Being a Republican used to be respectable, back when Margaret Chase Smith was Senator from Maine. Of course in those days, conservatives weren't so stupid as to equate socialism and Stalinism. Only extreme reactionaries like Joe McCarthy and Ayn Rand did that. The American people were too smart to fall for such crap. Unfortunately, our educational system and media has declined since then.

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Senator Margaret Chase Smith

The Four Horsemen of Calumny

By Richard Girard

After writing "Contra Rand" (OpEdNews May 6, 2011), I felt a strong desire to be hosed down with strong degreasers and disinfectants. My desire arose from a vain hope that I could wash the slime and stench I always feel when I deal extensively with the Goddess of the Market, as Jennifer Burns titles Ayn Rand in her recent biography of the woman that I believe better deserves the title "demon queen of Objectivism." Unfortunately, I know that like the aftereffects of being sprayed by a skunk, I will have to wait for the worst of it to wear off, no matter how many tomato juice baths I take.

What is defined as Conservatism has dramatically changed in my lifetime. What once were considered "conservative values" are now considered centrist or even center-left values. The reactionary values of the John Birch Society and the White Citizens Councils in the 1960's have become the values of many modern conservatives. Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and Everett Dirksen would all be considered liberals by the modern conservative movement.

The primary difference between yesterday's conservative (Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, etc.) and today's (Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, etc.) is the influence of the writings of Ayn Rand. The modern conservative has been inculcated in the immoral cult of Randism , with its Objectivist "philosophy," and its inverted message of Marxist doctrine (where roles of capitalist and worker are reversed), as much as any member of the Red Guard was by the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao.

Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to Thomas Law in 1814) called self-interest "egoism." But there is often confusion between "egoism," and "egotism." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition copyright 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company defines "egoism" as follows:

1. a) The ethical doctrine that morality has its foundations in self-interest; b) The ethical belief that self-interest is the just and proper motive for all human conduct.

2. Excessive preoccupation with one's own well-being and interests, usually accompanied by an inflated sense of self-importance.

3. An inflated sense of one's own importance; conceit.

   It defines egotism as:

   1. The tendency to speak or write of oneself excessively and boastfully.

   2. An inflated sense of one's own importance; conceit.

   So while there is a tenuous, tertiary connection between the two words, their primary meaning is very different. Egoism is about a doctrine of self-interest; egotism is about boasting.

   This leads us back to Ayn Rand and her quasi-philosophy of Objectivism. As I pointed out two years ago in my article "Illuminating Dichotomies," (OpEdNews, September 19, 2008), Conservatives have taken the position since Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan that human beings are ultimately motivated solely by self-interest, and that liberals have an unrealistic view of the world if they dare to believe anything else. Liberals in turn believe that conservatives have a limited, irrational, even paranoid view of the world. Liberals believe that the conservative Weltanschauung is so colored by their paranoid assumption that everyone is out for themselves, all of the time, it makes conservatives' judgment concerning human relationships at best questionable.

   The great majority of conservatives will also try to claim that their self-interest is "enlightened;" that they can set aside their immediate self-interest for some probable (and more substantial) long term personal benefit. They use this to justify their most generous or seemingly altruistic actions, as well as others acts of generosity or mercy, claiming that they are truly neither. Altruism according to conservatives is contrary to human nature and, according to Ayn Rand, immoral. Humanity--by their standards--is a collection of self-absorbed brutes who do nothing except for their own personal reward or self-gratification. Conservatives leave any potential contradiction in the self-interest/altruism dichotomy to the liberals.

   And it is a contradiction, because altruism is no more the opposite of selfishness than love is the opposite of hate. Allow me to elucidate.

   Practically speaking, love is when you deeply care what happens to a person or a thing in a positive or constructive sense. Hate is when you deeply care what happens to a person or a thing in a negative or destructive sense, which is love turned inside out. The real opposite of love is apathy, where you do not care what happens, positively or negatively, to a person or thing.

   The same is true of selfishness and altruism. Selfishness is when you place your needs ahead of everyone else's. Altruism is when you place everyone else's needs ahead of your own; in other words, altruism is selfishness turned inside out. The true opposite of selfishness is fairness, where everyone's needs are met, to some extent.

   Once you understand the reality of this dichotomy, where altruism and selfishness are not true opposites, then Objectivism loses a primary justification for selfishness in a failed attempt to make opposites of what are inversions of one another. If one of a philosophy's basic premises is found to be faulty, then the entire system must be questioned. This is certainly the case with Objectivism. Correspondingly, Rand's twisted belief in how economics works, derived in part from the Austrian School of Economics of Hayek and Mises, is not the opposite of Marxism, but only its inversion. For this reason, it must be considered as flawed as the Marxist system from which it was transposed until proven otherwise.

