This essay presents an interesting and challenging account of power and its use. It’s exposition of the impact of law and statelessness on the actions taken by bureaucrats is enlightening. His Marxist and Religious dogma detract from the arguments presented, and in some way blind him to what I perceive the true ramifications of his essay. Below, I have sketched out seven key conclusions that I derived from the work.
Any government should treat all people as people, regardless of their status as a citizen – thus, even though noncitizens may not have the ability to participate in a governing structure, all rules and regulations must apply equally to them.
A current example of where this is not the case, is the United States use of the term “Enemy Combatant” and the use of extrajudicial processes and locations, such as CIA blacksites and Guantanamo Bay.
"Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end." — Kant
And perhaps more radically, that the use of force, is fundamentally immoral except in matters of self-defense. And those arbitrary regulations such as those used against the Jews were in effect an attack, and that they would have been justified in the use of force to protect themselves.
Power structures, especially those calcified in the form strict bureaucracies, can be easily co-opted - providing legitimacy, and disarming those upon which they operate. The co-option, of various Jewish organizations greatly increased the ease at which they were controlled and ultimately slaughtered. From this, it becomes apparent that those power structures should be severely limited, and their authority must be constantly challenged.
As evidenced by Milgrim’s famous experiment, the removal of responsibility and the distancing of direct infliction facilitate individuals in carrying out acts of unspeakable horror. Thus, if we are serious about institutional reform, one would think that rotations that serve to remove the distance a bureaucrat has from their actions and the effect of those upon which they are inflicted would be considered the standard operating procedure.
Government bureaucracies, and others that rely upon force to maintain their funding and resources, provide a difficult challenge for those affected by their actions to alter the system. In a society in which individuals are free to interact, the market provides a means by which one can punish the remote bureaucrat. Resources can be removed to weaken, take down, and ultimately impact the bureaucrat that “sleeps easily.”
The discussion of the ethics involved in the Tuskegee experiments should provide insight into current discussions about the FDA and its approval of drugs. Individuals have no choice but to take part in double blind studies, thus they have no control of their lives. Though differing in key fundamental ways modern drug trials are functionally equivalent to the Tuskegee experiments – the patient is given or a placebo or not, and observed. Luckily in modern FDA trials the patient knows that they may be given a placebo, but the end results are the same – if the medicine would have saved them, then they are condemned to death for science. This is not to discount the benefits that accrue due to these trials or to argue about the system that should replace it, merely to highlight the current system has fundamental ethical issues that must be addressed – it’s hard to find a solution, if the problem isn’t articulated.
The attacks against corporations and the arguments against capitalism seem to be misguided. Sure there are evil corporations, and groups of people, but their ability to inflict pain and suffering on the general populace is significantly less than that of governments as shown throughout the history of the 20th century. It would seem foolish to trust a serial killer to keep tabs on a shoplifter.In the above thoughts, I tried to capture my thinking in response to the act of reading this essay. Premature, as they are, they perhaps provide a hint to ways in which I will continue to think about justice, ethics, power, power structures, and their impacts on the populace.
Notes:
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This power must also alter the texture of foreign relation. According to Max Weber, "The sate is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory.” Auschwitz has enlarged our conception of the state’s capacity to do violence. A barrier has been overcome in what for millennia had been regarded as the permissible limits of political action. The Nazi period serves as a warning of what we can all too easily become were we faced with a political or an economic crisis of overwhelming proportions. The public may be fascinated by the Nazis; hopefully, it is also warned by them.
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As the stateless refugees entered the countries of the West, especially France, it was soon discovered that these were people who could neither be repatriated nor granted citizenship by the host country. The stateless were truly men without any political community. No country wanted them or cared about their fate.
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In dealing with the apatride who could not be repatriated, the host country could either suffer his presence at liberty, subject at all times to police surveillance, or it could set up concentration camps in which to detain him. In either case, the apatride, although not a criminal, was for all practical purposes an outlaw. He was subject to the kind of police surveillance and control that was not in turn subject to judicial review. Stateless persons were thus among the first Europeans in the twentieth century to experience unrestricted police domination. Once the police tasted the freedom of dominating one class of men unhindered by judicial process or legal restraint, they sought to extend their power to others. This process reached its zenith in Nazi Germany towards the end of the war when the power of the Gestapo and the SS over the German people was almost completely unhindered by any competing institution.
While individual apatrides were permitted to pursue whatever manner of life they could find as refugees within the urban centers of the host countries, as soon as large numbers of apatrides, such as the veterans of the Spanish Republican army, entered a host country en masse, they were placed in detention camps which were in reality concentration camps.
Initially, the concentration camps were established to accommodate detainees who had been placed under “protective custody” (Schutzhaft) by the Nazi regime. Those arrested were people whom the regime wished to detain although there was no clear legal justification for so doing. Almost all of the original detainees were German communists, not Jews. Had the Nazi’s political prisoners been brought before a German court in the first year or two of Hitler’s regime, the judiciary would have been compelled to dismiss the case. This was not because the German judiciary was anti-Nazi, but because it was bureaucratic in structure. In the early stages of the Nazi regime, there was a no formula in law to cover all the political prisoners the Nazis wanted to arrest. This problem was solved by holding them under “protective custody” and setting up camps outside of the regular prison system to receive them. Incidentally, the American government did something very similar when it interned Japanese-American citizens during World War II. They had committed no crime. No Court would have convicted them.
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Like the original political prisoners in the German camps, there was no legal basis for the detention of the apatrides. Yet, the host countries’ leaders were convinced that it was in their nation’s interest to hold them. Camps were established for those who had no status in law and for whom no law existed that could justify their being held. The unifying bond between the apatrides and the first prisoners in the German concentration camps was that both groups were outlaws.
Neither the apatrides nor the German political prisoners were outlaws because of any crime they had committed, but because their status had been altered by their country’s civil service or police bureaucracy. They had been deprived of all political status by bureaucratic definition. As such, they had become superfluous men. Those apatrides in the detention camps were among the living dead. Sooner or later, most of the living dead were destined to join that vast company Gil Eliot has called “the nation of the dead,” the millions who perished by large-scale human violence in this bloodiest of centuries.
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Before World War II, the number of stateless persons increased with every passing year. Statesmen and police officials were agreed that a solution to the problem had to be found. The stateless could neither be assimilated nor, in most cases, expelled. International conferences on the “refugee problem” were held, but to no avail. There seemed to be no solution. In reality, there was a “solution” that was obvious to Hitler. When one has surplus livestock that are a drain on resources, one gets rid of them. Neither Hitler nor Stalin saw any reason why people ought to be treated differently. The “solution” had logic on its side, yet there remained a sentimental obstacle: In the prewar period, it was not yet possible to exterminate surplus people the way a farmer might kill off surplus cattle.
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The British government was by no means averse to the “final solution” as long as the Germans did most of the dirty work.
