nhboy
08-18-2012, 11:23 AM
Link to original source. (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/16/what-paul-ryan-learned-from-ayn-rand.html)
"It is true that fiction is a much more powerful weapon to sell ideas than nonfiction,” Rand wrote when she was just beginning to construct the plot of her capitalist blockbuster Atlas Shrugged.
Fiction, she added, “arouses the public to an emotional as well as intellectual response to our cause. Call it a sugarcoating—although I don’t like to say that. It works.”
It worked for Wisconsin Rep. Paul D. Ryan, just as it has worked for tens of thousands of Rand adherents and acolytes over the last half century, including Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Ron Paul, and Bob Barr. Like many of them, the chair of the House Budget Committee and this year’s Republican candidate for vice president first encountered Rand’s novels of heroic individualism and swashbuckling capitalism in adolescence. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are,” the congressman told a convention of Rand followers in 2005. Rand was “the reason I got involved in public service.” A passionate convert to her black-and-white, apocalyptic worldview, Ryan also became a missionary for her ideology."
.....
"He is boyish, and not only in the charming, physically vigorous sense that is most apparent. It’s no accident that fervent admirers of Rand’s philosophy are typically male and typically find inspiration in Atlas Shrugged from their teen years on. The novel’s emotional appeal, about which Rand wrote, exists largely in the victory of its heroic, steel-willed industrial titans and inventive geniuses against a suffocating nanny state manipulated by feminized bureaucrats with names like Wesley Mouch.
The ideological content of the novel is sealed by larger-than-life characters and the intellectual suspense of a plot that resolves itself into science fiction. Although in recent days Ryan—who is not only Catholic but also a pro-war, anti-women’s-rights conservative, which the avowed atheist and civil libertarian Rand certainly was not—has been accused of lack of loyalty to her ideas and of possibly not being a Randian at all.
But many of Rand’s most ardent fans develop an early and enduring ability to fit even the balkiest reality into the mythic formula she devised and go on seeing the political and economic landscape, if not religion or matters of personal liberty, through her heroes’ eyes.
Think of Ron Paul. Think of Alan Greenspan, who during the financial meltdown in 2008, after 35 years at the pinnacle of government power, not to mention decades of dining with the world’s top bankers, expressed genuine surprise that bankers and traders would favor short-term personal gain over the apparent long-term interests and reputations of their banks."
"It is true that fiction is a much more powerful weapon to sell ideas than nonfiction,” Rand wrote when she was just beginning to construct the plot of her capitalist blockbuster Atlas Shrugged.
Fiction, she added, “arouses the public to an emotional as well as intellectual response to our cause. Call it a sugarcoating—although I don’t like to say that. It works.”
It worked for Wisconsin Rep. Paul D. Ryan, just as it has worked for tens of thousands of Rand adherents and acolytes over the last half century, including Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Ron Paul, and Bob Barr. Like many of them, the chair of the House Budget Committee and this year’s Republican candidate for vice president first encountered Rand’s novels of heroic individualism and swashbuckling capitalism in adolescence. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are,” the congressman told a convention of Rand followers in 2005. Rand was “the reason I got involved in public service.” A passionate convert to her black-and-white, apocalyptic worldview, Ryan also became a missionary for her ideology."
.....
"He is boyish, and not only in the charming, physically vigorous sense that is most apparent. It’s no accident that fervent admirers of Rand’s philosophy are typically male and typically find inspiration in Atlas Shrugged from their teen years on. The novel’s emotional appeal, about which Rand wrote, exists largely in the victory of its heroic, steel-willed industrial titans and inventive geniuses against a suffocating nanny state manipulated by feminized bureaucrats with names like Wesley Mouch.
The ideological content of the novel is sealed by larger-than-life characters and the intellectual suspense of a plot that resolves itself into science fiction. Although in recent days Ryan—who is not only Catholic but also a pro-war, anti-women’s-rights conservative, which the avowed atheist and civil libertarian Rand certainly was not—has been accused of lack of loyalty to her ideas and of possibly not being a Randian at all.
But many of Rand’s most ardent fans develop an early and enduring ability to fit even the balkiest reality into the mythic formula she devised and go on seeing the political and economic landscape, if not religion or matters of personal liberty, through her heroes’ eyes.
Think of Ron Paul. Think of Alan Greenspan, who during the financial meltdown in 2008, after 35 years at the pinnacle of government power, not to mention decades of dining with the world’s top bankers, expressed genuine surprise that bankers and traders would favor short-term personal gain over the apparent long-term interests and reputations of their banks."