We’re supposedly just three days away from the final House votes on health care, and still nobody’s sure how it’s going to go. If you listen to Fox News, there’s no way Nancy Pelosi will round up the necessary votes; over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow was talking like passage was a done deal even before America’s favorite liberal leprechaun found his conscience (and, quite likely, a pot o’ gold of some sort) on St. Patrick’s Day.

With all the lingering uncertainty over ancillary issues – most prominently the rather despicable fact that the health security of millions rests on the re-election prospects of a handful of Democratic congressmen from red states – both sides are getting more than a little desperate. Pelosi has cooked up her “deem and pass” scenario, which would fold the House’s undesired vote for the Senate bill into its (much preferred) vote on President Obama’s fixes. The idea, ostensibly, is to save some congressmen from a vote they’ll have trouble defending to their constituents; more likely, the true intent is to save Pelosi and the Democratic leadership from being forced to whip two votes when they can’t get their act together to schedule even one.

Yesterday the president, even as he derided Washington’s focus on legislative process, undercut “deem and pass” as a maneuver that might do vulnerable House members any good in November. And while the Dems can be forgiven for any last-minute parliamentary tricks they find necessary, considering the horrendously bad faith with which health-care opponents have acted over the last year, one can only hope they’ll find the stones to do this the right way and let the question rise or fall on its own merits.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the debate, all hell has broken loose as the various incarnations of the right wing rage (once again) against the injustice of being a distinct minority on the brink of defeat. Their fury isn’t (yet) quite what it was in late October 2008, when the reactionary rantings at McCain/Palin rallies became so extreme that they frightened even the GOP standard bearer. And it’s not quite as bad as last August’s town halls/death panels/birthers freak show. But the general flailings of the Republican/tea party/Fox triumvirate certainly have reached “Code Red,” as their latest advertising/rabble-rousing gimmick puts it. It’s not so much Code Red for saving the economy, or for defending the American way of life, or anything like that – it’s more of a Shutter Island kind of Code Red, the kind where a few too many lunatics have managed to get out of their cages.

Yesterday, even as tea-party folk were screaming through the office doors of ambivalent House members, Fox’s Bret Baier transmogrified into a town-hall wackjob during his interview with Obama – apparently in the belief that only through disrespect could he break through the president’s focus on substance over process (or at least draw the kind of ratings Roger Ailes demands). Congressional Republicans did their part by conveniently ignoring their own histories with reconciliation and “deem and pass” while railing against the Dems’ plans as unconstitutional and anti-democratic; by insisting that passing health care will surely mean the end of the Dems’ majorities, even as John Boehner incongruously demands that reform “never, ever, ever, ever pass”; and even by planning ahead for a repeal effort in 2011 after they presumably take over.

If this confluence of crazy achieves nothing else over the next week or two, it has already given the lie to the silly notion that there’s any distance between Fox, the tea part(ies), and the Republican Party. Baier’s unprofessional interview, piled on top of the million bits of evidence that can and have been collected from years of videotape, proves beyond question that Fox is incapable of “fair and balanced”-ness even during the “news” hours outside its evening slate of talk-TV lunacy. And the TPs’ recent shift from denouncing the particulars of health care to obsessing over the Democrats’ legislative maneuverings – with marching orders provided by the GOP and Fox — is only the latest showcase for the simple fact that the tea-party chimera represents nothing like an “independent” movement, but rather an outlet for the anger of the Republican base.

That base has been in self-loathing mode since at least 2005, when the bankruptcy of modern conservatism became clear for all to see – in the hysteria over Terri Schiavo, in the quagmire of Iraq, in the torture chambers of Gitmo, in the jobs-free “recovery” of mid-decade, in the comedy of Social Security privatization, in the cronyism of Harriet Miers, in the floodwaters of Katrina. (All of which was quickly followed by the kink of Mark Foley, the hypocritically wide stance of Larry Craig, and much, much more.) “This isn’t really conservatism,” Republicans began telling themselves as their party’s electoral fortunes soon mirrored the cataclysm wrought by the policies they’d been cheering for years; eventually they disowned the president they’d twice finagled into the White House, and then the GOP nominee who wanted to take his place.

After McCain lost badly, despite their mean-spirited, dim-witted and un-American vilification of his opponent, Republicans amped up their disassociation from their failed party. They answered the call of (GOP douchebag emeritus) Dick Armey (has there ever been a more self-fulfilling name?) and re-birthed themselves as Tea Partyers – in the process creating a cottage industry for “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, Obama-as-Joker Photoshop posters, and Glenn Beck. Never mind that they brought along oodles of mainstream-Republican politicians and ideas, along with a knee-jerk opposition to anything favored by (that Muslim/socialist/fascist/foreigner) Obama … the Tea Party is an independent movement, by god, and don’t you forget it! You can tell from all the self-described “independents” who’ve signed up – even though 99 out of 100 of those mavericks is undoubtedly a onetime Republican whose self-loathing emerged early enough to make him change his registration during the last couple of election cycles.

It’s all worked out quite well for the right wing, at least so far. The TPs imagine themselves as scions of true, patriotic conservatism, who can hold Republicans’ feet to the fire while simultaneously manning the barricades against the “socialist” direction of the Democrats. (All of which they achieve via a combination of screaming into the wind, toting guns to political events, keeping the TV and radio tuned to Fox and Rush, and claiming credit for the election of a fiery moderate like Scott Brown.) Meanwhile, Fox creates its own “news” programming by promoting, participating in, and covering Tea Party rallies while pretending it’s not a tool of the GOP. And the Republican Party’s politicians can have their shit-kickers and eat them, too, licking the boots of TPs during rallies and conventions while distancing themselves from the rabble’s more extreme behavior.

The Tea Partyers position their goals for 2010 in nothing less than “revolutionary” terms, but the reality of the change they seek is a restoration of Republican majorities to Congress. (By the way, why is it that Republicans find it necessary to talk of “revolution” every time a Democrat’s in power – the 1980 “Reagan revolution,” the 1994 “Republican revolution,” etc.? Do they find American democracy so fragile, so uncontrollable, or so undesirable that it must be subjected to overthrow metaphors occasionally?)

This is, finally, where the “independence” of the Tea Party movement falls apart. We’re constantly hearing – in the comments sections of my columns, as well as many other places – taunting suggestions that “the game’s up” for incumbents in general, Democratic ones specifically. “This fall, baby. Wait until November,” enthused our friend Autodidact a few weeks ago. Yet, in the absence of a viable third party (and most likely even in the presence of one, if it existed), the only path to defeating Democrats is voting for Republicans. And in nine out of 10 contested races this fall, those Republicans will be not the litmus-test conservatives the TPs would prefer, but the same sort of mainstream, weak-tea Republicans who can win elections in swing districts – the same sort who collectively drove the nation into a ditch between 2001 and ’08, and have done their best to obstruct every attempt to climb out since then, using tactics based not on principle but on purely partisan calculation.

Still, the TPs will vote for those Republicans anyway, and will serve as the backbone of any GOP resurgency that materializes in November. (Does anybody really think their anti-incumbent rantings will extend to voting for Democrats in GOP-held districts?) So let’s put an end the charade of Tea Party independence – because really, folks, is it so offensive to admit what you actually are? Say it loud and say it proud: “I’m a Republican!”

By the way, I’ve managed to get through this column without using the word “teabaggers” even once. There hardly seems a point, really – what with the endlessly repeated TP/GOP talking point that Democrats are “ramming health care down our throats.” It’s difficult to say for sure which Obama agenda item will next arouse (ahem) the right wing’s ire – but it’s safe to guess that the opposition will be packaged with a hilariously kinky double-entendre.

The most thrilling, and also the most ridiculous, presidential speech of modern times came not from an actual president, but from a fake one. Michael Douglas’ off-the-cuff remarks at the close of The American President (1995) were a liberal’s wet dream, and are seared permanently into the memories of millions who use them as a measuring stick against which all real politicians are found pathetically inadequate. Playing the lovelorn, overcautious, and put-upon President Andrew Shepard, Douglas (channeling screenwriter Aaron Sorkin) finally quit pussyfooting around and took down his populist-conservative-blowhard challenger (“This is a time for serious people, Bob, and your 15 minutes are up!”), while jettisoning an ineffective crime bill in favor of one that might actually solve problems (“You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and handguns … I will go door to door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns”).

It’s that last bit, of course, that’s so ridiculous – politically speaking. (Considering the massive arms race among America’s nutjobs over the past year, in response to a president who has never mentioned gun control, can you imagine the NRA buzzsaw a real President Shepard would face?) Still, the popular response to The American President was so great that Sorkin was given a weekly forum to indulge his penchant for political drama. The initial episodes of The West Wing featured occasional flights of rhetorical fancy, but focused primarily on the process of governing and the foibles (romantic and otherwise) of President Jed Bartlet’s staff. Indeed, the show, like Bartlet’s presidency, was too focused on all that stuff – particularly on the administration’s delicate minuets with Congress, lobbyists and cabinet chiefs. It wasn’t until Episode 19 that all the president’s men realized their caution and obsession with deal-making had prevented their boss from governing with the same verve and intellect with which he had campaigned — and that they were looking at a one-term presidency unless they loosed the reins and “let Bartlet be Bartlet.”

Our current, real-life president finds himself at a similar point right now, at a crossroads that likely will determine the course of his administration. Unfortunately, the extraordinary (if fictional) leadership skills of Jed Bartlet seem lacking in Barack Obama; in fact, the mess in which our commander-in-chief currently sits is entirely related to his failure to behave in more … commanding fashion. Obama seems to be the last man in America who respects our legislative branch – or at least the last one who doesn’t work on Capitol Hill or K Street — and his willingness to turn the details of lawmaking over to the entirely dysfunctional United States Senate is the root cause of his fading popularity. Sure, he put health care, climate change and banking regulation on Washington’s agenda — but unless he begins dictating not only that agenda, but the terms of debate as well, his policies will continue to twist in the breeze of extreme partisanship, zero-sum politics … and the whims of a fickle political “center” that quite obviously has no idea what it wants, and is content to watch the country self-immolate rather than make up its frigging mind.

Obama took a step in the right direction this morning by moving unilaterally to establish a deficit-reduction commission, circumventing the Senate’s refusal to vote for such a panel on its own (the product of more than a half-dozen typically shit-for-brained Republicans who abandoned their earlier endorsement as soon as the commission became a “bipartisan” idea). That decision builds, in baby steps, upon the momentum generated a couple weeks ago when Obama blew away GOP snivelers during an appearance at the House Republican Retreat – at which he demonstrated that while his opponents have a vast talent for lying and complaining, he retains a confident grasp of facts and the ability to appeal to the intelligence of people watching on TV, even if there’s none evident in the room itself.

He has a golden opportunity to retake control of the health-care debate during next week’s “summit” at Blair House, which already, by its very existence, is the “trap” Republicans have taken so much grief for fearing it will become. If McConnell/Boehner/etc. don’t show up, they prove once and for all an ugly recalcitrance that Americans aren’t likely to reward; if they do, their knee-jerk opposition to insurance reform and their weak alternative “ideas” will be exposed as political canards designed merely to foment discontent, not to serve the nation. If nothing else, Obama should be able to talk rings around the GOP leaders, who so strongly prefer the word “no” to actual debate because the logic behind their defiance inevitably withers in the light of day.

Obama can take several paths at the summit, but there’s only one he should take. The time has passed for remaining in the background while unpopular congressional leaders dither and bicker and cobble together bills that are easy to hate, impossible to love. Obama, at long last, needs to lay down the law and truly become the face of health reform. Accept a couple of Republican additions that will do next-to-nothing to fix health care, but won’t really hurt either (expanded tort reform, allowing interstate insurance commerce) – but only on the condition that the bill gets a guaranteed up-or-down vote in the Senate, and only with an alternate (and GOP-unfriendly) bill set to go straight to reconciliation if Republicans refuse to deal.

