The Grand Battle - Ayn Rand vs. Elizabeth Warren, Prime Movers vs. Populism

Ayn Rand

As American politics increasingly moves away from centrist philosophies, two camps are developing behind two dramatically different female figures.  On the right we have Ayn Rand and on the left Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Though the politics on the left are still in a formative period on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the new-found status of Elizabeth Warren as the titular head of a new branch of Democratic politics, the right has a firm leader in place.  That leader is dead but her vision is the flag that flies atop the flagpole of the Tea Party and far right libertarian thought.

Ayn Rand was a Russian Jew who immigrated to America in the 1920s.  She was born Alisa Rosenbaum and later changed her name.  She received a degree in philosophy from the Petrograd State University and fancied herself a writer.  This blog isn't meant to get into the entire philosophy of Ayn Rand but she cultivated something she called Objectivism.  In short it's a philosophy that mankind is the ultimate king of the universe and that there are people called prime movers without whom mankind would still be living in caves.  She was an outspoken advocate of completely free market economics, anti-government, anti-regulation.

I can't think of a person alive or dead who would be considered to be a true prime mover.  I have known a lot of people who like to consider themselves to be one but they are people who have gotten where they are on the coattails of their fathers, taking over the family business, people like Mitt Romney who thinks he carved his own path I guess despite his father being governor of Michigan and CEO of American Motors.  A little like how Ayn Rand took advantage of a Soviet educational system.

The Tea Party and Libertarian Party are full of these self-styled prime movers.  You'll find a lot of small business owners who have had a hard time.  Though it's usually because they have bad business models, they'll blame any problem they have on Obama.  Even though they're exempt from Obamacare provisions due to having less than 50 employees, they'll blame the law for any negative financial issues.

I have worked for some of these people.  Once at a restaurant owned by two Tea Party folks.  The owner and his wife started their restaurant in a glutted market, a fried seafood place in Orange Beach, Alabama which is better suited for more upscale businesses and where there are already several places serving the type of menu he was.  Yet because her parents put up capital to allow them to start the business they thought they were the prime movers.  Providing jobs and being community leaders until they couldn't borrow any more money.

Then there was the trucking company for which I worked in the accounting department.  The owner of that company had inherited a good solid business from his father.  But he had his mind set on expansion because he wanted to carve his own path.  He really did consider himself to be a pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, self-made man.  He had to bring in somebody from the outside who actually knew how to run a business to manage it but he ended up overexpanding and losing money and eventually I was part of a predictable downsizing.

The Donald

There are many instances where money is leverage and money has an inertia where it grows itself.  You can see that in people like Donald Trump.  Trump came from a wealthy real estate family.  He used his money to make more money in a manner anybody with money could have done.  What made him what he is is unbridled greed and lack of morals.  In the world of Randian philosophy that is considered a good thing.  You know, "greed is good" to quote Gordon Gecko.

The bible for these people is Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged.  Though I hate to recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it, it does give you a great deal of insight into the minds of those on the far right.  This is where all of their ideals originate.

The Far Right Bible

The book is so long and such a laborious read.  It's preachy to the point where you want to bang your head on something.  All of the characters are horrible two dimensional caricatures of Randian concepts.  None of them even vaguely resemble anything you'd find outside a work of fiction.  The draw is that egotistical people want to believe they're something more than the average person and that average people are jealous of that superiority and want to try to stop the prime movers.  Boy if that doesn't sound like the Donald I don't know what does.  A recent two part movie version of Atlas Shrugged had Defiance star Grant Bowler as the lead character Hank Rearden which really makes me not want to like Defiance but I do.  Usually people who associate themselves with movies like this one are also into the philosophy as no self-respecting actor would want to associate themselves with Ayn Rand otherwise.
At least he's not Ted Nugent or Donald Trump.

Senator Rand Paul (R) - Kentucky

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Ron Paul's son by the way and yes he was named after Ayn Rand, is one of the leaders of this movement in Washington.  Ironically he is in politics and was considered a viable candidate to begin with by drafting (NASCAR term, look it up) on his daddy's name.  Rand is all about gutting social security and Medicare, loosening or removing regulations, all that sort of thing that the Tea Party wants.  It's worth mentioning that Ayn Rand was an avowed atheist as are most of her followers.  Yet none of her political devotees in Washington identify as atheist.  That's because they use the power of the culture wars, pitting their die hard religious followers against the secular humanism pushed by the left, as a means of political leverage to get financial regulations eased on their corporate donors.  And this is where I do plug a book.  If you haven't read Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? you definitely need to.  It explains the dynamics of poor to middle class conservatives voting against their own financial interests due to the machinations of people like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, etc.

