Ayn No Way: Paul Ryan's Problem
by
Daniel W. Morgan
The
strange intersection of Rep. Paul Ryan, novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, and
Catholic social teaching became a big story—for the second time—during the
2012 election cycle.
The
story was cognitive dissonance: How could Rand, the atheistic founder of
“ethical egoism,” be embraced by a man so avowedly devout in his
Catholicism? In response, a bevy of mostly conservative apologists
elaborately sought to reconcile the apparently disparate ideologies.
What
escaped the attention of most writers, however, was the manner in which a
conservative politician held up his faith as a shield against accusations
regarding his political principles. By publically renouncing Rand in favor
of Catholicism on the one hand, but keeping his allegiance to most of his
former teacher’s ideas on the other, Ryan used his religion to maneuver
around accusations of its misapplication. The GOP vice-presidential
candidate tried to have his political cake and eat it too.
This
whole strange ride began in the spring of 2011, when Ryan, newly enthroned
as chair of the House Budget Committee, introduced a Republican budget
proposal that contemplated the reconstruction of Medicare as we know it and
the shrinking of many federal programs.
“When
Paul Ryan first decided to publicly share his admiration of Ayn Rand, he
could not have imagined it would lead to him speed-walking to his SUV to
avoid a young Catholic trying to give him a Bible and telling him to pay
more attention to the Gospel of Luke,” Amy Sullivan wrote in Time on
June 3, 2011, weeks after Ryan released the budget proposal. But coverage of
his commitment to Ayn Rand had actually begun months before.
A
January 25, 2011 Washington Post op-ed opened by calling Ryan an “Ayn
Rand-quoting zealot.” On April 10 the Daily Beast labeled Ryan a
“Rand nut.”
Rick
Holmes, writing for the Metrowest Daily on April 16, chimed in that
he was “a fan of Ayn Rand, the novelist-philosopher whose books…preach that
the rich and successful should be rewarded with greater wealth and power,
while the ‘moochers and looters’—Rand’s term for poor people and
government—should be punished.” Three days later, Michael Stafford’s blog in
Town Square Delaware dismissed Rand as “essentially the L. Ron Hubbard of
American conservatism. And Objectivism is its closest approximation of a
political/ideological cult.”
Rand,
it turned out, energizes liberals.
Consider the May 2011 complaint from the American Values Network, a lobbying
organization led by former Clinton administration activists Burns Strider
and Eric Sapp. The network produced a video warning of “Ayn Rand’s strong
atheism, absolute rejection of Christ’s teachings, and goal of replacing
religion with her belief system, stand in total opposition to all that which
America’s faith community holds most dear.”
The
video went on to complain that Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was “posting on
Facebook praising Rand’s morality and saying hers is the ‘kind of thinking
that is sorely needed right now.’ Simply put, Paul Ryan can’t have it both
ways, and neither can Christians.”
Among
Catholics, Rand doesn’t sell many tickets either. John Gehring’s U.S.
Catholic article from July 2011 said that Rand’s “contempt for religion
and lack of compassion for the poor has not stopped many
conservatives—including influential Catholic members of Congress—from
adopting her as something of a patron saint of radical individualism, whose
ideas inspire a policy agenda deeply hostile to Catholic teaching about the
common good.”
The
Rand-Ryan story gave media outlets a new twist on the radical
libertarianism-versus-liberal collectivism trope, and they ran with it.
Susan
Brooks Thistlewaite, in an April 18, 2011, “On Faith” post for the
Washington Post, described the philosophical incongruities of Ryan’s
proclaimed love for both Rand and Christian social values:
“Then
Jesus looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.’ (Luke 6:20) According to Ayn Rand, the
novelist and atheist philosopher so beloved of influential American
conservatives today, that’s where Jesus got off track…Ever since Rep. Paul
Ryan (R-Wisc.) put out his draconian budget proposal that slashes essential
programs for the poor and gives big tax breaks to the rich, Ryan’s
attachment to the works of Ayn Rand has been in the spotlight.”
Any
account of the stories told on Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand would not be complete
without first reporting where all the trouble began. From the New York
Times to the Daily Beast, from the National Review to
Atlantic Wire, from the Progress Report to Forbes,
everyone put their finger on the fateful speech Ryan delivered at the 2005
meeting with The Atlas Society.
Besides
harping on the fact that Ryan actually spoke at an event honoring the
philosophical accomplishments of Rand, most media sources reported some form
of the following quotation from his speech: “But the reason I got involved
in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person,
it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about
it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.”
It was
thus Ryan who convicted himself of putting Randian values above Catholic
social teaching in his public life.
But
despite the liberal energy, by the end of 2011 the Ryan/Rand problem had
faded into the background of coverage of the Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity”
budget plan. It was briefly revived in April when the New York Times’
liberal lion Paul Krugman wrote a column calling Ryan “deadly serious about
cutting taxes on the rich and slashing aid to the poor, very much in line
with Rand’s worship of the successful and contempt for ‘moochers.’”
