Republicans have been on an Ayn Rand binge for the last ten years, overdosing on the mantra of selfishness as the new God since the Randian Tea Party swept the House. At the same time, the Republicans continue to stamp their morally deficient policies with Jesus. However, atheist Rand sought to replace Christianity with her own belief system, and even called the Christian message monstrous.
BreakingPoint.Org wrote, “She (Rand) once said she wanted to be known as “the greatest enemy of religion.” And when Rand said “religion” she meant Christianity, which she once called the “kindergarten of communism.””
Yes, communism. It’s odd, isn’t it, that the people barking the loudest about President Obama wanting to “fundamentally change America” and suggesting that the President is not a Christian and, even on the far right suggesting that he is the anti-Christ, at the same time embrace the economic philosophy of Ayn Rand. Gone are the conservatives of charity, service, responsibility and morality.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that as America ushered in her culture of greed with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan at the helm, the right was mimicking Rand’s worship of the self and claiming selfishness to be the new Jesus. Greenspan, who had been an associate of Rand’s and had been deeply impacted by her worldview later admitted that he had been wrong.
Greenspan confessed during a House Oversight and Government Reform committee, “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.” Of course, it was too late by then. We had careened over the cliff of feeding the id — morality and ethics but a retreating image in our rear view mirror. We were a country with no tempering super ego.
It’s old school to talk of ethics these days — makes me long for characters like Atticus Finch as role models for our children. Stemming from the modern morality of reality TV narratives like survival-of-the-fittest and he-who-consumes-the-most-wins, Americans are considered weak if they don’t attack first and steal all of the food for themselves, stepping over the less privileged to get more than their share. It’s social Darwinism meets Any Rand religion and it’s not pretty.
The American Values Network points out that Republicans face a crisis of moral values for their party stemming directly from their claims to be guided by both Jesus and Ayn Rand. They explain:
GOP leaders and conservative pundits have brought upon themselves a crisis of values. Many who for years have been the loudest voices invoking the language of faith and moral values are now praising the atheist philosopher Ayn Rand whose teachings stand in direct contradiction to the Bible. Rand advocates a law of selfishness over love and commands her followers to think only of themselves, not others. She said her followers had to choose between Jesus and her teachings.
GOP leaders want to argue that they are defending Christian principles. But, at the same time, Rep. Paul Ryan (author of the GOP budget) is posting facebook videos praising Rand’s morality and saying hers is the “kind of thinking that is sorely needed right now.” Simply put, Paul Ryan can’t have it both ways, and neither can Christians. As conservative evangelical icon Chuck Colson recently stated, Christians can not support Rand’s philosophy and Christ’s teachings. The choice is simple: Ayn Rand or Jesus Christ. We must choose one and forsake the other.
Video courtesy of American Values Network:
The Ayn Randians also got into bed with the Dominionist or Reformationists. Apparently this is a Machiavellian marriage of convenience meant to dominate our resources. Neither group appear to be bothered by the obvious incompatibility of their stated values and have even managed to convince a good percentage of Americans to traipse along behind them unquestioningly, spitting at anyone who disagrees with them and mocking the sick, the disabled, the elderly, and the needy.
While Republicans run on cultural war issues of the personal, their ideas translate on a policy level to killing Medicare, Medicaid, defunding Planned Parenthood and schools, and raising taxes on the elderly while giving huge tax breaks to corporations. It’s easy to get confused by their claims of moral superiority to think that we are discussing personal morality, but when we talk politics, we are discussing how those values get played out in legislation and impact all of America. Do we think government is meant to be run by people who outright reject a moral obligation to others? It’s most peculiar that conservatives push to have government run by their Bible while at the same time worshiping a philosopher who despised the message of Christ.
Two and a half years ago, still stumbling in the darkness brought down upon us from the age of selfishness, America elected a man as President who embodies the highest values of personal responsibility, reason, kindness, judgment and true family values. And so as a nation we are at war with ourselves, with nothing less than the soul of America on the line. Conservatives embraced Ayn Rand and turned their back on compassion. They embraced the extreme self over the collective. And when this didn’t work, instead of examining their platform for inconsistencies or leaks, they doubled down on immorality wrapped in the glittery paper of a fake Jesus of consumption and greed.
Republicans should have to choose between Ayn Rand and Jesus, but they won’t. They lack the moral fortitude and the strength of their convictions to do so. Instead, they’re going to leave it up to us to choose for them.
Image: Buffalo Beast
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Excellent article–very accurate! Thank you!
If Jesus was a Randite, he would have said “Die for you parasites? Hell, no.”
I believe their solution is to wrap Ayn Rand’s earthly relics in the shroud of Turin and pretend they’re the authentic body of Christ. You shoot me if I’m wrong.
The GOP is schizophrenic!!!
Bill O’reilly said it best when presented with the Bible passage about the camel and the eye of a needle: “I don’t care about that”
They have decided, but as the sociopaths Rand taught them to be, have no trouble lying through their sneers.
Great point Chaz.