That’s the way legislatures are actually supposed to work — with the majority compromising as much as necessary with the minority, based on the latter’s relative strength, but with the assumption on both sides that some version of the majority’s agenda (i.e., “the public will,” as expressed through democratic elections) will pass into law. Of course, the GOP has turned that supposition on its head since the days of Newt Gingrich, but Republican disrespect for the process isn’t the whole problem. We’re now seeing that Howard Dean and Charles Schumer’s 2006-08 strategy of building Democratic congressional majorities by fielding moderate-to-conservative candidates in GOP strongholds was, if anything, too successful. It created a 60-vote Senate supermajority that, in reality, wasn’t a working majority at all. Instead, it gave off an aromatic scent of dominance that merely masked the stench of special-interest corruption (see Lieberman, Joe) and cynical deal-extraction (see Nelson, Ben), while providing Republicans the freedom to energize their base (and recapture the hearts of most teabaggers) by opposing everything in lockstep.

Now the Democrats in Congress are universally despised – by liberals, conservatives and everyone in between. Obama needs to quit relying on them to press his goals, to quit respecting the traditions and rules of order that the Senate’s own members no longer respect, and to begin implementing his agenda – both its popular and its difficult elements — without their help. He needs to sign a batch of executive orders implementing new regulations on the banks and insurance companies, setting lofty new emissions standards for industry, rescinding Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and whatnot — and dare Congress to overturn them. He needs to clear his slate of judicial- and executive-branch nominees with recess appointments – and let the Senate know he’ll do the same thing again on President’s Day 2011 (and 2013, and 2015) unless they get their shit together. He needs to throw Blanche Lincoln completely under the bus – she’s not worth saving, anyway – and let even Harry Reid know that his campaign support comes at a price (namely, the price of finally figuring out how to “herd cats,” as Trent Lott famously put it).

Chances of all this happening? Few. It’s clear by now that Obama fetishizes, above all else, his notion of “changing the way Washington works” – despite the huge opening it gives Republicans to defy him while simultaneously painting Democrats as too lily-livered to govern. If Obama’s idea of bringing change to the nation as a whole depends on his ability to douse DC’s partisan conflagration, we’re not gonna get much change at all. Forget “letting Bartlet be Bartlet” – Obama needs to start behaving more like George Bush, who earned Congress’ meek compliance (for four years, at least) via an early dose of threats and bullying … and, yes, via the liberal use of reconciliation, executive orders, recess appointments, and even signing statements.

I hated all that “unitary executive” stuff when Bush was president, and I still hate it today – but right now there is nothing in Washington more despicable than the United States Senate. (OK, maybe Dan Snyder.) Obama’s popularity may be down 15 points or so since his inauguration, but he is still, by far, the most popular guy in town. It’s time he stopped proving he’s not Bush, and started living in the political world that Bush and his GOP have created – a world in which might makes right, and in which executive-branch overreach is both the source of and the remedy for Congress’ incompetence.

I have no doubt that Obama, whatever his intentions, will put on a good rhetorical show at the health-care summit. But his failure to translate inspiration into action, on his own if necessary, has made me wonder if Hillary Clinton wasn’t right after all when she said his lofty rhetoric was all “just words.” I mean, seriously: Does anyone doubt that President Hillary, lording over a Democratic Congress (an institution she never revered the way Obama does), would have signed health care into law last summer — whether she had a 60-vote supermajority or her VP casting the tie-breaking vote?

Just in time for last weekend’s National Tea Party convention – an event which will be remembered mostly for the way Sarah Palin had her devotees eating (and the rest of us reading) out of the palm of her hand – a series of op-ed pieces arrived in the nation’s media comparing the Everyman Patriots down at Opryland with the snobbish, know-it-all progressives who currently dominate Washington. The Washington Post, whose editorial-page leanings seem to shift with every stiff breeze (or massive snowfall), published two such analyses/warnings over the three days of Nashville teabagging.

One came from the venerable columnist Charles Krauthammer, who, while cheerleading the coming “Peasant Revolt of 2010,” declared that President Obama and his fellow Democrats continue to push their too-liberal agenda because they don’t understand the lessons of Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts. Instead, he fulminated, they view the world only “through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.” In this delusional Democratic view, he continued, “Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.” And Brown’s victory can be attributed to the mouth-breathing public’s “anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.”

A couple days later, a University of Virginia professor named Gerard Alexander posed many of the same questions, but with less fire-breathing intensity, in an op-ed titled “Why Are Liberals So Condescending?” Previewing a speech he gave Monday at the American Enterprise Institute, he ticked off a list of four “major [liberal] narratives about who conservatives are and how they function”: the “vast right-wing conspiracy” of cynical politicians and opinion leaders who acquire power through deceit and trickery; the “rank-and-file [Republicans who] must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst”; the idea that “Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants”; and the notion that “conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety — including fear of change — whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic.”

Throughout his piece, which you really ought to read in full, Alexander’s tone remains level and reasonable, devoid of the pot-shots and name-calling so typical in Krauthammer’s work. As an unabashed liberal, I expected to come away from Alexander’s column feeling assaulted, even apoplectic; instead, I emerged from his litany of supposedly negative liberal beliefs thinking, “I agree with this completely — and the problem with it is … what, exactly?”

Indeed, with just a few words changed, virtually the same column could have been published by the New Republic or American Prospect as a celebration of liberal thinking. Of course, one of those words is in the piece’s title: the word “condescending.” Then again, the very idea that liberals – so frequently disparaged as bleeding-heart, tree-hugging, America-hating agents (and beneficiaries) of big government and wealth redistribution – should also be caricatured as “condescending” has always required an absurd twist of logic, a thought-warp that somehow manages to link the liberal concerns for equality of rights and opportunities to “elitism.”

That contortion can be traced to Republican message-shapers as far back as Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, who saw opportunity in the new demographics of Republican-friendly America in the ’60s – lily-white, increasingly Southern and Western, pro-Vietnam, religious at a moment when Time magazine was asking “Is God Dead?”, angry about desegregation, and suspicious that LBJ’s Great Society programs would disproportionately benefit people who (to put it charitably) were not like themselves. In that environment, GOP marketers decided that the path to populist success was to sweep their own party’s traditional base of country-club businessmen under the rug, and to paint those young, well-educated, “godless” (like Communists!), East- and West-Coast liberals who dominated ’60s culture as “elitists” who wanted to dictate your future and put an end to American (i.e., white male) exceptionalism. (“Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea,” Goldwater said, inspiring a brilliant LBJ campaign ad.)

It’s easy to see how this tactic succeeded. By the late ’60s and ’70s the Democratic Party was a noisy and restless amalgam of constituent parts – African-Americans, feminists, anti-war students, gays, immigrants, organized labor and the poor, all pressing loudly for more progress on their own agendas. And as everyday, working- and middle-class white Americans found it increasingly difficult to identify with the Democrats’ collection of movements, the Republicans played on their resentments, convincing many that every “win” for a liberal constituency – whether it was reflected in a legal victory (celebrated by conniving trial lawyers) or government spending (approved by lordly legislators who didn’t “share our values”) — was a “loss” for ordinary folk. Thus did the GOP – the party of the Chamber of Commerce, the oil companies and the military-industrial complex — talk millions into believing that any effort to lift the poor or oppressed onto equal footing had to be the work of smug “elitists” condescending to, and seeking to undermine the stature of, “real Americans.”

Opposition to such “elites” has become a defining characteristic of populist conservatism. The stereotypical villains float before us like ducks in a shooting gallery: Rich Hollywood types who push sex and violence on our children (while having the gall to use their celebrity as a platform for discussing their political beliefs). Smug, godless, maybe-even-Communist academics to whom we send our kids for four years of brainwashing. Lockstep-liberals in the media who report only one side of the story (when they’re not just making things up) and then think they’re so smart because they’re telling the stories, while we’re just watching and listening and (very occasionally) reading. And, worst of all, politicians who take it upon themselves to confiscate our hard-earned dollars and give them to people who don’t work as hard as we do, who don’t think or behave or believe like we do. According to the Republican playbook, these various “elites” don’t just think conservatives are wrong – they think they’re ignorant, or bigoted, or otherwise inferior.

The trouble was, and is, that such caricatures of “liberal elites” are bullshit. It’s true that liberals and conservatives have profoundly different attitudes toward the role of government in society, and toward the use of one person’s tax dollars to fund programs that benefit someone else. And it’s certainly true that, as a liberal ideologue, I believe that the liberal perspective is almost always both intellectually and morally superior to the conservative viewpoint. (While recognizing that conservatives feel exactly the opposite way, and that most moderates think both sides are taking this far too seriously.) But there’s a huge difference between confidence and condescension – and when your political philosophy is built on using the levers of government to correct otherwise-intractable societal imbalances and to achieve greater equality for all, that is by definition the opposite of the “elitism” that’s required to be “condescending” in the first place.

In his column, Krauthammer offered as further evidence of liberal “elitism” the fact that the Democrats’ cataclysmic loss in Massachusetts hasn’t dissuaded Obama from pressing forward on health care, climate-change legislation, and his other priorities. By his way of thinking, the GOP’s ascension in a couple of governors’ races and one senatorial election is proof-positive that the American people reject Obama’s agenda – yet the president insists upon flouting the public will, on the premise that he knows better and the people just don’t understand.

Let’s leave aside the fact that American democracy always reverts toward the middle after a one-sided election like 2008. The facts of that autumn, and the need for the new policies engendered by that landslide, remain the same today — even after Massachusetts, and even if the tea partiers believe it’s time to swing violently back to the right. As much as we all hated bailing out those bastards in the banking industry, and as repulsive as it is to watch the mutual butt-smooching and pocket-lining by Capitol Hill and Wall Street, the bailouts were still necessary in order to get the credit markets moving again for the sake of all Americans. As painful as it has been to watch the nation’s deficits and debt rise over the past 18 months, every reputable economist on both ends of the political spectrum still thinks the stimulus was worth the money and necessary to jump-start growth. As excruciating and often disgusting as the process of writing and passing health-care legislation has been, the insurance reforms contained in the final bills have (largely unmentioned) bipartisan support – and the government subsidies that enable the poor to purchase insurance not only constitute a major step toward building “a more perfect union,” but are our best hope (at least in the current political climate) for bringing down everyone’s insurance costs in the long run. And while shifting to renewable energy sources no doubt will cause our electric bills to spike in the short term, in the long term a government-mandated, carrot-and-stick approach to reducing carbon emissions remains essential to ensuring both our environmental future and our nation’s economic and political security.

It is justifiable to argue the specifics of these points – whether the time is right to impose cap-and-trade, whether a public health-care option is the only way to rein in the insurance industry, whether the stimulus should have emphasized tax breaks more than infrastructure spending. (In fact, it did – arguably to the economy’s detriment.) But to stoke the public’s rage at Wall Street for political purposes, to broaden the “liberal elite” narrative to incorporate the vulgar lie of health-care “death panels” – and to abandon the pursuit of compromise, or even the offering of serious alternative ideas, in favor of ensuring that no part of the elected majority’s agenda comes to pass … these are not conservative “ideas” that liberals ought to be taking more seriously. They are tactics which are not only unhelpful to advancing the nation’s welfare, but are actually worthy of the condescension Krauthammer and Alexander decry. (They’re not particularly likely to “lift American spirits,” either.) And that’s a fact that doesn’t require an elitist, or a rocket scientist, or a mind reader — or even a hand reader – to understand.

For about four months now I’ve had a copy of Ted Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass, sitting on my nightstand. So far it has served as a coaster and as a paperweight – and as an acceptable pile-topper when I don’t feel like cleaning old newspapers and half-read magazines off the table. But I’ve never cracked it open. I’m not really sure why – actually, I can think of one reason – but now I’m wondering if I’ll ever read it at all. Since Tuesday it has come to seem decidedly less necessary, historically speaking … like a rock band’s phenomenal debut album that was followed by a dozen shitty ones, or like Tiger Woods’ pursuit of Jack Nicklaus’ record for major championships.