   But it is with philanthropy that this inversion of selfishness and altruism sees its purest expression, in that the motivations that lie at the heart of philanthropy best demonstrate why altruism and selfishness are inversions of one another, not opposites. Philanthropy is generally altruistic, and very passive, often doing little to ease the immediate difficulties of the mass of working and middle class people who have actually made the philanthropist's gift possible. This philanthropy is contrary to an actual and active fairness, which would require the philanthropist to take care of the people who make his wealth possible at the time he acquires it. This can be easily done by making certain the people who work for him are receiving compensation that includes a livable wage, and benefits that permit them to obtain decent healthcare, housing, education, recreation, etc. Of course, it would reduce profits, at least in the short term.

   The conservatives today tell us, just as they did when Ayn Rand was writing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, that our only alternative to the socialist or Communist state (they have a difficult time differentiating between European social democracy and the Marxist state), is those systems' theoretical opposite (or more properly inversion), free market, laissez-faire capitalism, based upon the theories of the Austrian or Chicago Schools of Economics. This is often combined with a political system of libertarianism, which broadly includes the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand's Objectivism, and Robert Nozick's more cerebral system. Robert Locke correctly called libertarianism "The Marxism of the Right" in his eponymous article in the March 14, 2005 issue of The American Conservative.

   Conservatism's has always had two great weaknesses: its inability to think outside of a limited yes/no, black/white, right/wrong framework, and its inability to recognize when an idea has had its day, and needs to be discarded on the trash heap of history.

   This is demonstrated in the blindness of the disciples of Ayn Rand to the dangers posed by corporate power and bureaucratic centralization--as opposed to the State's (especially Fascism's and Communism's) dangers of government power and bureaucratic centralization. In my mind, this nullifies any claim on their part of legitimacy for the rightness, the nobility, and moral purity of corporations and their beloved laissez-faire capitalist system.

   Karl Marx wrote of the direction that the unfettered, free market capitalist system was doomed to go (and is now going) almost 170 years ago, four years before he and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto:

   "We have started out from the premises of political economy [i.e., free market capitalism]. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property; the separation of labor, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit, and capital; the division of labor; competition; the conception of exchange value, etc. From political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that, finally, the distinction between capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers." " Human Requirements and the Division of Labor ;" Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 48, 1844.

   What Marx is describing in this passage is the modern equivalent of the feudal system, of which Western Europe did not fully rid itself until the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. But a return to the two tier system of noble and serf seems to be the laissez-faire capitalist's ultimate goal.

   Where the laissez-faire capitalists make their mistake is their faith--and that is the only way that it can be described--that the market will somehow correct itself in an open economic system without any outside, i.e., governmental, controls.

   The free-market mavens always invoke Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nation's to justify their belief in a free market system. They always neglect to take notice that: 1) the free market described is always on a small scale, e.g. a town or province; 2) the "invisible hand" is a metaphor that Smith states falls apart at the national or international level, or when competition is reduced to a small enough number of businesses that permits them to effectively collude; 3) as Kenneth Lux explained in his book Adam Smith's Mistake, the failure of Adam Smith to add the word "only" to his famous statement, "It is not [put the word "only" right here] from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest," (The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 2, p. 23); made the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments appear in his second work to be justifying an amoral system.

   In fact, The Wealth of Nations elsewhere sets moral standards that are contrary to the above statement, "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of its members are poor and miserable. It is but equity besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged;" (Book I, chapter 8, p.p.110-1).

   Laissez-faire capitalism, by its very nature, does everything it can in order to maximize profits, including exploiting workers and eliminating competition.

   It is self-evident to me that it is in the best interest of the laissez-faire capitalist to do anything they can, both fair and foul, to increase their business's profitability. To quote Kenneth Lux, " The saving grace was supposed to be the "invisible hand" of competition"competition would keep these instincts [to drive competitors out of business] and "expensive vanities"...in line. Smith would hardly have been surprised at the motives of Rockefeller, but"would have been chagrined at his success. Smith"overlooked the possi bility that self-interest would work to undermine and eliminate competition and"tie up the invisible hand. It is"unrestrained self-interest that is the fundamental flaw in any absolute policy of laissez-faire." (Adam Smith's Mistake: How a Moral Philosopher Invented Economics and Ended Morality; 1990, p.p. 118-9.)

   Michael Schwalbe, in his recent article on Common Dreams, "A Primer on Class Struggle" (March 31, 2011), stated the employees' position in this amoral situation very succinctly:

   "One needn't embrace the labor theory of value to understand that employers try to increase profits by keeping wages down and getting as much work as possible out of their employees. As the saying goes, every successful capitalist knows what a Marxist knows; they just apply the knowledge differently. (Emphasis added.)

   Workers' desire for better pay and benefits, safe working conditions, and control over their own time puts them at odds with employers. Class struggle in this sense hasn't gone away. In fact, it's inherent in the relationship between capitalist employer and employee. What varies is how aggressively and overtly each side fights for its interests.

