ayn rand
If House Speaker Paul Ryan truly wants to promote a “compassionate conservative” agenda that counters the divisive rhetoric of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Ryan should follow the example of one man: Pope Francis.
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About love she was all wrong,
the old capitalist, patron saint
of the self-made rich. How well
she misunderstood the paradox deep
as mothers’ grief: that finding our self
requires losing it, that love and loss
make one truth, not two. Objective
as granite in relationships, her hero
never collapses into cancer with a wife,
never drops into death with a brother.
SEEMINGLY OUT of nowhere, the newly founded conservative tea party delivered a stunning blow to Democrats in the November 2010 election, causing them to lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Just two years earlier, the 2008 election had severely weakened Republican forces with the election of the country’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, who won by promising change after eight years of the Bush administration.
Two recently published, fascinating books, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, by Harvard social policy experts Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, and Ayn Rand Nation, by award-winning financial journalist Gary Weiss, provide a treasure trove of careful research, new material, and balanced reporting that throws much-needed light on how the tea party was born and how it became a lightning rod for many frustrated Americans.
Who are the tea party members? They are, for the most part, middle-class white people over the age of 45, as the general media have already reported. But as one tea partier told the Harvard researchers, “We are not a bunch of uneducated, racist rednecks.” Her view is, in part, corroborated in the book. Skocpol and Williamson found through hundreds of interviews that the movement is indeed made up of many college-educated people (some graduates, some not) who live throughout the U.S. They are engineers, IT managers, small businesspeople, home contractors, and teachers. Although as a group they lost jobs, businesses, and retirement money in the recent recession, they were not hit nearly as hard, report the Harvard researchers, as those with lower incomes.
What brought out tea party rage? One source was an unlikely populist crusader, CNBC financial broadcaster Rick Santelli, who suddenly began ranting on the air on Feb. 19, 2009, that “the government is rewarding bad behavior” by subsidizing those about to lose their homes through President Obama’s home foreclosure relief plan. His rant was picked up by the Drudge Report and then rebroadcast through the major media.
Tea Party Jesus from AVN
The video will be a satirical take on the Sermon on the Mount with various quotes, signs and policy positions of the Tea Party. While I don’t think the creators of the video would argue that this same test be applied to every piece of legislation Congress considers, it is an interesting experiment.
How often do we divorce the things we say and do or the beliefs we hold from what we read in the Gospels about the person and teachings of Jesus?
This video will drive some conservative Christians nuts for two reasons.
First, because there are conservative Christians, such as Chuck Colson, who have spoken out against Ayn Rand and don’t want to be lumped in with her followers.
Second, because Rand’s influence is real and it’s not a good thing.
Rand’s extreme individualism turns Christian virtue into vice and vice into virtue. Her worldview feeds selfishness and a disregard for our neighbors. I read all 1,046 pages of my paperback copy her Atlas Shrugged and I would like at least 700 pages worth of my time back.
In one of the most-viewed articles on FoxNews.com several weeks ago, writer Onkar Ghate presents a choice of competing moralities between Ayn Rand and Jesus. While his exegetical powers leave much to be desired, he is correct in noting that the choice many Americans will have to make, as far as political philosophies go, is between Ayn Rand and Jesus.
The mainstreaming of Rand is, in large part, the work of one man (and his money).
It is reported that Congressman Paul Ryan makes every member of his staff read philosopher Ayn Rand, the shame