By Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan to be his running mate. Since
his teens, Ryan has been a big fan of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." In
2005, he told The Atlas Society that the novel shaped his "values
system" -- and that speech has launched a number of recent columns by
liberals aghast at Ryan's taste in literature.
"Almost everybody in the conservative movement has
read Ayn Rand. She gives a moral dimension to defending the free enterprise
system," alternate delegate Bill Evers of Stanford's Hoover Institution
told me Monday morning as the California GOP delegation gathered.
Let me confess: I tried to read Rand's "The
Fountainhead" years ago and put it down twice. I found, as I talked to
other Republicans, that I am not alone.
After liberals started complaining about Ryan's
admiration of "Atlas Shrugged," I downloaded the book. I'm on Page
549 of the 1,200-plus-page opus, first published in 1957. My first-blush
verdict: The characters make too many speeches and don't talk as real people
talk. I laughed out loud at the dialogue in the first sex scene.
I have to agree with conservative radio talk show host
Hugh Hewitt, who told me the novel is "a young man's book." If Rand
reminds me of anyone, it's George Bernard Shaw, whose works I inhaled when I
was in high school.
Rand was conservative; Shaw was a socialist. Yet both
writers were philosopher/novelists who created brainy characters of unbendable
conviction. What smart young person can resist such a combination -- especially
with the bonus of the message that the world always should accommodate a clever
protagonist?
Hewitt also called the novel "a work of genius"
-- and for good reason. Rand lays out an economic scenario that actually makes
readers care about where manufacturers get copper and how their goods are moved
to market.
She captures how big corporations and big-government
bureaucrats collude to protect their interests, how their actions corrupt the
way people think and how dysfunction then spreads. Now when I see a broken
subway escalator, I'll see the shadow of Ayn Rand.
Later in the morning, I approached Rep. Darrell Issa,
R-Calif. Issa compared "Atlas Shrugged" to George Orwell's
"1984." Both novels, said Issa, remind readers that "liberty
isn't something that just happens." And both cautionary tales warn of
consequences that did not happen.
So why are liberals so threatened by Rand? The New York
Times' Paul Krugman wrote that "Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would
ordinarily be a good thing" -- except that Ryan likes Rand, despite her
"worship of the successful and contempt for 'moochers.'"
Krugman conveniently overlooks Rand's many corporate
villains and self-serving academics who cheerlead policies that ultimately
bankrupt working families. Rand supports capitalists and capitalism. She extols
the social benefits of success; ergo, her book is sinister.
At least the Ryan pile-on is a departure from the usual
dismissal of the GOP as the Party of Stupid. Now the left complains that
Republicans are too fond of a weighty tome on industrial economics. The left's
usual message to the right: Read a book; challenge your assumptions. Now it's
this: Read a book; it challenges our assumptions.
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