   Where else does class struggle occur? We can find class struggle wherever three things are at stake: the balance of power between capitalists and workers, the legitimacy of capitalism, and profits."

   http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/31-4

   The GOP's current tight party discipline must be the envy of every single extremist party in Western Europe, from the right-wing neo-Fascist parties to the few surviving Communists, Trotskyites, and Maoists. Their accusations of the Democrats moving the nation towards Socialism are less true than it has been at any time in the last seventy years, even during the heyday of the McCarthy era, when the alcoholic junior Senator from Wisconsin accused Harry Truman of not hunting down Communists in his Government.

   I will quote here from John Nichols' superb article, "How Socialists Built America," first published in The Nation, and reprinted at OpEdNews on April 16, 2011:

   "Truman had stirred conservative outrage by arguing that the government had the authority to impose anti-lynching laws on the states"...[and] proposing a national healthcare plan"...[He] had not [only]...won the [1948] election but restored Democratic control of Congress. To counter this ominous electoral trend, conservative Republicans, led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft, announced in 1950 that their campaign slogan in that year's Congressional elections would be 'Liberty Against Socialism.' They then produced an addendum to their national platform"charging that Truman's Fair Deal 'is dictated by a small but powerful group of persons who believe in socialism, who have no concept of the true foundation of American progress, and whose proposals are wholly out of accord with the true interests and real wishes of the workers, farmers and businessmen.'

   Truman did not cower at the mention of the word 'socialism,' which in those days was distinguished in the minds of most Americans from Soviet Stalinism "Nor did Truman "rave about the evils of social democracy. Rather, he joked that 'Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, "socialism.'

   Savvy Republicans moved to abandon the campaign. The return to realism was led by Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who feared that her party was harming not just its electoral prospects but the country. That summer she would issue her 'Declaration of Conscience'--the first serious challenge to McCarthyism from within the GOP--in which she rejected the anti-communist hysteria of the moment:

   'Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism--

   The right to criticize;
   The right to hold unpopular beliefs;
   The right to protest;
   The right of independent thought.'

   Republicans might be determined to end Democratic control of Congress, Smith suggested in her declaration:

   'Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny--Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.

   I doubt if the Republican Party could--simply because I don't believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest.'"

   http:// www.thenation.com /article/159929/how-socialists-built- america

   There was a time I respected the Republicans. And Margaret Chase Smith was one of the Republicans I respected most. I see no member of the GOP today worthy of carrying her pipe cleaners.

   We now have a Republican Party that is united against a President in a way they never were against President Truman, because Barack Obama has succeeded in passing a minimal national healthcare plan, and had the audacity to commit the heinous crime of taking the Oath of Office to be President of the United States while Black. The "modern" Republican Party has embraced Senator Smith's Four Horsemen of Calumny like a long lost lover.

   The traditional seven deadly sins (pride, covetousness, lust, wrath, envy, gluttony, and sloth) are either the expression or result of selfishness. Pride--considered by theologians to be the deadliest of all the sins--is nothing more than the highest expression of narcissistic egoism. It blinds us to our faults, as well as to others' needs. And the modern Conservative is driven by pride that refuses to admit the slightest fault, or that a political opponent may be right. This pride seems driven by a need to avoid confronting the moral inadequacy of their own positions, or the lack of moral substance in the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

   Corey Robin, in an article written last year for The Nation, (reprinted at Alternet.org on June 7, 2010), "Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage As Truth -- Why Did America Buy It?" stated the point almost perfectly:

   "On her own, Rand is of little significance. It is only her resonance in American culture--and the unsavory associations her resonance evokes--that makes her of any interest. She's not unlike the 'second-hander' described by Roark: 'Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation"The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person.' For once, it seems, he knew whence he spoke.

   But after all the Nietzsche is said and Aristotle is done, we're still left with a puzzle about Rand: how could such a mediocrity, not just a second-hander but a second-rater, exert such a continuing influence on the culture at large?"

   http://www.alternet.org/story/147133/

   Like Christian fundamentalists with the Bible, I believe that Ayn Rand "cherry picked" those parts of Aristotle and Nietzsche which supported her viewpoint, and ignored those parts that clashed with her Weltanschauung. Although she claimed a degree in "Social Pedagogy" (Social Studies) from the university in Leningrad, her knowledge of history seems to me to be very myopic, and totally lacking in either breadth or depth, and her knowledge of American History seems limited to what she learned watching movies in Hollywood.

   But most of all, her lack of tolerance for other points of view, even within the Conservative movement in her day--as Jennifer Burns writes in her book Goddess of the Market --mark her now and forever as someone riding Margaret Chase Smith's Four Horsemen of Calumny to their ultimate destination, and dragging too much of our nation with her into Hell.

   
   
   
   Authors Bio:
   
   

   Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'