In fact, something interesting happened on Tuesday night. Remember that scene near the end of Back to the Future, when Marty’s hand begins to disappear as chances of his parents getting together become less likely? Well, on Tuesday night an entire section of True Compass vanished from my nightstand. It was Teddy’s health care legacy. Will Democrats somehow find a way in the coming days and weeks to restore those pages to the book, or are they – and, with them, the usefulness of the Democratic Party as a governing coalition – gone for good?

Ted’s legacy is hardly the most important potential casualty of Massachusetts’ idiotic decision to place Scott Brown in Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat, but it’s hardly the least important, either. Symbolically speaking – and we may as well speak of symbols, because reality flew out the window a long time ago when it comes to the health-care debate – Tuesday’s vote represents the (overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning) people of Massachusetts marching en masse down to Arlington Cemetery and pissing on the eternal flame. One day very soon, Brown will cast an inevitable, lockstep “No” vote on an issue that hasn’t yet been utterly poisoned by demagoguery — an issue for which Teddy would have been leading the fight, on behalf of the huge majority of people in his state who favor progressive action rather than the conservative let’s-do-nothing approach. A jobs program, maybe? On that day, some significant number of currently spiteful, moderate Massachusetts voters will think to themselves, and not for the last time, “My God, what have we done?”

In all honesty, it’s hard to blame those voters for their boneheaded move. Martha Coakley was a terrible candidate, and – particularly considering what a monstrous boulder health care has been to push this far up the hill, and considering how energized even the Bay State’s tiny Republican base was bound to be – it’s astonishing that Democrats didn’t treat this election as though their lives depended on it. Instead, Dems screwed the pooch in every possible position: changing state laws on succession (twice!), nominating Coakley, taking a lengthy Christmas vacation, and generally taking the voters for granted. And with Nancy Pelosi announcing today that she doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate bill as-is, avoiding further negotiations and a certain filibuster, that boulder seems destined to rumble back down the hill — perhaps leaving Barack Obama’s administration as flattened as the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince.

But that’s all process. (Though it must be said that the Republicans’ apparent plan to use their new, 41-vote Superminority to bring Congress to a standstill, rather than negotiate compromise for the good of the nation, is a mockery of representative democracy.) On a broader, and ultimately more important level, Democrats have lost miserably on the substance of health care. They might still emerge with a signing ceremony at the White House – though right now it’s difficult to envision a path to that event – but even if they do, it will be a law that begins its life with a couple of broken limbs and a huge cloud over its head. And it didn’t take an inventive campaign of opposition by the Republicans, or an election decided by fickle voters to make the Democrats look ridiculous. No, the Dems brought this upon themselves, just as surely as Tiger’s career was felled not by his opponents learning to play better, but by the exposure of his own massive flaws.

This past year was, to be sure, not the most convenient time to attempt a major overhaul of the nation’s abominable health-care system. The economy was a shambles, the workforce was hemorrhaging jobs, government spending was already unpopularly profligate — and while health-care reform is a key long-term component to fixing the first two of those problems, it was hardly a short-term solution to the third. Still, the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority gave them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make a longtime legislative dream come true – and simultaneously to make progress on a problem that for decades has served as a lead weight on the economy — and they were right to seize the initiative when they did.

That, however, was just about the only thing they did right. There will be a lot of finger-pointing over the next few weeks related to process-oriented fiascos – at Bart Stupak and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson (all of whom may now go ahead and refer to themselves as (D-Aetna), in the wake of today’s Supreme Court decimation of campaign finance laws); at Olympia Snowe and John McCain, and several other Republicans who ought to be better than this; and particularly at the Senate Finance Committee, for the foot-dragging that allowed the August recess to commence without a concrete bill in hand. But on the substance of the legislation, there is one man on whom the lion’s share of blame must be placed, and that is, of course, Obama.

Obama entered 2009 as the most trusted politician in America. In fact, let’s face it – he entered 2009 as pretty much the only trusted politician in America. Yet it quickly became clear that, on both the stimulus and health care, Obama was going to let Congress lead him (at least publicly) rather than the other way around. As the first president in a half-century to emerge from the legislative branch, his heightened (and misplaced) respect for that branch surely factored into it. But he no doubt also believed that, by declining to use his power as a bludgeon, he would be offering a corrective to the Bush administration’s “unitary executive” arrogance; he also likely thought, on health care specifically, that turning the bill-writing over to Congressional committees would help him avoid the “my bill or nothing” trap that many believe had swallowed the Clintons’ earlier attempt at reform.

Obama may have thought he had learned the lessons of 1994, but in reality he flunked his first major test as soon as he failed to write his name on the paper. He knew that Americans wanted (and still want) health-care reform in principle, but that Republicans would resurrect all the bogus arguments that sank the Clintons 16 years ago, and then some, in order to make reform unpalatable in practice. But he left the job of responding to (or ignoring) those lies in the hands of legislators whom the people didn’t trust, who hadn’t themselves received the electoral-college mandate that he had. Even worse, his failure to use the bully pulpit – loudly, forcefully, as inspirationally as he had used his campaign stem-winders – left him (and Democrats in general) in a permanent defensive crouch, even as they slapped each other on the back each time the legislation passed one more committee.

There’s no choice but to engage in some rapid response when your opponents are tossing around feces like “death panels” and “government takeovers.” But Obama, for the most part, neglected to play offense. Early on, he tried to achieve a sense of inevitability – Hillary Clinton’s favorite word, and look where that got her in 2008 – by making concessions to insurers and doctors and Big Pharma and then trumpeting their sign-ons to the effort. (Of course, his coalition building turned “reform” into an inside job, and started us down the road to the ungodly mess of legislation we now have before us.) But he never built or argued for the mountain of evidence that would have helped him appeal to the American people’s intelligence, and would have trumped the lies that right-wingers aimed directly at our fears.

For example, Obama should have had at the ready a stream of cost-benefit analyses from economists and think tanks – a new one every week, if necessary. He should have drilled it into our heads that the bills’ cost for extending insurance to most of those 15 percent of Americans who are currently without it – approximately $90 billion annually, spread over 10 years – re-arranges about 4 percent of Americans’ $2.3 trillion total annual spending on health care. FOUR PERCENT!!! (Even without the gimmickry of putting off major spending until 2013, the $160-billion annual budgets for the later years still only represent about 7 percent – hardly a “government takeover.”) He should have – but couldn’t, since he had already given away the store to get their lip-service cooperation – done a much better job condemning the insurance companies’ parasitic presence in the system, and arguing that government bureaucrats could scarcely do a less efficient job of managing the health of a few million public-option participants than Aetna/Cigna/BlueCross bureaucrats already do for the rest of us. He should have made it crystal clear that Americans already pay much more to hospitals and insurers, in order to offset the unpaid costs of treatment for the uninsured, than they would to the government even under Congress’ woefully flawed bills. He should have devoted a portion of the “You Lie!” speech to a rundown of insurance-lobby contributions to reform opponents, both Republican and Democrat.

He should have visited every Remote Area Medical clinic with the White House press corps in tow, and should have trotted out an endless parade of uninsured, laid-off factory workers from every state … not to mention, say, a passel of breast-cancer survivors (good Christians all) who are afraid to change jobs because of their pre-existing conditions. And he should have repeatedly devoted the loftiest of his lofty rhetoric to decrying the immorality of 45,000 Americans dying every year because of insufficient access to health care – over 10 times more folks in a single year than have ever been killed in terrorist attacks targeting our people.

That’s what a leader does in the media age – he campaigns relentlessly to get the facts (or, in Bush’s case, the pseudo-facts) out on the legislation he’s pushing. Instead, Obama’s near-silence created a communications vacuum that allowed opponents of reform – and, even more grotesquely, Republicans who might have joined a more bipartisan reform effort if it hadn’t meant handing a victory to another party’s president – to define the terms of debate once again, and to again turn Americans against their own interests. That’s what led, more than anything else, to the rabid jackals at the town halls; that’s what led to the god-awful bills in the House and Senate; and that’s what has led to Scott Brown – despite the fact that many Brown voters told exit polls they approve of Obama, and despite the fact that a vast majority of Massachusetts voters are pleased as punch with their own state’s expansive health-reform efforts.

Now that the 60-vote majority is history and Pelosi has written off the Senate bill, it’s difficult to guess how health care will shake out – whether Obama will try to shrink the bill down to those elements that might draw bipartisan support (excuse me while I finish cackling), whether a revived Medicare-expansion plan will go through reconciliation, or whether the whole thing will die an ignominious death. What’s easy to guess is that Democrats in Congress probably will spend the rest of this year walking a tightrope, on health care and numerous other issues, to ensure they lose as few additional seats as possible in November. Obama will propose a few populist measures, and Dems will try to embarrass Republicans by forcing votes on popular, if insubstantial issues. There will be much renewed rhetoric from Obama about compromise, but few concrete attempts in the backrooms on Capitol Hill – election years are a time for sharpening differences, not blurring them. And then the GOP will rout the Dems anyway.

If the Democrats had any balls, they would continue pressing an ambitious agenda of job creation and deficit reduction, while making a strong case for the economic benefits of health-care and climate-change legislation. Republicans are going to filibuster everything, anyway – Democrats should give them a real domestic program to oppose, then let the voters decide who’s right or wrong (and whether the tyranny of the filibuster is anti-American). But that’s not likely; instead, the Dems will be content to leave the voters with an unconscionable choice. Is it worse to stand, as the Republicans do, for nothing – that is, in opposition to everything? Or is it worse to stand, as way too many Democrats already did and even more will now, for nothing but your own political survival? Dems have played that game before, most recently in 1994 and 2002 — and if a Republican can compete on those terms and win Ted Kennedy’s seat in January, an electoral catastrophe is coming in November.

Thanks for sticking with me after the first half of this monstrous column wrapping up our series on Ayn Rand and her overlong orgy of Objectivism, Atlas Shrugged. I realize you could have ditched me and headed for Galt’s Gulch by now; instead you’ve chosen, like Dagny Taggart (or like Al Gore in the 2000 primaries, comparing himself to Senate retiree Bill Bradley), to “stay and fight.” Dagny Taggart and Al Gore exalted in the same breath … only on Popdose!

Anyway, having devoured as much Rand material as I can stand, and then having taken a bit of time to digest it, I will now admit (please don’t tell anyone) that I find admirable elements in her philosophy – but only as it relates to the individual and the way he travels through his own life. Self-esteem, in measured quantities, is certainly a good thing. As an idealized primer for living, it’s easy to see why Objectivism might work — for some people, of particular backgrounds, means and abilities — and it’s also easy to see why many of Rand’s followers are so goddamned smug about it. As for everyone else … and as for Rand’s prescriptions for organizing (or, rather, dis-organizing) society … well, that’s another story.

My own very tentative relationship with the concept of “God,” and my personal rejection of organized religious belief, leaves me particularly open to Rand’s arguments for atheism – and she is perhaps even more persuasive on this topic than our like-minded contemporary authors. I was particularly impressed with a fascinating passage in Galt’s speech arguing that the concept of “original sin” – you know, Adam and Eve biting the apple from the “tree of knowledge” and all that – was invented as a method of turning man against his own mind, and that “mystics of spirit” have convinced men to sublimate their free will in favor of religious doctrines pitting the sinful body against the virtuous soul. Both, to Galt, are “symbols of death … A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost – yet such is [religionists’] image of man’s nature.” And with reason removed from the equation, man “was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations – he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a Dictaphone.” (A rare infusion of humor in the otherwise oppressively dour Randian landscape!)