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… we are more likely to understand the Holocaust if we regard it as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. Given Britain’s imperial commitments, Europe’s Jews were as much a superfluous population for Great Britain as they were for Germany. In the moral universe of the twentieth century, the most “rational” and least costly “solution” of the problem of disposing of a surplus population is unfortunately extermination. Properly executed, extermination is the problem-solving strategy least likely to entail unanticipated feedback hazards for its planners. From a purely bureaucratic perspective, the extermination of the Jews of Europe was the “final solution” for the British as well as the Germans.
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Himmler does not seem to have been a sadist. During the war, he did not like to watch killing operations and became upset when he did. But, Himmler was the perfect bureaucrat. He did what he believed was his duty sin ira et studio, without bias or scorn.
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One of the examples of Himmler’s organizing ability was his involvement in the concentration camp at Dachu which he founded in 1933. Originally, there was little to distinguish Dachu from any of the early “wild” Nazi camps. Under Himmler’s guidance, Dachu became a model for the systematically managed camps of World War II. Under his direction, the sporadic terror of the “wild” camps was replaced by impersonal, systemized terror.
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The intent of Eicke’s regulations was to eliminate all arbitrary punishment by individual guards and to replace it with impersonal, anonymous punishment. The impersonal nature of the transaction was heightened by the fact that any guard could be called on to inflict punishment. Even if a guard was struck by a prisoner, he could not retaliate personally, at least insofar as the regulations were concerned. Like everything else at the camps, under Himmler punishment was bureaucratized and depersonalized. Bureaucratic mass murder reached its fullest development when gas chambers with a capacity for killing two thousand people at a time were installed at Auschwitz. As Hannah Arendt has observed, the very size of the chambers emphasized the complete depersonalization of the killing process.
Under Himmler, there was no objection to cruelty, provided it was disciplined and systematized. This preference was also shared by the German civil service bureaucracy. According to Hilberg, the measure that gave the civil service bureaucrats least difficulty in exterminating their victims was the imposition of a starvation diet. In a bureaucratically controlled society where every individual’s ration can be strictly determined, starvation is the ideal instrument of “clean” violence. A few numbers are manipulated on paper in an office hundred of miles away from the killing centers and millions can be condemned to a prolonged and painful death. In addition, both the death rate and the desired level of vitality of the inmates can easily be regulated by the same bureaucrats. As starvation proceeds, the victim’s appearance is so drastically altered that by the time death finally releases him, he hardly seems like a human being worth saving. The very manner of death confirms the rationalization with which the killing was justified in the first place. The Nazis assigned the paranthropoid identity of a tiermensch, a subhuman, to their victims. By the time of death that identity seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet, the bureaucrat need loose no sleep over his victims. He never confronts the results of his distinctive kind of homicidal violence.
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It was only possible to overcome the moral barrier that had in the past prevented the systematic riddance of surplus populations when the project was taken out of the hands of bullies and hoodlums and delegated to bureaucrats.
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In order to understand more fully the connection between bureaucracy and mass death, it will be necessary to return to the apatrides. They were the first modern Europeans who had become politically and legally superfluous and for whom the most “rational” way of dealing with them was ultimately murder. A majority of the apatrides had lost their political status by a process of bureaucratic definition, denationalization. Miss Ardent lists a World War I measure of the French (1915) as the first such measure.
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At the time of the denationalization decrees were first promulgated, few people dreamed of the ultimate jeopardy to which stateless persons had been condemned by the paper violence of the bureaucrats.
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Men without political rights are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people were covered by no law.
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As we have noted, had the Germans won the war, mass sterilization would have been an important aspect of their program for the subject peoples. It must be remembered that with both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, victory inevitably led to an intensification rather than a diminution of terror. Mass sterilization of Poles, Russians and, in the more distant future, the French and the Italians, would have permitted the Germans to exploit the vanquished at their own convenience in the certain knowledge that the subject peoples’ national existence was at an end. Whether extermination or killing was the means of securing absolute dominance or whether a certain number of the vanquished might be permitted to reproduce in exactly calculable quantities would have depended solely on the requirements of the German masters. The victims would have had as little control over their own destiny as cattle in a stockyard. In a society of total domination, helots could be killed, bred, or sterilized at will.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see the medical experiments as the outcome of some special viciousness of which only German doctors are capable. The Germans have no monopoly on the kind of mentality that would utilize powerless human beings as unwilling or unsuspecting subjects of such experiments. Recently, it became known that a group of black prisoners suffering from syphilis in an American prison were divided into two groups, one of which was given medication to cure or control the disease, the other was given a placebo. The object of the experiment was to compare the effects of medication with that of letting the disease run its course. The organizers of the experiment had cold-bloodedly condemned the prisoners who received the placebo to the mutilating effects of disease and/or death in the name of scientific rationality. The experiment that did come to light was different from the Nazi experiments only in that the American prisoners were completely unaware of what was being done to them. Most of the Nazi victims had some idea of what was happening. The same “modern” mentality that gives a higher priority to solving an administratively defined problem than to its effect on human beings characterized both the American and the German experiments.
Furthermore, the practice of using prisoner “volunteers” for medical experiments is currently very widespread in the United States. According to Jessica Mitford, on e reputable American scientist was reputed to have said, “Criminals in our penitentiaries are fine experimental material – and much cheaper than chimpanzees.” According to the Food and Drug Administration, as of 1973, such experiments were being carried on in about fifty prisons in twenty-four states. Prisoners are usually “paid” one dollar a day for their participation. Unfortunately, there is much permanent damage to the “volunteers” and even loss of life. During World War II, the great German pharmaceutical corporation, Bayer A. G. of Leverkusen, made extensive use of death-camp inmates for their experiments on human beings. Today, Bayer’s American corporate counterparts, such as Lederle, Bristol-Myers, Squibb, Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Upjohn, have found a plentiful supply of subjects (objects?) in America’s prisons for their “voluntary” experiments on human beings. The experiments in American prisons have the cooperation and the approval of such federal bureaucracies as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the Food and Drug Administration. Ms. Mitford quotes Dr. Sheldon Margen, a physician opposed to the experiments, as saying,
If the researchers really believe these experiments are safe for humans, why do they go to the prisons for the subjects? Why don’t they try them out in their own labs on students? … Because they know the university would never permit this … They make a distinction between people they think of as social equals or colleagues and men behind bars, whom they regard as less than human.
