodges out of public view;
he is certainly communicating to like-minded wealthy people that he
shares their commitment to doing nothing that could possibly help the
United States government. The rationale that Ryan’s ideology provides
for this unpatriotic behavior is that taxing rich people hinders the
market...our primary responsibility as American
citizens is to give way to the magic of the marketplace, and applaud
any associated injustices as necessary and therefore good.
This is where Ryan comes in. Romney provides the practice, Ryan the
theory... In the right-wing anarchism that arises
from the marriage of Rand and Hayek, Romney’s wealth is proof that all
is well for the rest of us, since the laws of economics are such that
the unhindered capitalism represented by chop-shops such as Bain must in
the end be good for everyone.
The problem with this sort of economic determinism is that it is
Marxism in reverse, with the problems of the original kind. Planning by
finance capitalists replaces planning by the party elite. Marx’s old
dream, the “withering away” of the state, is the centerpiece of the Ryan
budget: cut taxes on the rich, claim that cutting government functions
and the closing of unspecified loopholes will balance budgets, and
thereby make the state shrink...
This is a nice confident story,
with a more than superficial resemblance to the nice confident Marxist
story that a free market without intervention would bring revolution.
Like Marxism, the Hayekian ideology is a theory of everything, which
has an answer for everything. Like Marxism, it allows politicians who
accept the theory to predict the future, using their purported total
knowledge to create and to justify suffering among those who do not hold
power. Ayn Rand is appealing in a more private way because she
celebrates unbridled anarchic capitalism: it magnifies inequality and
brings pleasure to the wealthy, who deserve it for being so wonderful,
and pain to the masses, who deserve it for being so stupid.
Though he now prefers
discussing Hayek, Ryan seems to have been more deeply affected by Rand,
whom he credits for inspiring his political career. It is likely the
combination of the two—the theory of everything and the glorification of
inequality—that gives him his cheery, and eerie, confidence. Hayek and
Rand are comfortable intellectual company not because they explain
reality, but because, like all effective ideologists, they remove the
need for any actual contact with it...
Hayek’s native Austria was vulnerable to radicalism from the right in
the 1930s precisely because it followed the very policies that he
recommended. It was one of the least interventionist states in Europe,
which left its population hugely vulnerable to the Great Depression—and
to Hitler. Austria became a prosperous democracy after World War II
because its governments ignored Hayek’s advice and created a welfare
state. As Americans at the time understood, making provisions for
citizens in need was an effective way to defend democracy from the
extreme right and left.
Rich Republicans such as Romney are of course a small minority of the
party. Not much of the Republican electorate has any economic interest
in voting for a ticket whose platform is to show that government does
not work. As Ryan understands, they must be instructed that their
troubles are not simply a pointless contrast to the gilded pleasures of
the man at the top of the Republican ticket, but rather part of the same
story, a historical drama in which good will triumph and evil will be
vanquished. Hayek provides the rules of the game: anything the
government does to interfere in the economy will just make matters
worse; therefore the market, left to its own devices, must give us the
best of all possible worlds. Rand supplies the discrete but titillating
elitism: this distribution of pleasure and pain is good in and of
itself, because (and this will not be said aloud) people like Romney are
bright and people who will vote for him are not. Rand understood that
her ideology can only work as sadomasochism. In her novels, the
suffering of ordinary Americans (“parasites,” as they are called in Atlas Shrugged)
provides the counterpoint to the extraordinary pleasures of the heroic
captains of industry (which she describes in weird sexual terms). A
bridge between the pain of the people and the pleasure of the elite
which mollifies the former and empowers the latter is the achievement of
an effective ideology.
In the Romney/Ryan presidential campaign, Americans who are
vulnerable and isolated are told that they are independent and strong,
so that they will vote for policies that will leave them more vulnerable
and more isolated. Ryan is a good enough communicator and a smart
enough man to make reverse Marxism work as a stump speech or a
television interview. But as national policy it would be
self-destructive tragedy. The self-destructive part is that no nation
can long survive that places stories about historical necessity above
the palpable needs of its citizens. The tragic part is that the argument
against ideology has already been won. The defenses of freedom against
Marxism, above all the defense of the individual against those who claim
to enact the future, also apply to the reverse Marxism of the
Republican ticket.
The great political thinkers of the twentieth century have
discredited ideological systems that claim perfect knowledge of what is
to come and present politicians as scientists of the future (remember,
Ryan’s budget plan tells us what will happen in 2083). The way to
national prosperity in the twenty-first century is surely to think
non-ideologically, to recognize that politics is a choice among
constraints and goods rather than a story about a single good that would
triumph if only evil people would allow it to function without
constraints. The market works very well for some things, the government
is desperately needed for others, and stories that dismiss either one
are nothing more than ideology.
August 28, 2012, 12:25 p.m.
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