Of course, until very recently religious stories served not only as a means of establishing and enforcing social control, but as a way of explaining humanity, the world, and death (or, if you prefer, life, the universe, and everything) to fearful people in the absence of scientific knowledge. And yes, plenty of folks still “cling” to their faith – as our President once noted indelicately — as a means of maintaining tradition and comfort in a still-uncertain world. That’s part of human nature … a nature toward which Rand often seems to have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear.

In theory, relying on individual reason and rationality in one’s personal decisions and actions, and placing the highest value on one’s own virtues, ambitions and desires are profoundly worthwhile goals. And it’s nice to think that such a worldview can work out splendidly, particularly if you have the intellectual and/or physical talents, as well as the education and the means, to live that way. Unfortunately, not everyone does. Indeed, even Rand asserted that the vast majority of people aren’t virtuous enough to put her ideas into practice. Asked by Mike Wallace in 1959 if a “weak” man is “beyond” her conception of love, Rand said, “He certainly does not deserve it … if a man wants love he can correct his flaws, his weaknesses … but he cannot expect the unearned.” Wallace: “There are very few of us, then, in this world, by your standards, who are worthy of love.” Rand: “Unfortunately, yes, very few. But it is open to everybody to make themselves worthy of it, and that is all my morality offers them.”

Which begs the question, what good is a philosophy that applies only to the “very few,” often at the expense of the many? Politically speaking, Rand yearned not merely for an end to Communism (in her home country) and “welfare state” entitlements (throughout the West), but for a return to the era before the permanent imposition of the income tax in 1913 – and before the Progressive reforms of the previous decade that curbed monopolies and trusts and offered workers minimal protection from exploitation. She insisted that a society in which each man operated rationally and in his own self-interest, and never used force against another man – which wouldn’t really be a “society” at all, she was happy to note – would be free from monopolies or exploitation. But what evidence did she have that such would be the case? In fact, as I’ve argued before, all the evidence of our history suggests exactly the opposite – that the captains of industry who built Rand’s beloved steel, rail, oil, automobile, and other industries did so on the backs of laborers who were exploited to the fullest extent possible, via low wages, long hours and dangerous working conditions. Those laborers’ lesser education, skills and/or class left Randian pursuits largely inaccessible to them – unless they were willing to accept those low wages and poor conditions as the “full value” of their labor. And generations would have been doomed to follow in their subjugated footsteps were it not for government regulation of industry … or for public schooling, for that matter, which would also fall by the wayside in Rand’s taxation-free utopia.

I’ve said this before, as well, but I believe that the downfall of Objectivism is its Social Darwinism – its refusal to account for the fact that, in a free and civilized world, an individual’s rights end at the place where another’s begin, and that if my rights and interests exist in conflict with someone else’s, they should be resolved in a manner that is fair to both parties. American economic history — much of human history, really — is a story of the struggles between management and labor, whites and blacks (and Hispanics, and Native Americans, immigrants, etc.), men and women, young and old, as they’ve competed for economic and political power, not to mention the basic freedom to pursue their interests. The path of growth among democratic governments over the last century, from taxation to regulation to entitlements, has mirrored the perceived need for correctives to be found for the imbalances in those power struggles — not to tear down those who have more power and money, but to empower and, yes, provide a “safety net” of bare-minimum subsistence and opportunity for those who have less. It is entirely possible, indeed it is downright common, to be “altruistic” in the dictionary sense – that is, to have a healthy interest in the welfare of one’s fellow man, regardless of any “value” a person in need may be to you, and to be willing to use both charity and government to “promote the general welfare” – without being “altruistic” in the Randian sense of thoroughly subjugating one’s own interests for the sake of others. Such a distinction is lost throughout Atlas Shrugged and Objectivist philosophy in general, to the novel’s (and Rand’s) discredit.

Note the word “democratic” in the paragraph above. Had a majority of self-interested Americans opposed the income tax in 1913, Social Security in 1934, or Medicare in 1965, they could have swept into power representatives who promised to overturn those programs. Assuming the health care bill passes this month, they’ll get another chance this fall and/or in 2012 – but don’t bet on such a reversal happening, even if Republicans do win big. The simple fact is that most citizens of the U.S. and other democratic societies – rich, poor, and middle class alike — approve of some amount of “redistribution of wealth” via government taxation, regulation and spending, regardless of their personal “rational” interest in the people served by the programs financed with their money. Huge majorities believe, unlike Rand, that roads, public schools, infrastructure, and a social safety net for children, seniors and the poor are worthwhile uses of government money (i.e., their own taxes). And even most conservatives believe that government is good for considerably more than Rand’s very narrow prescription: local and national security, and the protection of private property via the justice system. Citizens often vote to change course when they decide their government needs a corrective – when it is taxing and spending too much, or serving the public too little. Even taking into account the frequently negative impacts of special interests and bloated bureaucracies, part of the glory of democracy is its tendency to keep the extremes in check, and to keep governments from sliding toward the sort of totalitarianism Rand portrays in Atlas Shrugged. She often called the United States “the only moral country in the history of the world,” but it would seem she approved only of the theory embodied in its governing principles, not the reality of their execution.

According to Rand, approving of the government’s legal capacity to tax its citizens and spend their money to help other citizens – its forced altruism, in other words — is not only immoral but irrational, and even “unthinking.” She theorized in absolutes that run contrary not just to the teachings of “mystics of muscle” or “mystics of spirit,” but to human nature itself; to her, it is impossible for a “rational” New Yorker to care whether an unemployed stranger in Arizona has adequate health care, or whether an African-American stranger in Mississippi faces job discrimination. And that is where she veers from philosophy to sociopathy, and where her ideas lose their merit. Indeed, the arrogance of her stance makes one wonder if her opposition to active government was truly an outgrowth of lofty ideas about “reason” and “rationality,” or whether her emphasis on “the mind” is merely an invention designed to justify her selfishness and belittle opposing ideas. “I don’t deal with those who disagree,” she told Phil Donahue in 1980 after responding bitchily to a former acolyte in the audience who said she had turned away from Rand’s teachings. “I would love to see an honorable adversary, but I’ve stopped hoping for it. They’re not honorable in their ideas. If she’s parted from my writings, that’s her loss, not mine. She doesn’t have to bring it to me.”

No, Rand didn’t brook disagreement with much pleasantry, and labeled dissenters from her ideas “immoral” and worse. Those were not the only similarities linking Rand’s rhetoric and ideas with the political and (especially) religious leaders she held in such ill regard. “Don’t follow leaders – and don’t become one,” demanded her philosophy (Galt refused to “rule” even when begged) … yet she commanded such fealty from her followers that she insisted they call themselves “Students of Objectivism,” even as she claimed the title of “Objectivist” solely for herself. “Stop believing what the mystics teach you – think for yourself,” Galt commands … in the middle of a three-hour lecture insisting that the only “rational” thoughts are his own kind.

And then there’s the key plotline of Atlas Shrugged – the mysterious vanishing of Randian industrialists, and the ensuing tribulations of those lesser (and in most cases “immoral”) men who have been … left behind. (Ayn Rand and Timothy LaHaye, mentioned in the same breath … only on Popdose!) Yes, it’s Rand’s own Rapture, with Galt as the Redeemer who has been martyred by tyrants via torture (though, in keeping with his creed placing primacy on his love of his own life, he doesn’t bother to die) — only to return just in time to reclaim Earth in the name of … reason and selfishness. Well, it’s not a perfect analogy, but it works well enough that it must have been intentional … right? Perhaps composer Richard Halley’s “Concerto of Deliverance” should have been titled “Concerto of Revelations.”

I briefly worried, while beginning this long-winded column, that I might have trouble finding a persuasive example of the manner in which Rand’s absolutism falls apart upon close examination – in which entirely rational people balance self-interest and altruism on a day-to-day basis. Then a high-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti on Tuesday, devastating that nation’s capital city and leaving thousands dead, perhaps hundreds of thousands homeless. How many millions of people with no relatives and no economic interest in Haiti will nevertheless write checks to charity in the coming days — in amounts they can afford without bankrupting themselves? How many millions more simply smile with hope and reassurance upon hearing their governments’ leaders promise swift logistical, nutritional and financial help to the people of Haiti – help they can provide thanks to taxpayer dollars?

Thinking about the Haitian quake, in turn, made me think about Roberto Clemente, the baseball great (and Puerto Rico native) who responded so valiantly after the Nicaraguan capital was struck by an earthquake in December 1971. Clemente could hardly have placed a particularly high “value” on the “virtues” of a nation and a people that were not his own – certainly not the same value he placed on his own identity and heritage, when he demanded that baseball writers and fans stop calling him “Bobby” and use his real name. But he recognized “need” when he saw it, and saw a duty (born of the intrinsic value he placed in humanity as a whole) to use his time and his resources to help. He quickly organized three relief flights – and when he learned that the supplies were being diverted from the people who needed them, he decided to accompany the fourth plane himself. Never mind the disastrous outcome of that flight – Clemente’s decision merely to fly to Nicaragua was an act of self-sacrifice, and a breaching of his own “rational self-interest,” that Rand, from my reading of her, probably wouldn’t have approved.

Clemente, for his charity and altruism as much as for his glorious baseball career, is a hero to millions. So is Ayn Rand, to other people for very different reasons. You’ll forgive me if, in the final analysis, I choose to exalt Clemente … and if I exalt a government that has the means and the mandate to provide some relief to the people of Haiti, and maybe even ensure some access to health care for uninsured people in our own land.

By the way, guess who was the first celebrity to book a flight for Port-au-Prince this week? It was Angelina “I Wanna Play Dagny Taggart” Jolie! (Ah, altruism…) If you guessed correctly, don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back. Nobody needs that much self-esteem.

“We do not tell – we show.”

So says the mentor of Atlas Shrugged’s three key “strikers,” philosopher Hugh Akston … on page 735 of a 1,168-page novel, in a passage that precedes by 300 pages the beginning of a 60-page, 35,000-word monologue by John Galt that is, if nothing else, an absolute triumph of telling over showing.

I note this contradiction not merely for an ironic chuckle – though I must say, I did spend a half hour guffawing after I read it – but also to preface the peculiar challenge I’ve set for myself now that I’ve finally finished Ayn Rand’s rambling rhapsody of (supposed) rationality. I must, of course, complete the task of synopsizing the novel – which is easy enough, except for the requirement of posting the phrase “Spoiler Alert!” for the benefit of anyone who’s just now stumbling across this series and might not want to find out what becomes of Dagny, Hank, and the gang down at Galt’s Gulch. But I must also say whatever it is I have to say about the novel as literature, and about Objectivism as a philosophy, since I have no plans of returning to either topic at any length. So settle in … this is going to take a while. In this “Part One” post, I’ll cover the synopsis and the literary criticism; if you survive it, please mosey on over to Part Two for a generalized take on Objectivism as viewed through the prism of Atlas Shrugged and some other Rand-related materials I’ve sampled recently.

I am well aware that whatever summary and analysis I offer in this relatively short space will be insufficient, either for novices or for those Students of Objectivism (inside joke – we’ll discuss it later) who, if recent history is any indication, will soon be suggesting in either a pleasant or troll-like manner that I am “uncomprehending” or “lazy” or “witless,” or some such. That’s fine; to each his own. (Which, by the way, in four words pretty much sums up Rand’s philosophy.) With that acknowledgment/apology out of the way, here’s a summary of Atlas Shrugged’s concluding chapters:

Hank Rearden, when last we saw him, was fighting off a violent mob (full of government-planted goons) at his steel mills, and deciding at long last to abandon his livelihood and join his fellow industrialists in Galtlantis. Dagny now soldiers on alone, not yet ready to turn the family railroad over to the moochers and looters, and allows herself to be tricked into attending a “conference” that turns out to be a “your presence equals your support” backdrop for a well-publicized TV broadcast by the “head of state,” the no-first-named Mr. Thompson. Just as this propaganda-fest is ready to go on the air, however, the nation’s broadcast signals are suddenly jammed – and the voice that emerges is not Mr. Thompson’s, but Galt’s.

