When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I came across a small news article about the energetic Ayn Rand Club at MIT. I had read three of her novels in high school, the appropriate time for sophomoric works. Along with Catcher in the Rye, Winesburg, Ohio, and many other books, I had already – at the age of twenty – begun to think of her novels as part of a wasted youth (too much reading, not enough sex). No one over twenty should – or could – take them seriously.

Apparently Rand was different, and appealed to a kind of person plentiful at MIT. She presented a logical social philosophy for people who knew little about social life. They were immature, yes, but there was no sign they would ever grown up. They were smart, not wise. Today we might suspect them of Asperger syndrome.

Paul Ryan is smart, too, in the style of an autodidact who has read widely without putting what he knows together into the big picture. Or perhaps putting it into a too simple a big picture. There is no mystery why a partially educated fellow like Ryan might cling to an adolescent worldview. The mystery is why he has accumulated followers who seem to find him some kind of profound guru. Even most Republicans, who as Rick Santorum reminded us do not even hope to attract smart people any more, must see through Ryan.

Or maybe not. Ryan reminds me of another would-be politician who used a similar kind of pseudo-intellectual style to attract a small but viciously devoted following, Lyndon LaRouche. There was one thing constant in LaRouche’s bizarre move from the authoritarian Left to the authoritarian Right: his use of impenetrable prose and technical jargon to “prove” his worldview. His main publications were couched as “executive reviews” and a magazine on the technical details of the fusion energy that would save the world. The very idea that a worldview can be “proven” is a telling mistake.

At the risk that I’ll sound like a crowd theorist of the 1950s, LaRouche’s followers seemed like social misfits. When they lurked around airports, their opening gambits for engaging passersby in conversation tended to be insults. “Even guys with beards can be for nuclear energy,” I remember one saying to me. Perhaps so, but not in my case. It took only a minute of conversation for him to turn contemptuous and end the conversation. An interesting way to win friends and influence people.

But the LaRouchies did not expect to win many friends (and they did not). It was more important to be right, to show off a few technical terms, and to feel superior to the rush of humanity. This is almost the definition of a cult: a group isolated from its surroundings by its own self-righteousness.

This pseudo-intellectual political style is linked to two other styles in American politics, famously analyzed by Richard Hofstadter a generation ago: anti-intellectualism and paranoia. Of the former, the great historian commented in 1962,

“Just as the most effective enemy of the educated man may be the half-educated man, so the leading anti-intellectuals are usually men deeply engaged with ideas, often obsessively engaged with this or that outworn or rejected idea.”

Ten years earlier he had written of the paranoid style’s pedantic concern with demonstration and facts:

“The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least of what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming ‘proof’ of the particular conspiracy that is to be established.”

The implausible conclusions are hidden in the forest of details.

In their local social circles, individuals often gain reputations for being profound thinker by deploying arguments like these, now easily available on the Internet, ready to send along or to cite at dinner parties. In addition, I suspect that there are certain professions, or semi-professions, where there are lots of people who appreciate the pseudo-intellectual style. Lower-level engineers, perhaps, or math and science teachers in middle schools: people whose sense of their own status depends on scientific facts, not social skills. More men, no doubt, than women, for that very reason. The laws of nature exist independently of what we think of them, and only a few understand those laws. That works fine if you are a scientist trying to discover a new neurotransmitter. But the laws of the social world – even economic markets – are not so simple.

Unfortunately the pseudo-intellectual style does get applied to social life, and that is when it turns dangerous. People with this worldview are rarely professional social scientists. In fact, the pseudo-intellectual aura of hard facts does not appeal to social OR natural scientists. The latter take a more pragmatic approach, seeing all findings as tentative and open to eventual refinement and revisions. There are no easy, complacent truths. But that does not stop quasi–intellectual occupations like math teachers or journalists from trying. Take a look at some of Glenn Beck’s elaborate diagrams of historical influence, linking Barack Obama to Angela Davis to Woodrow Wilson, and so on. It looks complicated, so it must be right.