The very disturbing thing about the Objectivist philosophy is that it's utterly heartless.  Everything in the dogma relates to the individual.  There is nothing of the social contract or elements that make a society a society.  It's about ego.  It's about a certain small percentage of society that creates things and the rest of the society worshipping that small sub-group and owing them everything.  It's very weird.  It's a world of narcissism gone wild and bears no resemblance to anything in recorded history.  Even Bill Gates stole from Xerox.  Thankfully Bill Gates is everything that Randian philosophy is not.  Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation those two devote money and time to a wide number of causes.  Ayn Rand didn't think anyone should feel like they should help another person.  Her fantasy world is one in which the playing field is one in which the people with vision and drive must navigate the minefields of people who seek only to mooch off of them and keep them from thriving.  Oh, and it's written like a fifth grader has gotten hold of a book of basic philosophy and economics which is perhaps why it appeals to people who don't come off as being very intellectual.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D) - Massachusetts
Photo Credit Tim Pierce at 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/qwrrty/8152000438/
Thanks to Tim for a Great Photo
 

The antithesis of Ayn Rand is Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.  Warren burst on the scene at the beginning of the Obama administration when she was picked to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which had been her idea.  Due to Republican filibustering her appointment was delayed long enough that she decided to run for Senator in Massachusetts and knocked off Republican darling Scott Brown.

From humble Oklahoma beginnings Warren became an expert debater in high school and received a debate scholarship to George Washington University when she was sixteen while also working as a waitress following her janitor father's death.  She became a Harvard professor after having two children and attending law school at a Rutgers satellite school in Newark, mostly working from home as an attorney while being a full time mother.  From 2006 - 2010 she was a member of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion and began to make appearances on TV and in Michael Moore's film Capitalism: A Love Story.

She gained notoriety quickly for her plain speech, ability to explain complex concepts well, and for her passionate sense of fairness and looking out for the less fortunate.  She pulls no punches when calling out the ways large financial institutions and Wall Street have manipulated our system.  Her status as a full blown class warrior came when, during her run for the Senate and in response to Republicans saying that to ask the wealthy to pay more in taxes was somehow "class warfare" she said:

"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. ... You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

This bold statement was a daring shot across the bow of the entire establishment, the entire free market, laissez-faire, deregulation crazy, Republican status quo.  It also propelled her to stardom.  She is the absolute antithesis of everything Ayn Rand and her followers in the Tea Party establishment stand for.  Terms like the "Warren wing of the Democratic Party" and "Neo Populism" and the sort are being thrown around and Warren has attracted an enthusiastic following.  With the gap between rich and poor expanding at alarming rates and with movements like the fight of fast food workers for fair pay and Occupy Wall Street, Warren has found herself as the figurehead of a movement whether she wants it or not.

She certainly is an eloquent voice for the movement and handles herself like no other politician in recent memory.  She may be the only truly viable progressive candidate to come along since Teddy Roosevelt and hopes for her are very high.  She has declared that she won't run for president in 2016, seeking rather to finish out her term as senator.  But you can bet that, should Hillary Clinton or Chris Christie win and not perform well or meet expectations, she'll be on the scene in 2020.

A VERY Flattering Pic of Hillary

But in the meantime it will be a continuing war between these two political extremes perhaps at the expense of centrism if you care about that.  The nation needs an Elizabeth Warren right now.  It needs somebody to stand up for the little guy since Obama has dropped the ball so badly in that area.  Hopes were high for him in the beginning but as Wall Street reaches new record highs and the rich to poor gap expands most have lost hope that anything will ever be done.  Warren gives those feeling disenfranchised a voice.

In all likelihood Hillary will get her chance since she was ordained even prior to 2008.  And in all likelihood she will be a hard guardian of the status quo unless the populist fire starts making her feel the heat.  At any rate, the empty rhetoric of the Ayn Rand crowd will never resonate with the common people and the right will have to continue to flog the culture war horse to keep the simple people on their side and the populism that resonates with most Americans will become a stronger force in our politics.