Ayn Rand’s comeback for 2022

It is times like these conservatives, libertarians and others on the right-ish end of the political spectrum like to break out the Ayn Rand references.

The power of government is being exercised in ways Americans typically are not accustomed to. We have runaway inflation due to the devaluation of the dollar and the dollar chasing not enough goods and services given production and supply chain limitations. There is a national emergency given the pandemic, and your governments at all levels are instituting vaccine and mask mandates.

And in Washington, D.C., where the so-called ruling political class resides, there is a culture made up of smug, pseudo-intellectual elitists populated by frenzied men and women trying to play the system to further their political careers.

Recently, I decided to reread “Atlas Shrugged” and started it a few days before Aaron Rodgers flashed his copy of the book up on the screen during the “Monday Night Football” segment “Manningcast.”

Rodgers, then the starting quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, is a vaccine skeptic and was panned by the media for daring to display what was heretical in their view. However, there are parallels to times like these and the plot and characters of Randian fiction.

In “Atlas Shrugged,” the industrialists of the era go on strike. They disappear one by one as government officials and government-adjacent crony capitalists trade favors to rig a system that is beneficial to only them.

Without those industrialists enabling the country’s means of production, systems collapse, including energy, transportation and the food supply, and without the ability to obtain other raw materials to produce goods, the nation grinds to a halt.

Ultimately, the country reverts to antiquated technology, as Atlas, depicted in Greek mythology as carrying the world on his shoulders, is unwilling to bear the burdens of the world and shrugs.

The first time I read the book, I was still in a starry-eyed idealist phase about politics. The country had experienced a collapse in the financial sector and elected Barack Obama as president. Government bailout had taken place all over the country to prevent so-called “too big to fail” banks from failing.

It was sort of an emergency, and we were told we were all Keynesians and the government was going to implement an infrastructure program that was akin to FDR’s New Deal. It did not work out that way, but there was a real fear the nation was spiraling into Ayn Rand’s dystopian vision.

Having lived through that and now read the unabridged “Atlas Shrugged” for a second time, it seems as if the COVID-19 pandemic and this wave of woke-ism that now dominates all corners of the upper echelons of American culture is more like the Randian setting than the threat of a national housing bailout in 2009.

Thus, the second reading in 2022 seemed appropriate because there are so many more parallels under Joe Biden.

The national emergency enabling all the kooky, so-called progressive policymaking is a health emergency, and a reluctant-acting federal government is pushing the limits of power and spending.

You have a media dominated by an appeal to authority fallacy.

“If Anthony Fauci, the World Health Organization or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it, we must defer to their proclamation. Any efforts to contradict those declarations will result in your cancellation from the internet. Leave the critical thinking to the experts.”

We also have a Black Lives Matter movement that has long gone past remedies to unfair policing and other pushes for equal justice. It now seeks to make inroads in changing the American economic system and create “equity,” which is more than equality of opportunity but equality of outcome by opposing meritocracy.

“It’s just not fair someone can accumulate wealth because they won life’s lottery and have acquired an advantage.”

The so-called aristocracy of pull, referring to those who have reached their status not necessarily by means or ability but political connections, seems to exist in nexus between Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

Initially, there was an ability shown by those who gave us Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook. However, as the game is played to increase company stock value and stave off government regulation, those same people have become part of the system.

This approach to governance seems to be running out of runway. Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical of the system. This ruling class has fallen short of the expectations for the sacrifices offered.

The public has been told lockdowns, vaccine passports and masking children were necessary to flatten the curve and stop the spread. Still, the evolution of the virus has prevented some of the progress politicians had promised during the 2020 election cycle.

It is a worst-case scenario for Democrats in some ways. They had control of the White House and Capitol Hill, but only had them by small margins. They initiated Draconian measures that have not been effective and will not prove to be in the end, barring some miracle.

Would Republicans have done any better? Maybe not, but it’s hard to envision an embrace of social programs spending and the remaking of American election systems by a GOP president or Congress.

This reflects poorly on the so-called progressive policies of the modern left and will produce a counterreaction.

What will that be? Who is John Galt?