The
conservative response from Brian Bolduc, writing in the National Review,
nicely mirrored Ryan’s own response strategy—denial: “Ryan isn’t a Randian.”
What
brought the problem roaring back was Mitt Romney’s choice of Ryan as his
running mate just before the Republican convention. Once again reporters
began asking Ryan about his self-professed love of Ayn Rand.
And
while some conservative writers stepped up to defend him against the
mockery, they continued to refrain from defending Randianism per se. As the
headline on Lauren Fox’s August 1 piece in U.S. News and World Reports
put it, “Paul Ryan is far from an Ayn Rand Prodigy.”
To be
sure there were others, like New York Daily News blogger S.E. Cupp,
who insisted on the Ryan-Rand connection. “Ryan certainly is a Rand
devotee,” posted Cupp on August 16. “He’s said as much. But so are most
conservatives.” Richard Salsman in the August Forbes titled his
article, “Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Ayn Rand: Now That’s the Ticket.”
Conservative Catholics, who have more obstacles between themselves and open
Randianism, had a tougher time responding to this story. In August, Benjamin
Wiker wrote in the National Catholic Register, “It isn’t enough for
Ryan to say that, on the one hand, he rejects her objectivism, but on the
other, that he affirms her moral case for capitalism—because her moral case
for capitalism is rooted in her objectivism.”
Ryan
himself had little use for pesky points like Wiker’s. “I reject [Rand’s]
philosophy,” he told National Review’s Robert Costa in an April 26
interview. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down
to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is
going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me
Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.”
But the
great scholastic theologian proved to be almost as big a problem for Ryan as
Rand had been: The broken-field running was all too easy to spot.
In
April, Rick Unger of Forbes concluded that Ryan “can’t seem to make
up his mind when it comes to his philosophical underpinnings.” Likewise, in
August, the hostile Daily Kos blog: “Even if we take Paul Ryan on his word,
believing the absurd supposition that he now rejects the moral philosophy
that shaped his past and drove his policy, there’s a huge problem in
approving his request to be linked to St. Thomas Aquinas.”
“Now
that he is the presumptive GOP Vice Presidential candidate,” Salon
noted on August 19, “Ryan has discovered the need to counter the public
perceptions that he is an uncaring disciple of the gospel of selfishness.
So Ryan
supporters turned to the congressman’s friends in the Catholic hierarchy,
and received some support. Writing in the August 31 New Republic, Amy
Sullivan recalled that Cardinal Timothy Dolan had given Ryan some cover
during the initial budget debates, commending Catholic social teaching to
the congressman but allowing that he had a right to exercise “prudential
judgment” in the scrum of political life.
Other
conservative Catholics bashed the Ryan bashers. In an August 16 St. Louis
Post-Dispatch op-ed, Colleen Carroll Campbell quoted with relish the
defense of his budget that Ryan had offered at Georgetown University four
months earlier: “I do not believe that the preferential option for the poor
means a preferential option for big government.”
Catholic liberals who questioned Ryan’s allegiance to the church’s social
doctrine often dissented far more fundamentally from true Catholic doctrine
on “the moral issues that the church labels non-negotiable, including
defense of the right to life and traditional marriage,” Campbell wrote.
A few
Catholic leaders, more distant from the fray, agreed that there were
perplexities caused by Ryan’s stance. Bishop Steven Blaire of Stockton,
California, told Joe Garogoli of the San Francisco Chronicle on
August 23 that the Ryan budget did indeed fail a “basic moral test.” Its
“moral failing is that it did not adequately provide for the care of the
poor and the vulnerable.” Blaire said, adding that he was “critiquing the
budget Ryan shepherded and not Ryan personally.”
As the
talking heads slugged it out in August, Amy Sullivan suggested in Time
that the Ryan contretemps would prove to be a challenge for the GOP on
Election Day. “The bottom line is this: the Romney-Ryan campaign must
acknowledge the Catholic concerns about the budget as a major obstacle to
winning the election Nov. 7,” Sullivan wrote. “It will make or break the GOP
ticket’s appeal to Catholics in a state like Pennsylvania.”
Indeed,
most of the most Catholic states—all of New England, New York, Pennsylvania,
California, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and
Minnesota—voted against the Romney-Ryan ticket.
By
then, the Ryan-Rand controversy had petered out. The story peaked in
mid-August, when almost every major news source discussed what appeared to
be an important internal contradiction in Ryan’s toolbox of values.
What
made the story different from the 2011 version was the internal Catholic
dynamic. In 2012, Catholic liberals egged their bishops to rule Ryan’s
social doctrine out of bounds, and by and large the bishops were unwilling
to do it. But, by a bare majority, Catholic voters did the job. |