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Bayer’s experiments were relatively innocent. This was not true of most of I.G. Farben’s corporate activities at Auschwitz. I.G. Farben was the most important German corporate employer of slave labor at Auschwitz. The corporation’s activities are at Auschwitz are an important part of the story of the camp as a society of total domination. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had observed that the economic triumph of the bourgeoisie, the class of modern capitalists that owned the “means of production”, had “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.” Marx and Engels were pointing to the same process of “dehumanized” rationalization as had Weber, who regarded the large corporation as a type of bureaucratic organization that rivaled the state bureaucracy in achieving rational efficiency and calculated results. According to Marx, the bourgeoisie had reduced industrial labor to a commodity “like every other article of commerce.” Marx claimed that in capitalist enterprise the cost of labor was restricted to the “means of subsistence” required by the laborer “for his maintenance and the propagation of the race.” In view of the conditions of the working class in England, Europe’s most industrialized nation in the 1840s, the observations were more than justified. As uprooted men and women were forced to move from the countryside to the cities, they had little choice but to accept the subsistence wages offered to them in the mills and factories. The alternative was starvation. There was an abundant labor supply and its cost was kept at a minimum. Unlike the old feudal order, the relations between the mill and mine workers and their employers were totally impersonal. The workers were unsentimentally regarded as a necessary component in the production mechanism, but each worker was seen as an interchangeable, easily replaceable unit in a depersonalized mechanism that was calculated solely in terms of minimum costs and maximum profits.
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In Victorian Egnald, the wage slaves had become servo-mechanism of the machines they tended. As Marx has observed, “as machines become more human, men become more like machines.”
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I.G Farben’s decision to locate at Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria by which contemporary multinational corporations relocate their plants in utter indifference to the social consequences of such moves: wherever possible costs, especially labor costs, must be minimized and profits maximized.
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According to the affidavit of Dr. Raymon van den Straaten, a slave at Auschwitz, on one occasion, five of I. G. Farben’s top directors made an inspection tour of I. G. Auschwitz. As one of the directors passed a slave scientist, Dr. Fritz Lohner-Beda, the Director remarked, “The Jewish swine could work a little faster.” Another I. G. Farben director responded, “If they don’t work, let them perish in the gas chamber.” Dr. Lohner-Beda was then pulled out of his group and kicked to death.
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My point in stressing Dr. Ter Meer’s American corporate connections is not to suggest that corporate executives are possessed of some distinctive quality of villainy. It is to emphasize the extent to which the same attitude of impersonal rationality is required to run successfully a large corporation, a death camp slave labor factory and an extermination center. All three are part of the same world. At least in Germany, the top executives of all three enterprises often felt at home with each other.
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Only one incentive was necessary to keep the slaves working at maximum capacity, terror. The workers knew that the moment they were no longer capable of meeting work schedules, they would be sent tot the gas chambers. No other incentive was required. None was given. If the slaves did not keep up with the schedule, they were gassed; if they did keep up with it, the work itself killed them within a few months. Their only hope of remaining alive was to maintain a schedule that was calculated finally to kill them.
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To repeat, no laws were broken and no crimes were committed at Auschwitz. Those who were condemned to the society of total domination were stripped of all protection of the law before they entered. Finally, no credible punishment was meted out. Truly, the twentieth century has been the century par excellence that is beyond good an devil.
As time passes, it becomes apparent that the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in their society of total domination, such as mutilating and homicidal medical experiments on human beings and corporate utilization of death-camp slave labor, merely carried to a logical conclusion operational attitudes and procedures that are every predominant in the workings of bureaucracy and modern corporate enterprise.
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On May 3, 1994, at the height of the savage deportation process, the Central Jewish Council of Hungary wrote a letter seeking an audience with Andor Jarosz, the puppet minister of the interior who had been hand-picked by the Germans to facilitate the deportation of almost 1,000,000 Jews: “We emphatically declare that we do not seek the audience to lodge complaints about the merit of the measures adopted, but merely to ask that they be carried out in a humane spirit.” (Italics added.) There was to be no protest about mass extermination, only discussion of how to make the deaths easier for the victims. It was actually easier for the Germans to exterminate the Hungarian Jews than it had been for them to kill those who had previously been exterminated. The Hungarian Jewish response is significant because it demonstrates that it made no difference whether a Jewish community knew of the fate that awaited them or not.
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In addition to the cultural conditioning that affected even the most assimilated Jews, the organized Jewish community was a major factor in preventing effective resistance. Wherever the extermination process was put into effect, the Germans utilized the existing leadership and organizations of the Jewish community to assist them. It was not necessary to find traitors or collaborators to do their work. The compliance reaction was automatic. It was only necessary to delegate to the existing Jewish communal leaders the responsibility for transmitting and executing German orders.
The process of taking over the Jewish communal bureaucracies and transforming them into components in the extermination process was one of the organizational triumphs of the Nazis. In the face of the German determination to murder all Jews, most Jews instinctively relied on their own communal organizations to defend their interests whenever possible. Unfortunately, these very organizations were transformed into subsidiaries of the German police and state bureaucracies.
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At first, the Reichsvereinigung performed the bureaucratic preliminary work necessary for the later stages of the destruction process. Jewish statisticians informed the SS of births, deaths, and other demographic changes. The communal newspaper (Judisches Nachrichtenblatt) kept people informed of German decrees. Jewish bureaucrats sat at their desks and performed the tasks assigned to them by German bureaucrats further up the chain of authority. According to Weber, “The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority mean a firmly ordered system of super- and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by higher ones.” One of the most important reasons for the system of graded authority in a bureaucracy, according to Weber is that the subordinate must fulfill assigned tasks “without any will of his own.” As subordinates, the Jewish bureaucrats had no effective will of their own.
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Thus, the official agency of German Jews led by the most distinguished German rabbi of the twentieth century, a man in whose memory an important rabbinical seminary has been named (London’s Leo Baeck College), undertook such tasks as selecting those who were to be deported, notifying the families and, finally, of sending the Jewish police to round up the victims. In the Warsaw Ghetto and in Lodz, Poland, the Jewish council, or Judenrat, did not resist German directives even when the Germans demanded the “selection” of 10,000 Jews a day for deportation. Jewish bureaucrats made the selection; Jewish police rounded up the victims.
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As we know, the twentieth century has witnessed extraordinary “progress” in the unlimited intensification of human destructiveness and the radicalization of the forms of human domination. Nevertheless, it was the organizational skill of the Nazis rather than their new weapons that made the society of total domination a reality. And, most of the organizational tools with which such a society can be set up have been greatly improved since World War II. Of supreme importance as a weapon of bureaucratic domination is the modern computer. Few weapons were as indispensable to the Gestapo as its files. When one compares the laborious task of maintaining comprehensive files as short a time back as World War II with the instantaneous retrieval of data about anyone the police or any other governmental agency might be interested in today, we see how greatly the problem of keeping tabs on people has been simplified.
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One of the gravest threats to constitutional government posed by foreign ventures is the possibility that government leaders might ignore constitutional restraints and employ the kind of “dirty” tactics they customarily use against foreigners in dealing with domestic opposition. That is why any domestic use of the CIA is so great a threat to American freedom. The domestic spying activities and the raid on the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, by members of the extralegal White House “plumbers” unit are examples of the use of CIA trained personnel and the CIA itself, in domestic political conflicts. And, it is hardly likely that we will ever know the whole story of those episodes. (c ) Nixon sought to secure consent to his program, if not by physical terror, then certainly by the beginnings of bureaucratic terror. Perhaps this was best seen in his attempts to utilize the Internal Revenue Service to harass political opponents as well as public personalities whose style of life or political commitments were distasteful to him. In addition to tax harassment, there were other attempts at bureaucratic harassment such as the threat to revoke the licenses of television stations owned by the Washington Post. The intent of the threatened punitive action was clear: opponents were warned that there were heavy penalties involved in opposing Richard Nixon. Such use of power was an important initial step in the direction of government by terror. Fortunately, the administrators of the most important government agency involved, the Internal Revenue Service, were seldom willing to go along. In this respect the federal bureaucracy, whatever its faults, still retained a measure of independence from the chief executive, something the German bureaucracy felt honor bound not to do after Hitler’s accession to power.
