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Republican Party ticket that embraces outdated ideology, taking some of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...
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| 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.