He proceeds, over what’s described as three hours of airtime, to lay out his/Rand’s ideas in frequently gripping, though too-often redundant fashion. He describes the extent to which people worldwide have turned away from the “moral choice” of reasoning and living like men, and have instead been lulled into an unthinking, rationality-free existence by collectivist governments which insist that individual will and reason are inconsequential, and which convince and/or force men to sacrifice their own interests and property for the benefit of others. (Galt calls the leaders responsible for this trend “mystics of muscle.”) He also argues that mankind has abandoned the possibility of happiness and pleasure in obedience to religious doctrines propagated by “mystics of spirit,” and in pursuit of imaginary future rewards that are available only after death. (More on this later.) Only by rejecting these false prophets of conformity and altruism, Galt says, can mankind recover his sense of self and regain the momentum that propelled us out of the dark ages and into the modern era.

Wrapping up his speech, Galt fesses up to stealing away the world’s great achievers and says that his “men of the mind” will return only upon the downfall of the collectivist states – an outcome that he suggests his listeners get to work on immediately. The broadcast ends, and the nation’s sniveling leaders quickly go into a panic – they recognize that Galt’s ideas offer an attractive alternative to their own failed course, but their first priority is the maintenance of their own power, so they decide (no joke) to find him, catch him, and “force him to rule.” Dagny unwittingly leads them straight to Galt, by going in search of him herself and finding him in a Lower East Side tenement; when they arrive, Dagny gets off by pretending to loathe Galt, and Galt is taken to the fanciest hotel in town to be kept under armed guard while one looter after another tries to talk him into running the country. Those pleas having failed, Mr. Thompson nonetheless schedules a TV broadcast (will these fools never learn?) at which Galt, dressed to the nines and with the business end of a pistol jabbing his kidney, will be forced to announce the “John Galt Plan” to the nation; after a series of pompous introductions, Galt stands before the microphone and sums up his attitude toward his captors, and toward governance in general, with one simple sentence: “Get the hell out of my way!”

Thus temporarily foiled again (curses!), Mr. Thompson, Wesley Mouch, and their fellow looters decide that a bit of torture might do the trick – so that night they take Galt up to a New Hampshire science lab, attach some electrodes to his skin, and turn on the juice. While all this is going on, out in Iowa a struggle has commenced for the giant, space-age weapon the government had recently invented to keep the populace unthinkingly obedient. Dr. Robert Stadler, a onetime “great mind” who had been co-opted by the collectivists, arrives to commandeer the weapon (and thus the nation), only to find that a gang of breakaway government goons has already had the same idea. When Stadler confronts the gang’s leader and suggests he hasn’t the brains to control a high-tech weapon, the drunken lout proves him right by pulling levers indiscriminately – thus setting off a sound-wave explosion that destroys everything and everyone within a 100-mile radius, including Dagny’s beloved Taggart Bridge across the Mississippi (the nation’s last remaining link between east and west).

News of the bridge collapse finally convinces Dagny that her railroad (and the nation) are no longer worth saving, so she joins Hank Rearden, Francisco d’Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjold and a few other Brigadooners in a mission to rescue Galt from his high-voltage fate. Dagny winds up killing a panicked guard who doesn’t know whether to believe her when she says Mr. Thompson sent her – in fact, she seems to kill him simply because he wouldn’t make up his mind – and the rescuers eventually find Galt shaken, a bit fried, but otherwise unharmed, his survival of the torture having left the looters (literally) at their wit’s end. Dagny, Hank, Frisco and Galt – after, remarkably, not fighting to the death over who would get to fly the plane – jet back to Colorado and Galt’s Gulch, passing over New York City just in time to watch the lights go out for good (an event which Galt earlier had suggested would symbolize their success in destroying Looter Nation). We last see them back in Shangri-La, plotting their triumphant return to rebuild the decimated country, rewriting the Constitution (literally!) with Richard Halley’s “Concerto of Deliverance” ringing in their ears.

All told, it’s a slam-bang ending to a Tarantino-worthy behemoth of a book, with its combination of Ultraviolence, kinky sex and ponderous exposition. Amazingly, I mean that as a compliment; Atlas Shrugged is, divorced from its philosophical underpinnings, at times a ripping good yarn. (If, as has long been rumored, Angelina Jolie is itching to play Dagny, why not cast Brad as Galt and beg Quentin to direct?) About Galt’s exposition, though: While I mentioned its obscene length at the top of this essay in order to poke a bit of superficial fun, it’s worth noting that in her book The Romantic Manifesto, Rand herself criticized Victor Hugo for occasionally stopping his narratives cold in order to indulge in essay-writing. Should a film or mini-series of Atlas Shrugged ever come to pass, may the ultimate “mystic of spirit” have mercy on the poor screenwriter who has to pare Galt’s speech down to a manageable length, then defend the cuts to the Objectivist micro-horde!

Rand wrote The Romantic Manifesto to defend her belief that fiction writing should present not realistic protagonists, but mythic heroes; not stories of the world as it is, but as it ought to be. Atlas Shrugged is her ultimate evidence for that belief, just as she once said she intended it to be the “climax and completion” of her espousal of Objectivism. This predilection for the “romantic” apparently gave her license, in her own mind at least, to create entrepreneur-heroes seemingly chiseled out of Grecian marble and political villains more ridiculous than the Keystone Kops, and to invent a nightmare Amerika whose people and politicians willingly vote, scheme, and fumble their way into totalitarianism. Rand’s defenders, some of whom we’ve heard from over the course of this series, use that same concept of romanticism to call Atlas Shrugged something like “science fiction,” to insist that we shouldn’t take it too literally, and to demand that I not compare the characters and situations in the novel with the real world of Rand’s time or ours. (Of course, such people also are screaming that Barney Frank is the incarnation of Wesley Mouch and are carrying signs to tea parties that read “Atlas is shrugging,” but that’s another matter.)

As I’ve noted in previous columns, I reject Rand’s claim of romanticism as an excuse for creating caricatures of the people and ideas she opposes, on the basis that she quite openly was using fiction (the medium in which her theories were most widely read) to offer evidence for her real-world ideas about reason, religion, regulation of industry, taxation and other matters. Her “romanticism” allowed her to invent straw-man villains and preposterous situations (related to politics, business, romance and family relations alike) that practically force the reader to sympathize with her self-reliant heroes. Those heroes are vaguely relatable as timeless “ideals” for human thought and behavior; how sad, then, that her theories of fiction (which she claimed to base upon Aristotle, though some of her critics say she was misreading Aristotle in the first place) forbade her from placing those heroes in a real-world context and attempting to convince her audience that her ideas were simply better than an honestly portrayed alternative.

(Or was her “aesthetic” really just a convenience? Considering that, for whatever reason, she didn’t dare to actually use the words “religion” or “Bible” or “atheism” anywhere in Galt’s speech, one can be forgiven for assuming that she would have had a great deal more trouble successfully making her arguments in a more realistic scenario. John Stossel’s pathetic attempt to do so last week, on his thoroughly pointless Fox Business Network show about Atlas Shrugged, ended up wallowing for 15 minutes in one Northern-Virginia entrepreneur’s complaints that the government of his state is trying to regulate or ban the service he provides: fish pedicures. I’m not kidding.)

That tension between “romanticist” flights of fancy and real-life concerns, not to mention her frequent interruptions of one to engage in the other, have led many Rand critics (and supporters as well) to wonder whether she should be considered a “novelist” at all, rather than a polemicist who trafficked in fictional scenarios to put across her arguments. I don’t find a need to take a stand in that argument, especially considering how much more entertaining it is to note the contradictory stances of various Rand haters – some of whom label her a decent theorist who wrote lousy fiction, while others say her plots were terrific (shame about the philosophy). I will say this: I found her ideas, to the extent she laid them out in full, to be far more persuasive as they were expressed during Galt’s soliloquy than they were as depicted through the novel’s well-developed plot and not-so-well-developed characters.

That’s not to say that Atlas Shrugged’s plot was perfectly developed – indeed, some key questions are left hanging at the end. For example, what will happen to Dagny’s childhood friend and business consigliere Eddie Willers, who at the end of the novel was left, abandoned and sobbing, on a broken-down train in the Arizona desert? I have failed to mention poor Eddie much, if at all, even though he represents in many ways the middle-management conscience of the novel – a guy who sympathizes with Dagny’s struggles, and who unwittingly passes along vital information about her and the railroad to Galt in the Taggart cafeteria. Does Eddie have reason to believe he might someday be received in Galt’s Colorado Graceland? And how, exactly, is the populace expected to respond when Galt leads his army of anti-altruists out of the mountains and back into society? How will they feel when Galt proclaims, “Hey, folks! We’re back! We’ve got this nifty motor that will solve all your problems … and oh, by the way, we’ve re-written your Constitution so you can’t control us!”

And what of Hank and Francisco, who seem doomed to a sex-free existence in Shangri-La now that the only woman they’ve ever loved, Dagny, has Gone Galt? They’ve clearly been smitten with one another, in an intense (if platonic) fashion, ever since they met — might they now find Virtuous Love … with each other? Just substitute “Objectivist” for “cowboy” here.

Hmmm … perhaps not. Rand told an audience in 1971 that homosexuality “involves psychological flaws, corruptions, errors, or unfortunate premises … is immoral, and more than that; if you want my really sincere opinion, it’s disgusting.” Any Rand acolytes who wish to pick up that ball and run with it are encouraged to do so in the comments.

For a broader discussion of Objectivism – and maybe even an explanation why I titled this pair of columns as I did – please proceed to Part Two … but please do so only if it fits within your rational self-interest. See you there!

I tried. I tried so hard. You’ve gotta believe me when I tell you how I tried and tried to finish Ayn Rand’s oversize chronicle of obsessive-compulsive capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, over the holidays so that I could wrap up this series today. Alas, somewhere in the early-late-middle of John Galt’s 32,000-word disquisition on “Men of the Mind,” “Mystics of Muscle,” and other assorted (and alliterative) figments of Rand’s imagination, I fell into a long yet fitful sleep. And after numerous horrifying dreams about Welfare Queens with entitlement complexes … not to mention one very lovely vision of a nude Dagny Taggart presenting me with a pristine copy of the novel’s Cliff’s Notes … I awoke to discover I had slept six days, it was 2010, and somehow our republican (though hardly Republican) form of government had survived into the New Year.

Relieved at the knowledge that the teabaggers had it all wrong, and that President Obama’s first calendar year in office hadn’t concluded with the declaration of a “People’s State,” I decided to throttle back my attempt to finish Atlas Shrugged in time for this column. Instead, my wife and I spent the long weekend dreaming up ridiculous reasons to call each other “moocher” and “looter,” and even that most powerful of Rand-ian insults, “loocher.” That last one, in fact, may yet come to replace “Socialist Schmoopy” as our go-to term of mutual endearment.

I’m sure some of you are quite pained to learn that my heretofore sincere quest to devour Rand’s magnum opus has, temporarily at least, devolved into openly mocking pillow talk with the missus. But don’t despair! Thanks to that magical Internet phenomenon known as the “pingback,” I learned this week that one of our nation’s most respected investigative reporters, the extravagantly mustachioed John Stossel, has picked up this hot potato and run with it — preparing an hourlong program on Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, to be broadcast this very evening at 8 p.m. EST on the Fox Business Network!

I know, I know … but try to contain your excitement. First of all, you’ll have to find FBN, which I had never done until I fired up the TiVo for this purpose. I can tell you that it’s on DirecTV channel 359 (right next to Fox News – thanks for the synergy, Rupert!), and that in New York it’s on channel 43. Second of all, you’ll have to commit to steering your remote toward the channel, which very few people actually do – FBN’s most recent daily rating is about 21,000 souls, less than a tenth of CNBC’s daily viewers and too small a number for Nielsen to measure verifiably. And then you’ll have to spend an hour, you know, looking at John Stossel, a prospect that singlehandedly kept me away from 20/20 for nigh on 30 years.