It may seem a long way from the improper use of the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the CIA and other federal agencies to harass opponents to a society of total domination, but Nixon had taken several important steps in that direction. He attempted to replace the give and take of the normal American political process by bureaucratic harassment. Fear was to replace debate and persuasion. In addition, h had established a category of citizens, the so-called “enemies’ lists”, who were to be subject to punitive government action, although they had broken no law and for whom there was no legal justification for any kind of government hostility. Those who had opposed him had, in fact, done nothing more than exercise their normal right to take a stand on political issues.
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It would be comforting to think that the abuses of power that occurred in the Nixon administration were due solely to his moral and political shortcomings. Unfortunately, the problem will not go away with the departure of Richard Nixon. The abuses occurred because the structure of government put the capacity to act as did Nixon in the hands of any president willing to employ it and clever enough to get away with such behavior.
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The overwhelming power of modern government is bound to increase no matter who is president. And not every President will be as clumsy or as noncharismatic as Nixon.
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The unlimited character of the state’s sovereignty even in the extermination of its own citizens was recognized by Justice Robert Jackson the presiding American judge at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Jackson expressed the opinion that the Nazies involved in the extermination of the Jews could not be prosecuted for murdering Jews of German nationality. He argued that no state can sit in judgment of another’s treatment of its minorities. Jackson felt compelled to assert the ultimacy of national sovereignty over all conflicting claims, even the right to life itself. He did not, of course, approve of the Nazi actions. He sought to include the extermination project in the catalogue of war crimes, but only because the project was pursued as part of a war of unjustified aggression, not because the extermination was a crime in itself. The right of a state to define the conditions under which capital punishment will be inflicted has not been impaired by the Holocaust.
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The Nuremburg trials were not a giant step forward in international law. They were in all likelihood an elaborate exercise in national vengeance. In ancient times it was not considered the function of the state to punish private injury. The greatest deterrent against the would-be aggressor was his calculation of the victim’s ability to avenge a wrong, either alone or in concert with members of his family or tribe. The ancient law of tribal vengeance may have been primitive but, in the absence of any impartial public institution for meting out punishment, it did serve to contain violence. The need for the Nuremberg trials arose out of a similar situation: there was no disinterested supranational institution that could enact and enforce laws binding on sovereign states. The situation between sovereign states is not unlike that which in ancient times led to the law of tribal vengeance. The power to injure remains the most credible deterrent to a would –be aggressor’s violence. At Nuremberg the Allies avenged wrongs done to themselves and their clients. Those who had the power could avenge. The Jews had no power and the interest of the Allies in acting on their behalf diminished radically as West German military cooperation against the Soviet bloc assumed importance.
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Some may claim vengeance is indefensible in a world of evolving, higher moral sensibilities, yet it is difficult to see what other deterrent can exist in a world in which a legal system is binding within a state but never between political communities.
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Similarly, if it is no crime for a state to exterminate its citizens or subject peoples, it is also no crime to inflict upon them the kind of slavery the Nazis inflicted upon the camp inmates. This fact was as clearly understood by the Bolsheviks as by the Nazis. Both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks under Stalin have demonstrated that a properly organized modern state can inflict total domination upon any segment of its population it chooses. Unfortunately, there are no categories arising out of traditional political, religious, or ethical norms with which such problems can realistically be confronted. It is, of course, possible to reiterate traditional affirmations about the innate dignity of human beings, but the existence of bureaucratically administered societies of total domination is the most compelling empirical refutation of all such claims. In the face of the new forms of domination, assertions about innate human dignity are either false or meaningless.
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Auschwitz was perhaps the terminal expression of an urban culture that first arose when an ancient protobourgeoisie liberated its work life from the haphazard, unpredictable, and seasonable character of agriculture and sustained itself by work which was, in the words Max Weber, “continuous and rational.”
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There is no private right or privilege that ought to be permitted to subvert the right of every person to a place of dignity and social utility within his or her community.
I recently finished this book and thought it was great. There were lots of little details and stories about Rand that I didn't know, and I didn't know how she fit into the history of libertarianism. This book is a relatively quick read, I'd highly recommend it.
Communism is a cruel system that crushes the virtuous and rewards the corrupt.
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The Nation doubted that "petty officials in Soviet Russia ride to the opera in foreign limousines while the worker goes wheatless and meatless."
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She was further unnerved by the radicals that seemed to swarm around Roosevelt and had wormed their way into the highest citadels of American intellectual and political life. Rand could see little difference between armed Communist revolution and Roosevelt's rapid expansion of the federal government. She rallied against both.
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Rand was suspicious of both democracy and capitalism, unsure if either system could be trusted to safeguard individual rights against the dangers of the mob.
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One day she probed this difference, asking the other woman what her "goal in life" was. Rand's abstract query, so typical of her approach to other people, brought a swift and ready response. "Here's what I want out of life," her neighbor lectured Rand. "If nobody had an automobile, I would not want one. If automobiles exist and some people don't have them, I want an automobile. If some people have two automobiles, I want two automobiles."
Rand was aghast. This piece of petty Hollywood braggadocio opened an entire social universe to her. Here, she thought furiously, was someone who appeared selfish but was actually self-less. Under her neighbor's feverish scheming and desperate career maneuverings was simply a hollow desire to appear important in other people's eyes. It was a motivation Rand, the eternal outsider, could never understand. But once identified the concept seemed the key to understanding nearly everything around her.
Swiftly Rand expanded her neighbor's response into a whole theory of human psychology. The neighbor's daughter was a "second-hander," someone who followed the ideas and values of others. Her opposite would be an individualist like Rand, someone who wanted to create certain ideas, books, or movies rather than attain a generic level of success. Within days Rand had identified the differences between her and the neighbor as "the basic distinction between two types of people in the world." She visualized the dim outlines of two clashing characters, the second-ander and the individualist, who would drive the plot and theme of her next novel.
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To effect this transvaluation of values Rand had to carefully redefine selfishness itself. Egoism or selfishness typically described one who "puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself," she wrote. "Fine!" But this understanding was missing something critical. The important element, ethically speaking, was "not what one does or how one does it, but why one does it." Selfishness was a matter of motivation, not outcome. Therefore anyone who sought power for power's sake was not truly selfish. Like Rand's neighbor, the stereotypical egoist was seeking a goal defined by others, living as "they want him to live and conquer to the extent of a home, a yacht and a full stomach." By contrast, a true egoist, in Rand's sense of the term, would put "his own 'I,' his standard of values, above all things, and [conquer] to live as he pleases, as he chooses and as he believes." Nor would a truly selfish person seek to dominate others, for that would mean living for others, adjusting his values and standards to maintain his superiority. Instead, "an egoist is a man who lives for himself."