The notorious hero of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, John Galt (tellingly, a double major in physics and philosophy, two fields revered but rarely understood by outsiders) proclaimed a contemptuous, anti-social philosophy “that I will never live for the sake of another man” because “you are your own highest value.” Surely Paul Ryan and his quasi-intellectual fans are a bit old for this sophomoric ranting?

I couldn’t sleep last night, haunted by a world gone crazy.

I dreamt that a purported Israeli, with the support of one hundred rich American Jews, pretended to make a feature length film aggressively mocking the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims in general – Islamophobia and anti-Semitism combined!

The faux film producer uploaded a mock trailer to YouTube. Along with thousands of other clips, it was ignored. But then when the film was dubbed into Arabic, the demagogues of the world all played their roles – the clash of civilizations as mediated performance art.

Radical Islamic clerics worked as film distributors (monstrous monstrators as my Daniel Dayan might put it), bringing the clip to the attention of the mass media and the masses. Islamist and anti-Islamist ideologues worked up their followers, happily supporting each other in their parts. Feckless diplomats in embassies tried to assure the public that hate-speech isn’t official American policy. Analysts identified root causes.

The clash of civilizations was confirmed. All the players needed each other, supported each other, depended on each other. A marvelous demonstration of social construction: W.I. Thomas would be proud of the power of his insight. Social actors defined the clash of civilizations as real, and it is real in its consequences.

A reality confirmed with a jolt when I awoke, knowing full well about the global attacks on American embassies and symbols, and the tragic death of a man who was determined to go beyond clashing clichés, the heroic American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. The American right, including the marvelous Mitt Romney and Fox News talking heads, denounced President Obama’s purported support of the attacks and failure to stand up for American values, including the freedom of speech — this from people who worry about the war on Christmas. It’s a surreal reality this morning.

And this morning, wide-awake, I am savoring Marvelous Mitt’s recent video performance: right-wing newspeak de-constructed. At last, class warfare in America has been given a full public airing. In pitching his candidacy with his fellow fat-cats, Romney revealed his definition of job producers, the nature of dependency and the work ethic. He also showed himself to be a true student of Ayn Rand. Really, all who depend on government vote for Obama and the Democrats? No wonder he selected Paul Ryan. Identifying those who don’t pay federal income taxes with votes for Democrats is amazingly poor sociology, bordering on comedy, a point made beautifully in a letter to the editor in today’s New York Times.

To the Editor:

I woke up early this morning and drove my daughter several miles on a government-built road, all the way to a government-operated school.

I came back to my home — for which I receive a government-sanctioned mortgage-interest deduction — and called my parents, who both receive Social Security and Medicare from the government. Then I signed on to the Internet, which was developed by government-sponsored researchers.

So Mitt Romney is right, on two counts. I am “dependent upon government.” And I’m not voting for him.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
New York, Sept. 18, 2012

Governor Romney’s selection of Congressman Ryan as his running mate assured the re-election of President Obama. Will Milberg already explained this from the point of view of the politics of economics a year and a half ago, while I first suggested my reasons in my review of Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address and Ryan’s official Republican response.

Romney has now firmly identified himself with a true-believing ideologist. The Ryan – Romney budget proposals, empowered by Ryan’s ideology, will hurt the guy who wanted Obama to keep his dirty, government hands off his Medicare, and many more people who depend on social programs in their daily lives. Thus, Milberg was quite sure when the Ryan plan was announced that the Republicans were finished.

And even though the nation is very divided, ideological extremism, even when it is in the name of the core American value of liberty, turns people, left, right and center, off, as the Republican nominee for president, Barry Goldwater learned in 1964.

Ryan’s ideology is not completely coherent. It has three sources: libertarian thought, a fundamentalist approach to the constitution, and a narrow understanding of natural law theory and the theological foundations of modern democracy. He recognizes tensions between these positions, but it doesn’t seem to bother him or slow him down. He still moves from theoretical certainty to practical policy as a true believer, and he does it with a happy and appealing smile on his face, which would be quite familiar to Milan Kundera, as he depicted such smiles in his novels A Book on Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The Congressman’s libertarianism comes via Ayn Rand, revealed in a speech he gave to the organization dedicated to keeping her flame, the Atlas Society. He explained:

I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged. People tell me I need to start with The Fountainhead then go to Atlas Shrugged [laughter]. There’s a big debate about that. We go to Fountainhead, but then we move on, and we require Mises and Hayek as well.