But I digress. (Hey, I’m reading an 1,168-page novel that really only required about 400. So give me a break!) Without any further ado, here’s a typically jaundiced summary of the first few chapters of Atlas Shrugged’s Part III (i.e., pages 700-1,000 in my hardback edition):

We last saw our put-upon heroine, the railroad magnate Dagny, plunging her single-engine plane toward a crash-landing on the grassy floor of a valley that had appeared magically in the craggy midst of the Rocky Mountains. (Apparently a key qualification for earning Rand’s respect is the ability to hop nonchalantly into a cockpit and pilot a plane.) Knocked unconscious by the landing, she awakens to see the face of the man whose plane (see?) she had been chasing – none other than John Galt himself. It turns out that Dagny has become the first uninvited interloper to visit “Galt’s Gulch,” a sort of Big-Business Brigadoon to which all of the novel’s vanished industrialists have fled. She spends a month in the valley, learning why Galt’s philosophy of anti-altruism is right for everyone from bankers and copper tycoons to composers and actresses – none of whom seem to need any assistance to ply their trades there, not from tellers or miners or musicians or playwrights. She grows quite enamored of the valley and its raison d’être – and she falls (chastely) in love with Galt, which is a pity for her lover Hank Rearden, who has spent the entire month searching for her in his plane (ahem!) and comes tantalizingly close to crashing the valley himself. Yet even as her hosts convince her that they had to drop out of society, to escape the depraved communitarians who hated them for their success – and even as they beseech her to remain Where the Reviled Things Are (“We’ll Wall Street you up, we love you so!”) – Dagny says no, and travels back in and out of days, and almost over a year …

And back into the morning of her very own office, where her evil brother has left her railroad, and it is still … crumbling, pretty much like the rest of the country. The increasingly totalitarian government, when it’s not developing crazy new weapons to intimidate dissenters, is imposing ever tighter restrictions on commerce and making terrible economic decisions based on cronyism, regionalism and misplaced altruism. Dagny is enlisted to defend the government programs she despises – under the threat of having her affair with Rearden revealed – so she goes on a popular radio show and valiantly reveals it herself, and rails against the nation’s leaders until someone pulls the plug. She then proceeds to pull the plug on her relationship with Hank, even as he declares his love and admits that the “contempt” he’d earlier professed to feel for her (read all about it here, if you’ve forgotten) had been a product of man’s self-destructive morality rather than his own true feelings. (Later, Dagny discovers that Galt has been performing yeoman’s labor for her railroad in order to keep an eye on her … which leads to Dagny and Galt making sexytime in an underground train tunnel. Hot!)

On the flipside of love, Dagny’s new sister-in-law, the onetime guttersnipe-turned-enlightened individualist Cherryl, has come to realize the evil behind her husband Jim’s “rescue” of her. It seems that Jim, in true (for Rand) altruistic fashion, loves her only for her flaws and her needs, not for her virtues – a realization that drives Cherryl to commiserate with her sworn enemy, the suddenly sympathetic Dagny. Afterward, Cherryl arrives home to find Jim in flagrante delicto with … Hank Rearden’s awful wife Lillian! Gross! Unable to decide whether she’s more embarrassed or repulsed – and apparently unable to fly a plane to Galt’s Gulch — Cherryl flings herself into the East River. Hank’s struggles continue, too, culminating in labor strife at his steel mill that turns violent when government-hired goons charge the gates. The goons take the life of Hank’s protégé, and after putting down the rebellion (with help from the suddenly Zorro-like Francisco) Hank realizes it’s time to fly the coop and head for Galt’s Gulch.

I’m going to hold off on much of my analysis until next week (I’d hate to step on Stossel’s ’stache…), but in my other hat as a music junkie I was fascinated by Dagny’s interaction with the composer (and Galt’s Gulch resident) Richard Halley, whose never-performed-publicly Fifth Concerto she has mysteriously been hearing throughout the novel. Rand’s descriptions of that musical theme – full of words like “violence” and “triumph” and “struggle” and “mathematical precision,” a work Halley himself calls his “Concerto of Deliverance” – make the piece sound to me like a thudding, Germanic monstrosity, like the music the Nazis kept when they banned the “degenerate” music of Jewish and modernist composers like Mahler, Mendelssohn, Weill, Hindemith and Schoenberg. (It should surprise no one that an Objectivist composer named John Mills-Cockel has recently recorded his own “Concerto of Deliverance” in tribute. You may listen to snippets here, if you dare.) Halley, it turns out, had spent years struggling in obscurity in the outside world before his opera Phaethon, which had been booed off the stage upon its debut, received a rapturous response when revived two decades later. It was that moment, he tells Dagny, when he realized that the people who suddenly loved his music didn’t love it for the right reasons, and therefore weren’t worthy of hearing it. “There’s only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive,” he says. Really? In my recollection, an artist’s two biggest fears are 1) starvation, and 2) never being able to give up the day job. It’s a good thing Halley had the Gulch to escape to – where he can perform his works a couple of times a year for audiences of idle tycoons, when he’s not giving piano lessons to the never-seen Rand Youth. I may be reading too much into this, but Halley’s entire story (like that of Kay Ludlow, the beautiful actress who ditched Hollywood because the roles offered her were “nothing but symbols of depravity”) smacks of sour grapes over Rand’s own inability to make a name for herself as a screenwriter during the pre-war years.

Speaking of the movies, this holiday season I encountered a couple of flicks that made me wonder anew about the efficacy, and the morality, of Rand’s philosophies. One was brand new, the other several years old. The latter was the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which explicitly portrays the company’s former CEO Jeffrey Skilling as the ultimate Rand-ian capitalist juggernaut – ruthlessly ambitious, wedded to deregulation, obsessed with profit and “production” at the expense of every other concern. These traits led him and his company not to honest and ethical success, but to a house of cards built on accounting fraud and manipulation of the stock market, not to mention the choice to enhance Enron’s profits by convincing the state of California to deregulate its power industry and then denying the state the very electricity the company was supposed to be providing, in the name of jacking up rates for consumers. Of course, Objectivists have disavowed Skilling ever since, insisting that he never truly reflected their values, but I figure if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck … preaches Social Darwinism like a duck…

The other film I saw with Objectivist implications is, ironically, George Clooney’s most recent Oscar catnip, Up in the Air – and there’s a Spoiler in this paragraph, so be careful. Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, is a smooth-talking consultant who makes his living on the road, doing the dirty work of laying off employees whom employers are too wimpy to sack themselves. Ryan has become the best (and most efficient) roving downsizer he can be by jettisoning all the “baggage,” physical and philosophical, that might weigh him down … that might force upon him the kinds of human emotions that Rand, too, rejects as distractions to achievement. Ryan even offers seminars in his spare time on how to ditch your possessions and your human relationships in order to become more successful! We watch as Ryan enters a sexual relationship with Vera Farmiga’s fellow traveler, Alex – a relationship, similar to Dagny and Hank’s in Atlas Shrugged, that both participants enter solely as a means of (casual) personal fulfillment, but which inevitably sprouts an element of co-dependence. Ryan eventually decides he’s ready to junk his philosophy and make a life with Alex – not as a means of “settling down,” but with the notion that two like-minded individualists can be happier together than apart. Sadly, things don’t work out – it turns out that Alex had achieved the same revelation years before, and already has a husband and family she’d conveniently neglected to mention. At the end of the film, Ryan still has his high-flying, detached, Rand-ian existence – but he has come to realize that it, like Enron, was a soulless house of cards that was doomed to topple.

Something to think about through this Oscar season (Up in the Air is a fine, fine film, though if I had a vote I’d probably still give it to The Hurt Locker). For now, though, I’m all a-twitter about tonight’s John Stossel gabfest, so I’ll finally sign off. If you miss the broadcast (and its reruns through the night), you can probably see snippets here . Maybe next week we’ll do a post-mortem, as I wrap up this series with Galt’s never-ending diatribe … and whatever happens after that.

I have to admit, I’m a bit conflicted this holiday season. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been going through the motions — spending lots of time at home with my family, plotting how I’m going to shower them with more gifts than they’ll know what to do with. I’ve been doing my bit with Toys for Tots and Cookies for Kids with Cancer, and I’ve been worrying (to the point of clicking that “donate” button again and again) about those folks who have to show up at sports arenas to get health care from volunteers because they can’t afford insurance. I’ve even stuck a buck or two in the Salvation Army pot, even though the folks ringing the bells no longer even bother to dress like Santa.

But something feels wrong about all this holiday “giving” this year. I’ve found myself thinking, shouldn’t I withhold just a bit of that cash, and time, and effort, and spend a little bit more of it on … me? Isn’t that Salvation Army money, and aren’t all those toys and cookies just going to wind up in the hands of folks who ought to get up off their asses and start contributing to society? Looters! And those kids of mine – when are they finally going to start pulling their weight? They’ve been living off me for years, and have they brought one penny into the household coffers? Hardly. Why did I have these kids anyway? Moochers.

Why have I got such a bad feeling about the holidays lately — that they distract us from our natural self-absorption, and encourage altruistic behavior that doesn’t push society forward? I don’t know, but I’m determined to figure it out … eventually. For now, though, it’s back to my exploration of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of all-consuming self-interest, by way of her bottomless pit of polemics, the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.

If you’ve been reading along (with this series, if not the 700 pages I’ve conquered to date) you’ll recall that when we last left our protagonists, the industrialists/illicit lovers Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, they were reeling in the face of a crumbling economy, disappearing peers, and a snooping Mrs. Rearden – or at least they were doing their best to reel, during those few moments when the novel didn’t grind to a halt so that Hank could listen to (or himself offer) yet another long-winded diatribe about how money makes the world go ’round. Well, all that speechifying takes a breather as Part 2 of Atlas Shrugged picks up momentum, becoming a veritable potboiler of creeping Communism, chance encounters in the middle of the night, resignations and re-appearances, and a tour de farce of buck-passing on the Taggart railroad that brings disastrous results.

As the novel’s second half begins, the evil do-gooders (some government, some corporate) who have driven the nation into a ditch are meeting to finalize their most wrong-headed move yet – a law that, in an effort to slow the general collapse, will freeze all employment, all production of goods and services, all profits and losses and salaries, at their current levels. Indeed, everything will be frozen except taxes (which will naturally rise, as the government becomes all-powerful) and patents and copyrights, whose holders are expected to benevolently grant them to the government via “gift certificates.” This last move is one more shot across the bow of our hero Hank, whose patented Rearden Metal is the only thing holding the economy together, but whose profit-taking and anti-government attitude have made him a villain among the snivelers. Hank initially refuses to sign his gift certificate … until a bureaucrat blackmails him with threats to go public with the Rearden-Taggart affair, at which point he signs his livelihood away rather than betray his beloved.

When Dagny hears about the new law she abruptly resigns – but she doesn’t follow all the other vanished magnates into their mysterious oblivion. Instead she retires to a cabin in the backwoods, where she tinkers with handyman work while Taggart Transcontinental quickly goes to the dogs. She springs back into action after hearing about a horrible accident in a Colorado tunnel, but she’s soon distracted by her concern for the newfangled motor she believes will save the world. She senses that the engineer she’s hired to reinvent the motor is going to be the next man to disappear – and sure enough, as her plane lands at his local airport she learns that he and a mysterious interloper have taken off in the opposite direction. She gets back in her plane and takes off after them, soaring high into the Rockies and then plunging down, down, down into a magical hidden valley, where she crash-lands in a grassy field screaming “words of defeat, of despair and of a plea for help: ‘Oh hell! Who is John Galt?’”