...
"A man has a code of ethics primarily for his own sake, not for anyone else's," Rand asserted.
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By contrast, her characters were starkly etched in her mind. Rand designed an elegant, almost geometric structure for the book. Howard Roark was her ideal man, an uncompromising individualist and creator. The other primary characters were variations on his theme. As she explained in a notebook, "Howard Roark: the man who can be and is. Gail Wynand: the man who could have been. Peter Keating: the man who never could be and doesn't know it. Ellsworth M. Toohey: the man who never could be -- and knows it." Rand also created two love interests for Roark Vesta Dunning and Dominique Francon.
Rand's characterizations flowed directly from her architectural research, her knowledge of current events, and her developing opposition to American liberalism. To give Roark form and specificity she drew on the career of the modernist pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright, whose avant-garde style she admired. Numerous details of Wright's life as described in his autobiography would recur in the novel, and she gave Roark a cranky, embittered mentor in the vein of Wright's own teacher, Louis Sullivan. Second-hander Peter Keating was based on a contemporary mediocrity, the popular architect Thomas Hastings. As Rand noted excitedly after reading a book on Hastings, "If I take this book and Wright's autobiography, there is practically the entire story."
Other titans appeared in the novel as well. Gail Wynand was modeled after William Randolph Hearst, whose career Rand had closely followed. She was struck in particular by his failed bids for mayor and governor of New York. Here was a man who claimed great influence but had little success in actually grasping the levers of power. Hearst had been thoroughly humbled, Rand thought, overlooking his two terms in Congress and the authority he continued to wield through his media empire. To her Hearst's strength was a chimera. His power was not his own, but could be granted or withheld by the masses whom he served. In her novel Wynand would illustrate this principle, with his failings contrasted starkly to Roark's independence and agency.
Her villain, Ellsworth Toohey, promised to transform Rand's supposedly nonpolitical novel into a sharp satire on the leftist literary culture of 1930 New York. One evening she and Frank reluctantly accompanied two friends to a a talk by the British socialist Harold Laski at the leftist New School for Social Research. When Laski took the stage Rand was thrilled. Here was Ellsworth Toohey himself! She scribbled frantically in her notebook, sketching out a brief picture of Laski's face and noting his every tic and mannerism. She and Frank went back twice more in the following evenings.
Most of Rand's notes on Laski's lecture, and her resultant description of Toohey, showcased her distate for all things feminine. Rand was repelled by the women in the New School audience, whom she characterized as sexless, unfashionable, and unfeminine. She and Frank scoffed at their dowdy lisle stockings, trading snide notes back and forth. Rand was infuriated most by the "intellectual vulgarity" of the audience, who seemed to her half-wits unable to comprehend the evil of Laski's socialism. What could be done about such a "horrible, horrible, horrible" spectacle, besides "perhaps restricting higher education, particularly for women?" she asked in her notes on the lecture. This misogyny rubbed off on Rand's portrait of Toohey, who was insipidly feminine, prone to gossip, and maliciously catty "in the manner of a woman or nance." Through Toohey, Rand would code leftism as fey, effeminate, and unnatural, as opposed to the rough-hewn masculinity of Roark's individualism.
Before she saw Laski, Toohey was an abstracted antithesis of Roark. But a socialist intellectual fit her purposes just as well, even as the characterization shifted the novel ever closer to a commentary on current events. Laski was not the sole inspiration, for Rand also used bits of the American critics Heywood Broun, Lewis Mumford, and Clifton Fadiman to round out Toohey's persona. Fitting Toohey so squarely into the leftist literary culture signaled Rand's emerging dual purposes for the book and ensured that when it was finally published, the novel would be understood as a political event as much as a literary achievement.
Page 49
The one organized anti-Roosevelt group, the Liberty League, was a secretive cabal of wealthy businessmen hoping to wrest control of government from the masses. Although the Liberty League made several awkward attempts at populism, it's main financial backers were the conservative Du Pont family. Tarred as fascists after several of the group's members praised Mussolini and called for an American dictator, the Liberty League disintegrated within a few years of its founding.
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These spontaneous sessions began to shake Rand loose from her preconceived notions about American voters. Before campaigning, Rand had been suspicious of American democracy. Instead of government of, for, and by the people, she thought the state should be "a means for the convenience of the higher type of man." Her earliest fiction, heavy with contempt for the masses, reflected this sensibility. Now she found herself impressed by the questions her working-class audience asked and their responsiveness to her capitalist message. She said of her timee in the theaters, "[It] supported my impression of the common man, that they really were much better to deal with than the office and the Madison Avenue Republicans." It seemed that the faceless crowds she condemned, rather than their social and intellectual betters, understood the dangers of the Roosevelt administration.
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The result was Rand's thirty-two-page "Manifesto of Individualism," the first full statement of her political and philosophical beliefs.
Page 63
She praised the American Revolution as a rare historic moment when men worked collectively to establish "the freedom of the Individual and the establishment of a society to ensure this freedom," and called "give me liberty or give me death," Patrick Henry's dramatic words in support of the American Revolution, "the statement of a profound truth."
Page 68
After another discussion of her novel, Watkins [[Her Agent]] told Rand, "You always ask for reasons. I can't always give reasons. I just go by feelings." The statement came as a "traumatic shock" to Rand. To her it was a shameful confession of personal and intellectual inadequacy. She could tolerate criticism of her book that was carefully and consciously justified, but to be attacked on the basis of unspecified feelings galled her. Watkins's confession also destroyed any possibility of an ongoing professional relationship. Rand told her as much in a long philosophical letter announcing that she no longer wanted Watkins to represent her work.
Page 84
Swayed by Roark's argument, the jury promptly votes unanimously to acquit. The jury proved critical, helping Rand democratize her vision and reaffirm the basic wisdom of the free-thinking, independent American. Although none of the jurors aren't the history-making creator that Roark represents, Rand makes clear that they can share in his glory simply by understanding and affirming the principle of individualism.
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The Fountainhead finessed this contradiction and escaped libertarianism's fatal elitism through Rand's theory of ethics. For all her bluster, Rand's ethics were rather anodyne. Roark tells the jury, "Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same; the degree of mans independence, initiative, and personal love for his work determine his talent as a worker and his worth as a man" (681). The book's hierarchy of values is not exclusive, for anyone could join Rand's elite simply by loving their work. Instead of talking about the wealthy, she talked about the independent, thereby sidestepping social class. Inequalities or differences between characters are discussed in specific, individual terms, without references to larger social structures. Denizens of Hell's Kitchen and the city's toniest drawing rooms are evaluated by the same standard of independence.