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.

In almost every fight we are involved in here, on Capitol Hill, whether it’s an amendment vote that I’ll take later on this afternoon, or a big piece of policy we’re putting through our Ways and Means Committee, it is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict: individualism vs. collectivism.

Ryan approaches the constitution as a libertarian and an avowed enemy of progressivism. He explained in an interview with Glenn Beck, which led Beck to become Ryan’s very strong advocate.

What I have been trying to do, and if you read the entire Oklahoma speech or read my speech to Hillsdale College that they put in there on Primus Magazine, you can get them on my Facebook page, what I’ve been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today and so to me it’s really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate.

GLENN: I love you.

PAUL RYAN: So people can actually see what this ideology means and where it’s going to lead us and how it attacks the American idea.

GLENN: Okay. Hang on just a second. I ‑‑ did you see my speech at CPAC?

PAUL RYAN: I’ve read it. I didn’t see it. I’ve read it, a transcript of it.

GLENN: And I think we’re saying the same thing. I call it ‑‑

PAUL RYAN: We are saying the same thing.

GLENN: It’s a cancer.

PAUL RYAN: Exactly. Look, I come from ‑‑ I’m calling you from Janesville, Wisconsin where I’m born and raised.

GLENN: Holy cow.

PAUL RYAN: Where we raise our family, 35 miles from Madison. I grew up hearing about this stuff. This stuff came from these German intellectuals to Madison‑University of Wisconsin and sort of out there from the beginning of the last century. So this is something we are familiar with where I come from. It never sat right with me. And as I grew up, I learned more about the founders and reading the Austrians and others that this is really a cancer because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature and turns it on its head and says, no, no, no, no, no, they come from government, and we here in government are here to give you your rights and therefore ration, redistribute and regulate your rights. It’s a complete affront of the whole idea of this country and that is to me what we as conservatives, or classical liberals if you want to get technical.

GLENN: Thank you.

PAUL RYAN: ‑‑ ought to be doing to flush this out. So what I was simply tying to do in that speech was simply saying those first versions, those first progressives, they tried to use populism and popular ideas as a means to getting ‑‑ detaching people from the Constitution and founding principles to pave the way for the centralized bureaucratic welfare state.

In the Hillsdale Speech and the Oklahoma speech Ryan does indeed explain himself more fully. His way of thinking about contemporary problems is deductive. He starts with simple propositions about the world, liberty and the rule of law, and then based on these propositions he understands complexity in a way that is quite similar to Beck’s approach. Progressivism bad. Individualism good. The constitution is understood as a univocal document that supports one party, the Republican Party, and its present agenda. The Democrats and their leader, on the other hand, are seen as undermining the founding document. They are a cancer, not opponents, but enemies.

This is where Ryan parts company with Rand. Instead of her atheism, he believes that the American system is a manifestation of God’s will. This he strikingly demonstrated in his speech on Saturday, accepting Romney’s nomination of him for Vice President. He declared: “Our rights come from nature and God, not government.” The sentence passed without much notice. Red meat for the religious right no doubt. But I wonder whose God and why God, and whose account of nature? Is it that of sound biology and environmental science? Or is it the creationist account? This is scary stuff. And I think as Americans went in response to Goldwater, they will go as well with Romney – Ryan.

Perhaps, therefore, the Romney – Ryan ticket will try to moderate their positions. Romney’s politics is notably flexible. Ryan is the ideologue. Romney isn’t. But they will then be running not only against Obama, but also against themselves. Romney was for “Romney – Obama Care,” until he was against it, and now Romney and Ryan may try being against (or perhaps more accurately not completely for) the Ryan Budget after they were for it. As Milberg put it: Obama Wins!