But back to that train accident. Rand’s depiction of the unfolding catastrophe is a terrific piece of writing, and a welcome reprieve from the nonsensical, hyperbolic mess of a political context she had cooked up to make us sympathize with her protagonists. It’s a CYA (Cover Your Ass) scenario one can easily imagine happening in a real-life corporate bureaucracy: A westbound train goes off the rails in the Rockies in the middle of the night, with a snotty, vaguely powerful figure aboard. The tunnel ahead lacks sufficient ventilation to handle a coal-fired engine, yet no diesel engine can reach the site before morning. The official demands a quicker fix than that, but no practical solution can be found, and the night-shift employees are loath to take responsibility for the situation. The buck gets passed up and down the railroad’s slipshod chain of command, as each individual on that chain weighs the welfare of the train’s passengers against his own job security. Finally, an immoral supervisor is found who is willing to order a steam engine into the tunnel – sending all the train’s passengers to their deaths.

It’s a tragedy of cowardice and compromised ethics, and it’s utterly believable – until Rand spoils the whole thing by identifying the train’s passengers as a rogues gallery of “looters” and “moochers”: a professor of sociology who taught his students to forsake individuality, a journalist who cheered the government’s economic takeover, a businessman who took a government loan (horrors!), a “sniveling little neurotic” of a playwright who depicted businessmen as scoundrels, etc., etc. I suppose Rand was trying to portray the “victims” as complicit in their own destruction, just as they were complicit in the nation’s downfall. But the effect is to coerce the reader into rooting for their deaths, or at least trivializing them. It’s a make-or-break moment; if you’re with me, she seems to be saying, you’ve got to be with me all the way through the gruesome euthanization of a train full of the kind of folks I despise.

It seems to me that only a person with an exceptionally narrow worldview could sign on to such grotesque manipulation – but then, the type of self-absorption celebrated throughout Atlas Shrugged can only be the byproduct of a profound narrow-mindedness. And Rand clearly kept the blinders on as she was writing. She envisioned a weak, self-destructive “United States” that was the antithesis of the hard-charging, world-beating nation of her era – and in doing so she ignored all sorts of historical and cultural factors that precluded the possibility of her vision ever coming to pass. (Of course, she rationalized this failure in one of her most famous quotes: “The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.”)

Well, that’s all well and good, Ms. Rand, but it didn’t make your vision any less absurd in the late ’50s – and it doesn’t make it any less preposterous now. Nevertheless, blessed as I am with the holiday spirit (however tainted it seems this December), I’d like to offer Rand some gifts – all fashioned from the historical context she left out of Atlas Shrugged. Here goes:

1. War. World War II transformed America in practically every way possible, from the remarkable pulling-together of the U.S. workforce to the generation of young men who returned from battle to climb the ladder of success via the government-created G.I. Bill. (And don’t get me started on the war’s communitarian impact on Europeans, who had to rebuild from complete devastation and decided they had had quite enough of megalomania, thank you very much.) On a purely economic level, FDR’s team brilliantly threaded the needle between capitalism and nationalization during the war, grabbing the reins of U.S. manufacturing while ensuring continued control and massive profits for the entrepreneur and investor classes. Our economy has been operating on a variation of that model ever since. Yet Rand (writing during the ’50s) imagined a nation in which the Big War had never happened. Why? Perhaps it was inconvenient for her that communitarianism ruled during the war (there are no Objectivists in foxholes) and its aftermath (the Marshall Plan was taxpayer-funded – you got a problem with that?).

2. Labor relations. Rand’s magnificent magnates never have to deal with a disgruntled workforce because, to the extent we ever see anyone below the managerial level, Dagny and Hank employ only the very best and brightest, pay them ridiculously high wages, and command absolute loyalty and even hero-worship. Yeah, right! Hey, Dagny – those tracks on which your beloved Taggart Transcontinental trains run? They were built by Chinese slave labor. And don’t turn your back, Hank, or the workers in your steel mill will organize in a heartbeat. Rand seems unable to wrap her head around the fact that American industry was built largely on the backs of exploited labor, not overly generous tycoons who demand no more of their workers than they put out themselves.

3. Race relations. I don’t recall a single African-American of any consequence appearing in Atlas Shrugged, so far at least. Of course, in economic terms this topic is inseparable from labor relations – and it was even more so in the ’50s, when the novel was being written. Jim Crow laws, segregation, hostilities between black and white factory workers … all were uniquely American issues of Rand’s time, yet none of them make a dent in Rand’s invented nation.

4. Children. There is (unless you’re Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest) probably no more selfless act than creating and raising a child – which no doubt explains why no one under the age of 18, except for the youthful Dagny and her copper-magnate buddy Francisco d’Anconia, makes an appearance in Atlas Shrugged. Dagny is what folks in the ’50s still called an Old Maid; Francisco’s a (supposed) playboy; and Hank Rearden has a childless marriage, even though his wife is desperate to hang onto him (and we all know how clingy wives in bad dramas use children to get their hooks in). Apparently, there’s just no room for child-rearing in an Objectivist’s life … which must mean that Rand recognized her philosophy was an elitist, exclusive one, or else she understood that a world running on self-interest wouldn’t last more than a generation.

I could offer more gifts of context to Ms. Rand, but I have a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate it anyway. Once Dagny reaches the Valley of the Magnates (yes, I’ve read ahead a little) she learns from her tour guide that “there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word give.” Well, bah humbug to you, too, Ayn! In any case, the contextual factors I’ve identified share one unifying characteristic — they all involve competing interests. The combatants in wartime; labor and management; blacks and whites … all have legitimate concerns that often exist in opposition to one another, and must somehow be reconciled. Heck, half the time my kids’ agendas are entirely different from my own! Simply put, Ayn Rand’s philosophy can’t work in the real world because it leaves no room for negotiation and compromise between such interests — it’s every man for himself, and such a world can only end in bloodshed and misery.

Now there’s a Christmas-y sentiment! Anyway, if you’re still reading this you probably have something better you should be doing. See you next year in this space, when we’ll wrap things up with a visit to Tycoon’s Paradise – and John Galt’s big (big, BIG) speech. Til then, when you’re watching It’s a Wonderful Life tonight, look for Rand-ian theories as practiced in Potter’s Field. As for me, I’ll be hanging with George Bailey.

Here’s the thing about reading Ayn Rand: She forces you to think the way she does. Once you’ve immersed yourself in her black-and-white worldview — and once you’ve adjusted your expectations to accommodate her rhetorical method, in which every fictional event is created as a forum in which she can communicate her notions of good and evil, morality and immorality – it’s hard to avoid applying that same method to the real world around you. Not to reach the same conclusions, necessarily … but to judge every person and situation on her terms, and to use those judgments to create a tidy little moral cocoon around yourself.

It’s fun, really – and dangerous. It’s also becoming more and more common these days, as the news media, Hollywood, religious institutions, and government officials have mastered the skill of tailoring events (what we now call “spinning”) to fit their particular ideological viewpoints. Even as they do so, their audiences/parishioners/supporters increasingly use those institutions to reinforce their own beliefs, and become more attached to whichever news channel, films, churches and politicians provide the information and analysis that will confirm their worldview.

But enough of this sociological bullshit! I put the word “porn” in my headline, and that’s probably why most of you are here, so let’s get on with it.

Since we last met in this space a week ago, I’ve managed to get through another 200 pages of Rand’s magnum opus of miserdom, Atlas Shrugged, so I’m just about halfway through. We left off with a rather cataclysmic event – the nation’s most prominent oilman setting his wells aflame and vanishing, with our heroine Dagny Taggart arriving too late to stop him. But I’ve gotta tell you, not much has happened since then. In fact, a summary of the events that actually furthered the “plot” over these last five chapters boils down to this:

More moguls disappear, unwilling to produce goods in an environment where they cannot profit from their labor. Government “looters” respond by passing more regulations to ensure the “people’s” welfare (at the expense of the “greedy” entrepreneurs), even as the nation slides into a chaos reminiscent of Children of Men. Our protagonists, railroad magnate Dagny and steel tycoon Hank Rearden, struggle to keep their businesses going; their affair continues as well, growing more co-dependent even as Rearden’s wife begins plotting her revenge. Dagny’s brother, the evil communitarian Jim Taggart, marries a shopgirl (a triumph of elitist condescension) in a social event that’s reduced to panic when attendees learn that the world’s largest copper company is about to suffer huge financial losses. Rearden goes on trial for violating a government regulation, but gets off with a suspended sentence. With the industrial giants of Colorado all having disappeared, Dagny is forced to close the John Galt Line that she and Rearden had struggled so mightily to build.

And that’s … about … it. Not really, though – because the point of these past 200 pages has not been the events themselves, but the opportunities they have provided our protagonists to pontificate on Rand’s most beloved topics: the morality of money-grubbing, and the immorality of anything (government, altruism, loyalty, human emotion) that gets in the way of money-grubbing. Jim’s wedding, Hank’s trial … even a Thanksgiving dinner at the Rearden household … all are mere set-pieces designed to offer a podium for the latest exercise in long-winded speechifying.

In that sense, Atlas Shrugged is … yes … polemical porn, a thin tissue of plot that functions as the setup for one episode after another of rhetorical foreplay and climax. During the wedding scene, one speech (by copper magnate/playboy Francisco d’Anconia, who I’m now convinced is The Most Interesting Man in the World) goes on for five pages, or about 6,000 words, a speech whose general theme is finally stated in his last paragraph: “Money is the root of all good.” Rearden gets a 2,500-word speech of his own during his trial, in which he responds to the government’s over-the-top efforts to regulate his business by arguing fiercely for the morality of profit-taking, and concludes, “The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!”

Was it good for you, too? Rand certainly hopes so – and, in fact, she makes certain of it by making the alternative to avarice completely unpalatable. She continues to imagine a society that’s in the midst of destroying itself because its elites have chosen to destroy capitalism. It’s a fascinating scenario – the notion that the death of capitalism (and, inevitably, of democracy) could come from the top down, rather than from the bottom up. It’s also, as I’ve said before in these columns, preposterous. Rand’s theories emerged largely as a result of her experiences during the Russian Revolution, when Marxist intellectuals (Lenin, Trotsky) organized the lower classes to overthrow the government supported by the middle and upper classes – yet in Atlas Shrugged she envisions Communism as evolving from liberal-elitist guilt run amok.

For evidence that such an evolution is outside the realm of possibility, at least in this country, look no further than the rapidly deteriorating effort to reform health care. President Obama promised throughout his campaign to achieve “universal” coverage: to improve access, increase efficiency and lower costs related to a huge, yet dysfunctional sector of the economy. “Socialism!” cried conservatives – even as Obama bartered for, then won at least a modicum of support from, every capitalist functionary in our current misbegotten system: insurers, pharma companies, the AMA, etc. Meanwhile, those same folks fed hundreds of millions of dollars into Congressional coffers to ensure that their interests would be represented there as well. In the last week we’ve seen the price of all that bartering and all that lobbying, as legislation that supposedly was meant to curb excessive profit-taking in health care will now enable even more of it. It is not the Hank Rearden-esque industrialist who faces punishment for refusing to play by the new rules – it’s the unemployed, or underemployed, worker who cannot afford overpriced health insurance but will now be mandated to purchase it anyway, at whatever prices the insurance industry sees fit.

See what I mean? Now that I’m immersed in Rand’s philosophies, I can’t help but apply them to every issue that comes down the pike. (Next week: climate change!) Of course, being who I am – and remaining so far unconvinced by all that speechifying – I tend to apply them in exactly the opposite fashion from the way she’d like me to. My obsession is not even limited to political affairs – perhaps next week I’ll delve into a analysis of Up in the Air, whose hero is a Rand-ian titan of non-communitarianism much like Hank Rearden … with personally disastrous consequences. But no spoilers, for now. Go see the movie, if you haven’t already (and you really should – it’s a great film), and we’ll talk about it later.