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The Fountainhead and The Road to Serfdom were even made into comic books, a testimony to their wide appeal.
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At the end of Hayek's second chapter Rand summarized her thoughts: "Nineteenth Century Liberalism made the mistake of associating liberty, rights of man etc. with the ideas of 'fighting for the people', 'for the downtrodden,' for the poor,' etc. They made it an altruistic movement. But altruism is collectivism. That is why collectivism took the liberals over." The solution, then, was to shift the principles of nineteenth-century liberalism onto different ethical grounds that avoided altruism. Rand had a ready candidate at hand: her own system of selfishness that she had articulated in the The Fountainhead.
Page 107
The film as never produced, but Rand's encounter with Oppenheimer provided fuel for a character in her developing novel, the scientist Robert Stadler.
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From the start she pushed Read to assume a stance that mirrored her own. She was particularly insistent that Read promote her moral views. he must explain that profit and individual gain were "the capitalist's real and proper motive" and ought to be defended as such. Otherwise, if the very motive of capitalism was "declared to be immoral, the whole system becomes immoral, and the motor of the system stops dead." It was the same criticism she had made of Hayek: a partial case for the free market was worse than no argument at all. Read was naturally more cautious. Like Rand he believed that government functions such as rent control, public education, the Interstate Commerce Commission, military training, and the Post Office should all be done by "voluntary action."
...
Rand believed that Friedman and Stigler were insincere in their arguments against rent control because they failed to invoke any moral principles to support their case. And when they did mention morality, it was to speak favorably of equality and humanitarianism. She fumed to Mullendor, "Not one word about the inalienable right of landlords and property owners ... not one one word about any kind of principles. Just expediency ... and humanitarian ... concern for those who can find no houses." In addition to her eight-page letter to Mullendore, replete with exclamation points and capitalized sentences, Rand sent a short note to Read. She called the pamphlet "the most pernicious thing ever issued by an avowedly conservative organization" and told him she could have no further connection with FEE. To Rose Wilder Lane she described the incident as "a crushing disappointment," adding, "It is awfully hard to see a last hope go."
Page 129
Paterson responded with more New York gossip, including a tidbit about Don Levine's bizarre new concept of competing government agencies. It was the first glimmer of anarcho-capitalism, Rand's bete noire in the years ahead. But now Levine's strange views simply signaled to both Rand and Paterson that his newest venture was not worth supporting.
Page 134
While driving back from New York, she and Frank visited Ouray, Colorado, a small town tucked in a seam of mountains. Right away Rand knew Ouray would be the model for her capitalist Shangri-la, the valley where her strikers would create their own utopian society.
Page 143
Rand now had two arguments to deploy against anti-trust. The first was her moralistic argument that antitrust laws unfairly punished the successful. The second was Mises's contention that monopolies were not the fault of business, but of government regulation. Rand could therefore cite monopolies as evidence that the United States had never experienced true free-market capitalism. As Paterson had before, Mises helped Rand strengthen, define, and defend her ideas.
Page 154
Rand and Mises argued over conscription, which Rand saw as tantamount to slavery. Mises, his eyes on history, argued that only conscription could prevent the rise of dangerous mercenary armies.
Page 159
During the two years she struggled to write Galt's speech, Rand's pronounced nervous tension wreaked havoc on those closest to her.
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Chambers was also unsettled by Rand's godless capitalism, which might be even worse than godless Communism. Where Rand saw the free market as an essentially spiritual realm and competition as the meaning of life itself, Chambers saw only a heartless machine world. In the 1940s Rand had been one of man intellectuals seeking a plausible grounding for individual rights and democracy. By the 1950s conservatives had found an answer in religion. Defining Communism as essentially atheistic, they were able to frame Christianity and capitalism as natural partners in the fight against government regulation. If the two impulses were paradoxical or contradictory at base, that was the very point, for conservatives wanted the free market set within an explicitly Christian society. Only religion could balance the "materialism" of free enterprise, with the Christian emphasis on charity, humility, and equality blunting the harsher edges of laissez-faire. But now Rand appeared to be tacking back to the earlier nineteenth-century vision of Darwinian capitalist competition, absent the sooting balm of Christian egalitarianism.
Atlas Shrugged represented a fundamental challenge to the new conservative synthesis, for it argued explicitly that a true morality of capitalism would be diametrically opposed to Christianity. By spinning out the logic of capitalism to its ultimate conclusion Atlas Shrugged showcased the paradox of defending free market capitalism while at the same time advocating Christianity. Rand's ideas threatened to undermine or redirect the whole conservative venture. Even worse, given her popularity, there was the significant danger that Rand would be seized on by liberals as a spokesperson for conservatism. She might then confirm the liberal stereotype that conservatism was nothing more than an ideological cover for the naked class interests of the haves. For all these reasons, Rand would have to be cast out of the respectable right. More than just a literary judgement, the National Review article was an exercise in a talbet keeping. The review signified Buckley's breaking with the secular libertarian tradition Rand represented and his efforts to create a new ideological synthesis that gave religion a paramount role. It was as Nathan had foreseen: Rand and the conservatives were not on the same side.
Page 183
Instead, the academic conference became the grounds for a bitter final breakup between Rothbard and the Rand circle. Tensions had been building over Rothbard's stubborn allegiance to anarchism. After almost six months of regular contact Rand and the Collective expected Rothbard to be convinced that anarchism was unworkable. In July 1958 a special Saturday night session was scheduled for Rothbard and Rand to debate. By then Rothbard had realized, "I hated the guts of [Nathan] and Ayn and the rest of the gang."
Page 186
To Peikoff, Kant's argument that the means of perception structured humans' sense of reality undermined objective reality, reason, and all absolutes. Kan's ideas had opened the philosophical gates to destructive ideas lik relativism and existentialism, which created the poisonous atmosphere that greeted Atlas Shrugged.
Page 194
The reaction to Rand fell neatly into a pattern established years before. Since the advent of Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin's famously anti-Communist senator, liberals had trouble treating conservative ideas as legitimate. A prominent 1955 volumen, The Radical Right, set the tone by treating libertarianism and anti-Communism as psychological syndromes, an expression of paranoia or status anxiety. Accordingly liberal commentators derided Rand her following as a fringe element with little to contribue to the nation's intellectual life. But Rand's popularity appeared impervious to attack by the most esteemed members of the establishment. The more guardians of respectability criticized Rand, the more irresistible she became to conservatives who loved thumbing their noses at the ascendant liberal order.
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As the campaign wore on, Rand was outraged to see Goldwater caricatured as racist by the mass media. It was true that both she and Goldwater opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a litmus test of liberal acceptability, but neither she nor Goldwater was truly prejudiced. Rand inveighed against racism as "the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism," and Goldwater had integrated his family's business years before and was even a member of the NAACP. But Goldwater's libertarianism trumped his racial liberalism. He was among a handful of senators who voted against the bill, a sweeping piece of legislation intended to address the intractable legacy of racial discrimination in the South. Goldwater's vote was based on principles he had held for years. A firm supporter of state's rights, he was alarmed at the expansive powers granted the federal government under the act. Following the analysis of his friends William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, he also believed the act was unconstitutional because it infringed on private property rights. In the scrum of electoral politics such distinctions were academic. Goldwater's vote went down as a vote segregation.
