The 'Grand Old Marxists'

Who are the real Marxists? This is from Timothy Snyder at the NYRB blog:

Grand Old Marxists, by Timothy Snyder, NY Review of Books: A specter is haunting the Republican National Convention—the specter of ideology. The novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) and the economist Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) are the house deities of many American libertarians, much of the Tea Party, and Paul Ryan in particular. ...

Romney has lots of money... In the right-wing anarchism that arises from the marriage of Rand and Hayek, Romney’s wealth is proof that ... unhindered capitalism represented by chop-shops such as Bain must in the end be good for everyone. ...

The attempt to add intellectual ballast to Romney’s career pulls the ticket downward into the slog of twentieth-century ideology... Like Marxism, the Hayekian ideology is a theory of everything, which has an answer for everything. Like Marxism, it allows politicians who accept the theory to predict the future, using their purported total knowledge to create and to justify suffering among those who do not hold power. ...

Hayek and Rand are comfortable intellectual company not because they explain reality, but because, like all effective ideologists, they remove the need for any actual contact with it. ...

Rich Republicans such as Romney are of course a small minority of the party..., the Republican electorate ... must be instructed that their troubles are not simply a pointless contrast to the gilded pleasures of the man at the top of the Republican ticket, but rather part of the same story, a historical drama in which good will triumph and evil will be vanquished. Hayek provides the rules of the game: anything the government does to interfere in the economy will just make matters worse; therefore the market, left to its own devices, must give us the best of all possible worlds. Rand supplies the discrete but titillating elitism: this distribution of pleasure and pain is good in and of itself... In her novels, the suffering of ordinary Americans (“parasites,” as they are called in Atlas Shrugged) provides the counterpoint to the extraordinary pleasures of the heroic captains of industry (which she describes in weird sexual terms). A bridge between the pain of the people and the pleasure of the elite which mollifies the former and empowers the latter is the achievement of an effective ideology.

In the Romney/Ryan presidential campaign, Americans who are vulnerable and isolated are told that they are independent and strong, so that they will vote for policies that will leave them more vulnerable and more isolated. Ryan is a good enough communicator and a smart enough man to make reverse Marxism work as a stump speech or a television interview. But as national policy it would be self-destructive tragedy. ...