Pat Robertson, on his 700 Club, got called out on the camel and the eye of a needle and his response was “Jesus didn’t really mean that.”
The GOP have managed to meld the 2 together through 2 channels – the Gospel of Prosperity preached by pastors such as Crefo Dollar (God wants you to be rich) and their historian David Barton who argues that the Bible forbids things such as the minimum wage and extolls the virtues of the free market as being Godly virtues. They don’t have to choose, they have already through these 2 channels have found a way to embrace booth. Look at pious Glenn Beck loved by religious conservatives everywhere, spitting on social justice and hawking anything on his program to make a buck!
You are right. Beck is their latest religious guru, teaching love and selfishness all at the same time. There is no conflict in him and neither in the GOP it apears.
False prophets all!
The ultimate Ayn Rand/Jesus candidate is Mitt Romney; in his personal life he is pious, clean living, family oriented and monogamous (I am almost certain that he was a virgin until he married and has never cheated on his wife) yet he made his fortune purchasing companies, firing employees; sending them into bankruptcy and selling off the assets (remember the expression the sum of the parts is greater than whole)? In his personal life he is pure to the point of wanting to make you puke yet he is ruthless scumbag extradinaire in his business life destroying companies and destoying people’s lives. He and his stepford wife Ann have no concept of the Average American’s struggle as evidenced by his joke recently in FLA that he was unemployed also (hahaha) and his blatent hostility towards unions (his references to card checking when refering to Obama in the Republican debate). Romney and basically the whole Mormon church represent the melding of a clean chaste personal life coupled with a ruthless screw you I got mine, FU if you want to get yours mentality (witness the actions of the Arizona state legislature that is controlled by Skousen loving right wing Morons..oops I mean Mormons.
haha love that slip at the end.
Romney’s personal life is NOT like that of Ayn Rand, who was an unpologetic hedonist. She made Bill Clinton look like a paragon of virtue.
I just watched the ad – it is fabulous! The DNC needs to run it during the budget debate and the 2012 election – the AVA has nailed it!
Well said, AZChick.
This ad should run in the “heartland”
First step is to share this ad with all FB friends…make it viral and then send money to get it to air via the public airwaves
Great article, Sarah. Just like they want to have Thomas Jefferson (portrayed by 18th century evangelicals as an “infidel”) and Thomas Paine (who hated Christianity) in their corner without admitting to these inconvenient beliefs.
I found a GREAT Paine video I wanted to share. It’s super long, but maybe I’ll throw it up as a late night snack for the intellectually curious. I loved this lecture, and if you haven’t heard it, you’ll get a kick out of it.
The Randian selfishness is definitely in conflict with the piety they want people to believe they possess. I firmly believe that these neanderthals want all of us to practice the chastity in our private lives that they don’t practice, yet they have no problem in oppressing folks from the security of their political offices. I also believe that one reason GW got “elected” is that he was perceived by many to be the anti-Clinton. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that he cheated on his wife, and his advertising the fact that he was “religious” seemed to overshadow any justifiable concerns about his unsuitability to be president. They are utterly disgusting in the insistence on prudishness that goes hand in hand with their touting of selfishness and greed.
Unfortunately, Republicans don’t really have to choose between Ayn Rand and Jesus. They only have to choose between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. A huge proportion of Republicans are single issue voters, and scandalously underinformed single issue voters at that. Republicans have successfully managed to construct a big tent that allows social conservatives and fiscal conservatives to coexist even though they theoretically ought to hate each each other and the party with which they have aligned themselves. The glue that holds the whole mess together? Ignorance.
And that ignorance is destroying our country!
The Regressives pick and choose what parts of Ayn Rand’s philosophy they subscribe to, the same as they do with the Bible. They truly are disgusting.
In fact, they are far from being the first to use the Bible to justify oppressive beliefs. Slaveholders used passages from it to justify slavery, and mysogynists have always used it to rail against women’s rights.
Hitler is illustrative as to what a psychopathic leader can do by talking out of both sides of his mouth. He pretended to be the defender of the German worker against “international [Jewish] finance”, yet he broke that German worker and sold him cheap, not only to the Krupps and Thyssens, but to Ford and IBM. He pretended to be a defender of Christianity to the Christians while he mocked it as a Jewish weakness to his followers; he occasionally professed an ersatz Odinism derived straight from Wagner to impress his Nordicist followers, and all the while he was planning a state religion that enshrined himself; he preached the sacredness of the family while, in the words of Fabian von Schlabrendorf, “planning to turn the nation into a stud farm,” the sanctity of young womanhood while instituting the forced-breeding Lebensborn program, and he furthered a racial ideal… in the words of a very underground joke, “blond like Hitler, tall like Goebbels, slim like Goehring, and shapely like Himmler”. By the time enough of Germany awoke to the contradiction, there was no deliverance possible save the brutal one of invasion and defeat. Little should we crave such a deliverance; still less think anyone can give it without planetary extinction. We must deliver ourselves before it is too late.
not that it mattered, but ms rand was into some serious fetishism. you know the bdsm degradation stuff…. you need to be in a dark place to be defecated on….
glad you pick this story up, i heard this guy on thom hartmann last week, it was the first time in a while i heard a rightwing xtian group understand that the GOP is the most anti xtian people around. yet profess to be the most righteous….