...
But she was equally appealed by the act's clauses II and VII, which forbade discrimination in public accommodations and employment. If the act passed it would be the "worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history," she wrote. Early civil rights activists who struggled against government-enforced segregation drew Rand's approval. Now she criticized "Negro leaders" for forfeiting their moral case against discrimination by "demanding special race privileges." Rand considered race a collectivist fiction, a peripheral category to be subsumed into her larger philosophy...
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... Rand proposed a new book, The Fascist New Frontier, after her essay of the same name.
...
The title was intentionally provocative but also reflect Rand's deep revulsion at the Kennedy administration. The famous line from Kennedy's inaugural speech, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, " inflamed Rand. (Milton Friedman also found this sentiment objectionable, attacking Kennedy's statement in the very first sentence of Capitalism and Freedom.) In the title essay she juxtaposed excerpts from speeches by Kennedy and Hitler to demonstrate their similarity; to her, both were collectivists who demanded that men live for the state.
Page 212
She repeated the idea in Atlas Shrugged and For the New Intellectual, making it a basic tenet of her ethics: "No man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others." Physical force was a core concern of Rand's political philosophy, for she held that rights could only be violated by physical force.
...
Although it sounded straightforward, Rand's definition of force was nuanced. She defined fraud, extortion, and breach of contract as force, thus enabling government to establish a legal regime that would create a framework for commerce. Critically, Rand also considered taxation to be an "initiation of physical force" since it was obtained, ultimately, "at the point of a gun." This led her to a radical conclusion: that taxation itself was immoral.
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Ted Turner, then a little-known media executive, personally paid for 248 billboards scattered throughout the South that read simply "Who is John Galt?" Ten years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged she was at the apex of her fame.
Page 218
Nathan closed with a strong attack against another group of Rand readers, the "craven parasites" who sought to use Objectivism for non-Objectivist ends. Into this category fell anyone who advocated political anarchism and anyone who tried to recruit NBI students into schemes for a new free market nation or territory.
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In 1962 Rothbard published his two-volume, Man, Economy, and the State, an exegesis of his mentor Ludwig Von Mises's thought. The book was written with a concluding set of chapters advocating anarchism, which Rothbard's sponsors at the Volker Fund quietly excised. Rothbard took his ideas to a more receptive audience, founding a magazine called Left and Right that hoped to attract student rebels from both ends of the political spectrum. Although anarchism was a minority position, to say the least, the very idea of it infuriated Rand. But some students saw anarchism as a the logical next step after Objectivism. Others, infatuated with Rand's idea of a capitalist utopia, hatched elaborate plans for a new libertarian Atlantis. A truly free market society could be found in uninhabited lands or even established on offshore floating platforms, they believed. Rand found these schemes ludicrous.
Page 229
Rand saw the draft as a sure sin that freedom was already in grave danger. She was deeply opposed to the draft and its implications for society. "Of all the statist violations of individual rights ... the military draft is the worst," she told her audience. "It negates man's fundamental right, the right to life, and establishes the fundamental principle of statism - that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time."
...
Framed as a statist violation of rights, conscription fit seamlessly into her larger opposition to coercion and the initiation of force.
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The schisms of the 1968 were a disaster for Rand but a boon for many of her readers.
...
No longer "students of Objectivism," those who liked Rand were free to call themselves Objectivists or libertarians. They could follow the logic of their antistatism all the way to the newly popular position of anarchism or, with a nod to Rand, anarcho-capitalism. Rand's works were to potent and too popular to be confined or controlled, even by their creator.
...
The greatest contribution of Rand's Objectivism was to moor the libertarian movement to the right side of the political spectrum. In turn, libertarians kept Rand's ideas actively circulating in the years after NBI's demise. Rand denounced libertarian appropriation of her work, never accepting that with her success came a commensurate loss of control. Objectivism, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt - they no longer belonged to Rand exclusively. She had set them loose in the world, and their fortunes were no longer tied to hers.
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Despite its stated orientation, The Rational Individualist published the first serious challenge to Rand's hegemony, an "Open Letter to Ayn Rand
by Roy Childs Jr., a student at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Childs admired Rand but questioned her stance on government as he gravitated toward an anarchist position. With his letter, sent to Rand on July 4, 1969, Childs repudiated Objectivism and debuted as the enfant terrible of anarcho-capitalism. Boldly Childs opened with a straightforward declaration: "The purpose of this letter is to convert you to free market anarchism." Relying heavily on Objectivist concepts and Randian words and phrases, Childs argued that Rand's advocacy of a limited state was contradicted by her own philosophy. Her(sp) told her, "Your political philosophy cannot be maintained without contradiction that, in fact , you are advocating the maintenance of an institution - the state - which is a moral evil." Beyond offering an ethical critique, Childs also turned Rand's terminology against her, arguing that her idea of a limited government that did not initiate force as a "floating abstraction." According to Childs, all governments must initiate force to survive as governments and maintain their monopoly on coercion. And if the initiation of force was forbidden in both the Objectivist and libertarian worlds, then the state itself must be opposed. Childs lectured Rand, "Your approach to the matter is not yet radical, not yet fundamental: it is the existence of the state itself which must be challenged by the new radicals. It must be understood that the state is an unnecessary evil. Rand was unimpressed by Childs's logic. Her only response was to cancel his subscription to The Objectivist.
...
How was it possible to oppose the initiation of force (a key Randian tenet), yet still defend a minimal state? R.W. Bradford, later an editor or Liberty magazine, remembered, "A few were willing to accept her obfuscations on the issue, but the overwhelming majority were unwilling to evade the problem. Virtually all these people became anarchists." To many libertarians tutored in Rand's absolutist style of thought, the steps were simple: the state was bad, so why not abolish it entirely? Childs put it this way: "As in ehtics there are only two sides to any question - the good and the evil - so too are the only two logical sides to the political question of the state: either you are for it, or you are against it."
...
... Atlas Shrugged had indelibly etched the idea of a stateless capitalist utopia onto the right-wing psyche. Anarchists were right to recognize that Rand's ideas had first opened them to the possibility of radical antistatism. By denying the morality of both conscription and taxation, Objectivism de-legitimized two fundamental functions of any state. At the same time Rand's fiction suggested that an alternative world was within reach. Once imagined, Galt's Gulch could never be forgotten.
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On the third day of the conference [[YAF Annual Conference (1969)]] libertarian frustration bubbled over when their anti-draft resolution went down to defeat. Not only did the convention reject the libertarian plank, but in the plank that passed they included a pointed clause condemning draft resistance and the burning of draft cards. The convention's decision to endorse abolition of the draft, but not resistance to it, was critical. It signaled that there were definite limits to YAF''s antistatism. The organization would remain firmly within the political establishment. Rhetorical support of limited government was fine, but anarchism and radical libertarianism were beyond the pale.