For now, my apologies if you were looking for something a bit more … prurient following my promise of “porn.” This is the best I can do, for now, on that score – to quote from Dagny’s speech to Rearden on the transaction of their affair:

“Hank, I want nothing from you except what you wish to give me. Do you remember that you called me a trader once? I want you to come to me seeking nothing but your own enjoyment … My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me – not by your suffering or mine … If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse … If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don’t do it in business, Hank. Don’t do it in your own life.”

Ah … romance…

When I was a senior in college, instead of prepping for a career as a Rand-ian Master of the Universe with high-level courses in economics or engineering, I chose a pair of classes in Northwestern’s speech department: “Rhetoric of Popular Culture” and “Rhetoric of Popular Music.” The professor for both was a crotchety, hilarious guy named Irv Rein, and I learned so much from him that I can safely say that without those courses I wouldn’t be who I am today – a stay-at-home dad who writes about pop culture for no money. Thanks, Irv!

Professor Rein had wonderful lessons to impart, from the ways in which pop bands were marketed to the “rhetoric” behind shopping center names and layouts: “Check out any shopping mall,” he’d say, “and most likely it’s named after whatever was destroyed in order to build it.” Unfortunately, in order to get to those lessons you’d have to sit through a lot of bullshit. Torrents and torrents of bullshit, really – ramblings that seemed utterly tangential to the stated topic, interspersed with classmates’ idiotic questions and comments that sounded like they came off the message boards at American Idol’s website. At some point during every lecture I’d think to myself, “I can’t believe I’m sitting through this … I’ve got to drop this class” – but then good ol’ Irv would finally get to the point, and the skies would open, the sun would shine, and he’d once again snatch reason from the jaws of inanity.

Right now, two paragraphs into a column that’s supposed to be about Ayn Rand, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Yeah, Jon, you’ve obviously learned a lot from Professor Rein.” But two paragraphs is nothing! I’ve read 336 pages of Rand’s monument to megalomania, Atlas Shrugged – just under a third of the book — and I’m still waiting for her to cut the shit and get to the point. However, I thought of Irv today because Rand did manage to slip a bit of wisdom onto page 331. Here it is: “By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find [the connection between two facts] inconceivable … check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”

It’s a great set-up for whatever’s to come during the remaining 832 pages. Unfortunately, at the moment I’m still struggling to climb down (temporarily) from Rand’s Tower of Babble. Here’s a synopsis of Chapters 6 through 10:

When we last left our intrepid world-beaters, railroad magnate Dagny Taggart and industrialist Hank Rearden, they were facing down some mighty odds — creeping government regulation, and the incompetence and blame-shifting of those around them — in their efforts to renovate a broken-down railway line that would serve the rugged-individualist tycoons of the newly prosperous Mountain West. Those obstacles grow exponentially as the story continues … and while Dagny and Hank have the cojones to stick it out, an unusual number of like-minded entrepreneurs have begun to give up on their depraved society and vanish into obscurity. There’s Francisco d’Anconia, for one; he had sunk his fortune into a copper mine he knew held no copper, then had put up no fuss when the Mexican government nationalized the mine. As they continue their adventures, Dagny and Hank learn of other such cases – including my personal favorite, that of a meticulous and upstanding (if greedy) banker named (no kidding) Midas Mulligan, who is told by a judge that he can no longer “discriminate” against loan applicants simply because they have no collateral and no prospects of success. Instead of granting the loan, Midas closes up his bank and disappears … taking a “mulligan” on his career as a mogul, as it were.

He leaves behind an economy that’s clearly in decay because of too much government intervention and too much concern for the “common man.” As we begin Chapter 6, poor anti-social Hank is steadying himself for a dinner party where he’ll encounter a rogues gallery of the forces that are Bringing America Down: nihilist philosophers, university professors, liberal newspapermen, altruistic simps, and other assorted socialist socialites. The buzz at the party is about the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, which would forbid any one man or corporation from owning more than a single business concern; everyone seems to love the idea, except for poor Hank, who has been buying up iron mines and trucking lines because he’s learned he can’t trust any business he doesn’t run himself. The bill soon passes, of course, forcing Hank to sell off businesses and place himself at the mercy of the inept and corrupt – but evil forces are plotting even higher barriers to his success. The “State Science Institute,” concerned more with the welfare of the moribund steel industry than with industrial progress, announces its disapproval of Hank’s invention, Rearden Metal – leaving him with no market for his product apart from the ever-loyal Dagny.

By hook and by crook, they build their railroad anyway – after Dagny separates herself from her family’s company and renames her project (of course) the “John Galt Line.” With help from renegade contractors and train conductors willing to betray their unions and trade associations – heroic scabs, in other words – the line is completed. The press, the government, and all those socialist pinheads are certain that Rearden Metal won’t hold up, that the first train will crash like the Titanic, but Dagny and Hank’s ride on the inaugural excursion becomes a triumphant experience that (for them, and clearly for the author) is far better than sex. Afterward they get their freak on anyway, and soon they’re taking a “romantic” vacation together – a vacation that takes a strange turn when they tour an abandoned automobile plant, and discover the ruins of an engine prototype that they’re convinced could change the world by harnessing the power of atmospheric electricity … if only they could find the genius who had invented, then abandoned it.

At this point Dagny embarks on a Nancy Drew-like quest to find that inventor – and along the way she suffers through another rogues gallery of the sorts of people who could kill a capitalist economy: bankers who make loans to people who can’t afford to pay them back (hmmmm…) … government bureaucrats who are so blinded by their concern for “the people” that they can’t distinguish the merits of a single individual … executives who destroy their businesses by worrying too much about being “fair” to their workers, and wind up draining the workers’ productivity. Eventually, though, Dagny comes within one degree of separation from the inventor – the short-order cook in a Wyoming diner, who turns out to be a famous philosopher (“the last advocate of reason,” Dagny calls him) who has turned his back on the degenerate world … and who refuses to give up the whereabouts of the inventor, who has similarly abandoned the society that has stomped on his individualism. On her way home, Dagny is jolted by the news that the government has imposed its most draconian regulations yet – rules that will make it impossible for her, or Hank, or those Colorado industrialists to profit from their businesses. Dagny rushes to consult with her favorite Colorado oilman, Ellis Wyatt … only to find that he has set his oil fields aflame and disappeared. Dunh-dunh-DUNH!!!

It doesn’t take a genius, or even an Objectivist, to decipher that Wyatt, the inventor, the cook, the banker … and Dagny, Hank and d’Anconia, too … are all going to wind up in one place by the end of Atlas Shrugged. The key question at this point is, are they going to respond to the “degeneracy” of government meddling and overbaked communitarianism in a manner that’s constructive or destructive? That’s the question that dominates my own response, at least, as a 21st-century American watching the tea party movement take up Rand as one of their patron saints. What will the teabaggers do with their own (largely irrational) fury over the “socialism” that they imagine is currently swamping America’s economy? Will they offer intelligent solutions and alternatives – or will they merely burn down the oil fields?

It should be interesting for those teabaggers to note that, 330-some pages into Atlas Shrugged, the word “tax” has not been mentioned. Not once. The redistributionist evil that Rand dreams up is far more nefarious; she imagines a nation which decides that industrialists and businessmen shouldn’t be able to profit from their endeavors in the first place, and that all men must be placed on equal footing in the economy. The economy being created in her scenario is Communism without totalitarianism – it’s a society that chooses en masse (so far, at least) to shackle its entrepreneurs in an effort to uplift “the people.” (Of course, to people like Dagny and Hank the new restrictions placed upon them certainly feel totalitarian.)

It’s understandable that the Saint Petersburg-born Rand, who was a teenager during the Russian Revolution and watched as her father’s business was confiscated by the Red Army, would make strident anti-Communism a keystone of her philosophy. (By the way, Rand’s settlement in America – on an expired temporary visa that had been granted willingly by the Soviet government – was what we would today call “illegal immigration.”) What isn’t so understandable – even considering that much of Atlas Shrugged was written during the paranoia-laden McCarthy era – is why she felt she couldn’t put across her own ideas about self-reliance and laissez-faire government without placing them in juxtaposition to a fantastical, quasi-Communist America that did not then, and realistically never could, exist. I ask again, as I did in my last column: Did she not trust her philosophy, or did she not trust her readers to get it?

In either case, for contemporary conservatives to be taking lessons from Rand while opposing the bailouts, or the stimulus, or health-care reform, or climate-change legislation is frankly laughable. While there are arguments to be made against each of those “big-government” initiatives – though not necessarily good arguments – all of them have been undertaken either for the direct benefit of, or with fundamental input from, exactly the types of Masters of the Universe who, in Rand’s fantasy world, would avoid such cooperation (or government money, for that matter) like the plague. Just think of it! Wall Street banks contribute a few tens of millions of dollars to politicians annually. In return they were given a seat at the government table when their luck ran out last year, then walked away from that table with nearly $800 billion in taxpayer funds! Currently, Congress is bending over backward to ensure that health-insurance companies – whose entire business is comparable to that of third-world highway bandits – will not only survive, but will profit even more, from the “reforms” that are being pushed through. Yet teabaggers have deluded themselves into thinking these programs are “socialist.”

There’s a certain irony in placing the bailouts within a Rand-ian context. One of the driving forces behind the investment-banking disaster was the diversification of the banks’ activities that had been made possible through the repeal, 10 years ago, of the Glass-Steagall Act. That Act, which (among other things) had prohibited bank holding companies from owning other financial enterprises as well, had functioned for the banking industry in much the same way that the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” would function for the entire economy in Rand’s nightmare vision. Yet, in the real world, it was the repeal of such legislation, and not the legislation itself, that nearly brought down the economy, through uninhibited (and unwise) bank expansions and abusive profit-taking at the expense of building sustainable business models.

It’s difficult to read Atlas Shrugged without noting such ironies. The novel’s principal plotline (so far) concerns the us-against-the-world quest by Dagny to complete a huge railroad project that no one believes will work, using Hank’s unproven Rearden Metal. It’s a project undertaken not out of any concern for its societal ramifications, but purely for the profits that can be taken from it, and for the satisfaction of Proving Everyone Wrong. And it sounds (to my jaundiced liberal ears) distinctly like a pre-emptive allegory for the run-up to the Iraq War: An oilman-turned-president decides, for reasons that are unclear (or at least unconvincing, to most of the world), to invade a country that’s bursting with oil! His vice president is certainly gung ho about the idea – perhaps not least because the vast company he used to run stands to make a mint in no-bid contracts related to the invasion and occupation! Working together and standing tall, the two of them overcome (or ignore) the nay-sayers who say their evidence is shoddy, their intentions misguided and their plans doomed to fail … and, by golly, they get that country invaded!

The irony, of course, is that while Rand’s characters are wildly successful in building a state-of-the-art railroad line, proving their Metal (so to speak), and fulfilling all their ambitions – at least temporarily – Bush and Cheney screwed the pooch completely, getting practically nothing right over the course of a six-year boondoggle. Reading Atlas Shrugged in 2009, it’s not a stretch to make such comparisons; in fact, it’s a necessity, considering that Rand wrote her novel less as a creative outlet than as a forum for exploring the supposed real-world applications of her ideas.

I’ve gone on long enough here, but I’ll leave you with another example of Rand’s bizarre attitude toward romance and sex. Her every description of male-female relations is laced with words like “contempt,” “mocking,” “anger,” “triumph” and “lowest instincts.” After Dagny and Hank finally fall, mockingly and disgustedly, into the sack, here’s a sample of his morning-after pillow talk:

“What I feel for you is contempt. But it’s nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved anyone … I wanted you as one wants a whore – for the same reason and purpose … All the greatness that I saw in you – I would not take it in exchange for the obscenity of your talent at an animal’s sensation of pleasure … I’ve given in to a desire which I despise … I want no pretense about love, value, loyalty or respect. I want no shred of honor left to us, to hide behind … It’s depravity – and I accept it as such – and there is no height of virtue that I wouldn’t give up for it. Now if you wish to slap my face, go ahead. I wish you would.”