It has to be a marriage of convenience. Do the fundie xtians really think the money brokers will let them have anything in the end? Once they have the power? Once they have the people in their pockets?
The GOP is most certainly following Rand, because there is certainly nothing christian about their actions or plans
Well, Shiva, I think the deal they made is that once the Dominionists have delivered the election and the nation to the plutonomists, the latter will exclusively empower the Dominionists to deliver opium to the people, and give them carte blanche in law and money to do it. Hell, there was such an arrangement before. It was called the Holy Roman Empire.
Yes I agree with you, but the church will have no real power except what the money handlers in the temple give them. Money needs a front and religion does quite nicely. The ones at the top prosper for selling out the poor
That’s fine with them.
By the way, Shiva, before you speak so nastily of “illegal aliens” bear in mind that we here may all be a hair away from having to beg some more enlightened country to give us refuge. We may be a hair away.
LOL I will keep that in mind. But I already have my spot staked out
Im not being nasty, illegals have no legal right to be here
“Two and a half years ago, still stumbling in the darkness brought down upon us from the age of selfishness, America elected a man as President who embodies the highest values of personal responsibility, reason, kindness, judgment and true family values. And so as a nation we are at war with ourselves, with nothing less than the soul of America on the line.”
I know, right? It sure is nice to have a president willing to take a stand against the Patriot Act, wiretapping, the Defense of Marriage Act, lobbying, and privacy issues. Three cheers for the end of the age of selfishness!
Three cheers!
Rand was born a Jew; she was just as hostile to Judaism, if not more so, as she was to Christianity.
One part of the foolishness of the recent debates about Rand is the idea that agreeing with Rand’s prediction and diagnoses in “Atlas Shrugged” – the accuracy of which has been demonstrated in the last few years to a nicety – somehow magically commits one to agreement with her total philosophy. Would this argument be extended to an atheist leftist who recommends Tolstoy or Victor Hugo?
The other part is a specific misrepresentation of Christianity. Christianity is not a pro-Statism religion; indeed, given who killed their Savior, it tends to the anti-State. (This is something the left has not yet dealt with.) Nowhere in the Bible does it say that wealth should be expropriated and redistributed by the dubious means of government structures; it speaks of personal and *voluntary* charity. One might add, looking at the horrific debt and unfunded liabilities situation that the U.S. is in right now, that the Bible and Jesus were wise in staying away from government panaceas.
This entire kabuki charade is in bad faith. The Bible does not advocate any Progressive notions of “economic justice.” The progressives who have suddenly discovered religion and its necessary role in politics – after thirty decades and more of stridently and rightly insisting it must be kept out of politics – are not sincere. After this temporary rhetorical bubble is over, they will resume their previous, also ad-hoc, declarations.
As for the “sociopath” accusation, this is what comes of copying attack website garbage. The whole thing rests upon one author – Michael Prescott’s – highly selective excerpting and chopping up of a private [i.e., thinking out loud without clarifications ] journal written when Rand was barely out of her teens, fresh from the blood bath of 1920s Soviet Russia – and still made it very clear that her read on the personalities of the observers showed that they were not appalled by Hickman’s crime – she said there had been far worse, without the same spectacle of glee – but by his flamboyant and mocking defiance of society. She – who was writing about a *legally innocent man* at the time of the trial – even called him a repulsive and purposeless criminal. Enough with the disinformation and – yes – Satanizing of Ayn Rand.
Remove religion from politics for a better tomorrow. Every time you say ‘religious morals’ I hear ‘bad parenting.’ Every time you say god, I think of ignorance. Every time you say intelligent design, I think of the chromosome fusion. Every time you go to church, I go to school. When you pray for the successful recovery of your friend after a horrible accident, I question why didnt you thank your god for the accident.
Bah. The age of the computer will hopefully be the beginning of the end of religion. Educational materials are so easily accessible now.
Who ever was up there crying about illegal aliens. The constitution states that we should accept anyone coming here from an oppressed nation, but there is a huge problem with illegal immigration. As a decedent of a family that went through Ellis Island, I think we need to deport all illegal immigrants and make them get in line and do it correctly. I shouldn’t be denied a job because the customer base speaks spanish. You can call me racist, I don’t care. But you didn’t grow up in South Phoenix.
Those who have actually read Atlas Shrugged and are still waiting for some compensation for their suffering, rejoice. It’s here, in the definitive parody. And those who haven’t read it–rejoice. Now you don’t have to. Get all the bombast and twice the pretension, at 1/15th the length. Find out what happens to John Glatt, Dragnie Tagbord, and the rest of the demi-god crew, ten years later:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/54707
Why pretend any of the republicans actually have any morality? Everything they do is to enrich themselves and their Bosses. They only use the parts of the Christian Bible that fit into their plan, which has been years in the making.