In the face of this insult, the libertarians could no longer resist their innate impulse to challenge authority. A small pack of students gathered in a conspiratorial knot. One of the group had a facsimile of his draft card. (Apparently the conservative within him lived still, for he was unwilling to sacrifice the actual card.) Another dissident seized a microphone and announced to the assembly that any person had a right to defend himself against violence, including state violence. Then "he raised a card, touched it with a flame from a cigarette lighter, and lifted it over his head while it burned freely into a curling black ash." The symbol of YAF, a hand holding the torch of liberty, had been deftly satirized and openly mocked.
After a few moments of shocked silence, pandemonium erupted on the convention floor. "Kill the commies" yelled the patriotic majority. Amid shouts, shoving, and fisticuffs, the traitorous facsimile draft card burners were ejected from the convention floor. Around three hundred of their ideological brethren followed the rebels out of the convention, and out of Young Americans for Freedom. A chasm now separated the libertarians and the traditionalists. By the end of the year a substantial number of YAF chapters had either left the organization or had their charters rescinded. California alone lost twenty-four chapters.
This libertarian secession was the culmination of a dynamic that had plagued modern American conservatism since its emergence earlier in the century. Postwar conservatives had crafted a careful synthetic ideology with a productive contradiction at its core: the tension between free market capitalism and cultural traditionalism. Clashes over the balance of power had broken out regularly ever since, with Rand's excommunication by National Review among the most prominent. The cultural upheavals of the late 1960s were a watershed, for they made stark the difference between laissez-faire libertarians and tradition-bound conservatives. Taking inspiration from the revolutionary language of the New Left, libertarians finally had enough confidence and strength to identify themselves as a distinct political movement. They were no longer conservatives, but following in Rand's footsteps they would remain part of the right.
Immediately after the convention Murray Rothbard and his new comrade Karl Hess attempted to pull the exodus of libertarians to the left, but it was Rand who emerged as a more decisive influence.
Page 258
Rand had little appreciation for her new fan base. During her annual public appearances she called libertarians "scum," "intellectual cranks," and "plagiarists." Because she defined Objectivism as her personal property, she viewed libertarian use of her ideas as theft. What others would see as tribute or recognition of her work, Rand defined as "cashing in" or plagiarism. "If such hippies hope to make me their Marcuse, it will not work," she wrote sourly. Her comment was not far off the mark, for Rand's writings were a sort of ur-text for the libertarian movement. They could be challenged, interpreted, reinterpreted, adopted, celebrated - but never ignored. Whether she liked it or not, libertarians would always consider Rand a vital part of their intellectual heritage.
Page 259
As the joke went, "If you put half a dozen libertarians into a room together, you will eventually end up with four factions, 2 conspiracies, 3 newsletters, 2 splinter groups and 4 withdrawals of sanction!"
...
Rand helped libertarians create a cohesive subculture without sacrificing autonomy or independence.
Page 260
... 'Freedom' is the bill of goods we try to sell to the flower children and the leftists." Continuing in a Randian vein, he noted, "if we wish to advocate capitalism, we must advocate it from a moral stand - we must assert that production is aright for man, that rational self-interest is right for man, that aside from (and in addition to) the fact that man should be free, he should also be selfish and productive. Here the restrictions that Rand put on libertarianism were clear. Rand had made capitalism a sacrosanct ideal for most libertarians, an allegiance that rapidly marginalized leaders like Karl Hess who hoped to draw libertarians to the left.
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More substantively Rand's patriotism and her reverence for the Founding Fathers were controversial in a movement that considered the Constitution a coercive document (because it claimed justification over even those who had not signed). Rand's account of the Apollo 11 launch crystalized this difference for many. In the Objectivist she described how she had been invited to a VIP viewing of the rocket launch. Shepherded past the masses within three miles of the take-off, Rand was awestruck. Apollo 11 was "the concretized abstraction of man's greatness," and as she saw the rocket rise she had "a feeling that was not triumph: but more : the feeling that that white object's unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe." It was a masterful piece of writing that become one of Rand's personal favorites.
...
What libertarian critics of the "moon jaunt" missed was how Rand's appreciation of Apollo 11 was tied to her ever=present worry that the United States was going backward, regressing to Petrograd circa 1920. Her fears were stirred anew by the emergence of the environmental movement, which she viewed as a virulent atavism that would drag mankind back to primitive existence. In her 1970 lecture to the Ford Hall Forum she attacked environmentalism as "the Anti-Industrial Revolution."
...
"Clean air is not the issue nor the goal of the ecologists' crusade.... it is technology and progress that the nature-lovers are out to destroy," she told her listeners.
Nature was not benevolent to Rand, but a force to be kept at bay by man's reason.
...
In this context Apollo 11 stood out for Rand as a bright sign of hope; it was not the powers of the state that she celebrated, but the wonders of technology and human achievement.
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... foreshadowed the emerging culture of cyberspace, which was strikingly libertarian from the beginning.
Page 264
What infuriated Rand the most was that feminism, as she saw it, was a claim based on weakness, a rebellion "against strength as such, by those who neither attempt nor intend to develop it." Feminists elevated their gender above their individuality and intelligence and then expected unearned success, to be enforced by government quotas and regulations.
Page266/267
The real rift between Rand and the libertarians came with the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1971. The party's founder, David Nolan was an MIT graduate and Rand fan. He was galvanized to action by Nixon's announcement of wage and price controls, intended to curb inflation. (By contrast Rand endorsed Nixon twice, regarding him as the lesser of two evils.) Nolan and a few friends announced plans for a libertarian national convention, held in Denver the following year. At the convention libertarians organized themselves into a loose network of state parties, coordinated by an elected central committee. they adopted organizational bylaws and a platform calling for withdrawal from Vietnam, draft amnesty, and abolition of victimless crimes and the Federal Communications Commission. The Party's statement of principles declared, in hyperbolic language, "We the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual." By liberation standards the Party was a smashing success. At the June convention the Party claimed one thousand members and doubled its numbers by election day. By the end of 1973 it had three thousand members, with organizations in thirty-two states.
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Although the Party earned only 3,671 votes, it gained one electoral vote - and national media coverage - when a renegade Virginia elector, Roger MacBride, cast his vote for Hospers-Nathan. The nominally Republican MacBride had been tutored in the fundamentals of libertarianism b no less a luminary than Rose Wilder Lane, who considered him her adopted grandson and made him her literary heir. His rebellion made Nathan the first woman to receive an electoral college vote, an event that drew television news trucks to the normally said Richmond Capital building where electors voted. They Party's quixotic decision to run candidates had turned out to be a savvy move, garnering national news coverage far beyond what was warranted by the campaign. MacBride became an instant hero to Party members and sympathizers and would go on to be the Party's next presidential candidate.
