Hatred of the working class isn't Randian...

[elfs]

Mitt Romney is an amazing businessman and CEO, able to crunch the numbers and analyze the data and understand how we got here and where we're going. He has to know that the unemployment rate is 8%, not 47%; he has to know that the 47% number comes because Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all cut taxes on and extended tax "credits" back to middle class families with children, in the hopes of encouraging more middle class children.

(The very poor didn't get credits because they didn't have any money in the first place to credit; the idea was that the middle class [read: mostly white, mostly Christian people] had Protestant values and just needed a little encouragement to have more kids, so most credits are targeted at 'having work, having kids' families.)

So what explains the attitude Romney showed in that video? Paul Krugman today in the New York Times claims it's all about Rand:

The fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn't have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party's affection is reserved for "job creators," AKA employers and investors.

The G.O.P.'s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party' policy priorities. Mr. Romney's remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as "lucky duckies."

[This] reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.

Okay, I've never read Atlas Shrugged, but I have read The Fountainhead, and while it's certainly about heroic individuals persuing their creative vision so thoroughly and so without compromise that their genius is eventually recognized by the masses, there is no disdain whatsoever for the working classes in The Fountainhead. Roarke admires the working classes: the riveters, steelworkers, stonemasons, even managers who are doing good work; he learns from them, studies them, and takes from them the values of creation. They are part of the system of creation, and Rand acknowledges that.

As of the writing of The Fountainhead, Rand had (and apparently never had) a thought for the organizations of communities outside of work; for fraternal organizations, for mutual aid societies, for families. Children never appear in her work. But she was not at all disdainful of work, or workers.

So is this loathing of the working class an Atlas Shrugged thing, or is this just another case of our oligarchical masters taking what they can from any text from which they can propagandize while still pursuing the policy of Sodom?

Comments

I read Atlas Shrugged as well as the Fountainhead

[shunra.livejournal.com]

...and everything else of hers I could get my hands on, when I was in my teens. (Much, in translation to Hebrew, which may have been inaccurate. I haven't been inclined to check back for comparison.)

But with that disclaimer, there was not a disdain for workers so much as a complete dehumanization. Ordinary workers were cogs in a machine, animals in a farm - and think battery chickens, not idealized picture-book rural with a faint French accent.

The hatred I hear in tea-party/GOP rhetoric is not exactly Randian, it sounds a little like the people who hate-hate-hate computers because they get in they way of sending email. They, too, dehumanize the mass of humanity, but they're convinced that if that mass were only excised, the road to a blissful paradise-on-earth would be clear.

Dehumanization is terribly dangerous under any circumstances, but in times of financial crisis and international tension, with resources thinning out and requirements thickening, we've got the makings of yet another genocidal war.

I cite Avrum Burg's book "The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes", which stated that many dozens of millions of deaths took place in genocidal killings in the 20th century. I would agree with his argument that each of these deaths was preceded with the dehumanization of a class of people.

I'm glad I read all of that. Gladder, still, that I figured out how little it had to do with real human beings before anyone was harmed.