Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Part 3

When life hands you lemons, just make shit up. Image from these wankers.


Chapter IV The Immovable Movers

“A simple rule in dealing with those who are hard to get along with is to remember that this person is striving to assert his superiority; and you must deal with him from that point of view”
Alfred Adler

Earlier in our story we learned that the world was divided into two groups, the superior and the inferior. The superior group, which is very small, is made up of extremely intelligent men and women who live only to triumph over others. The second group is the lice, the looters and moochers, who live only to drag down the Ubermensch as they are jealous of the latter's ability and vitality. Tragically the lice are winning; they are too numerous to fight and too tiny to step on.

Her work was all [Dagny} had or wanted. But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden, peculiar emptiness, which was not emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as if nothing within her were destroyed, but everything stood still. Then she felt the wish to find a moment's joy outside, the wish to be held as a passive spectator by some work or sight of greatness.

Dagny is an inhuman creation. She bears no resemblance whatsoever to a real person who feels the full gamut of human emotions and forms connections with other people. She loathes everyone and everything about her world. As Dagny walks home from her day at the office she is overcome with disgust at the taste and achievements of everything she sees. She spends the entire walk figuratively telling the world to get off her lawn, the losers. She hates modern music, "a long screech without shape, as of cloth and flesh being torn at random." She hates modern books which attack businessmen for their greed, modern movies with their conventional sexual morality, and everyone who reads those books, goes to those movies, or visits decadent modern nightclubs.

What had she hoped to find?--she thought, walking on. These were the things men lived by, the forms of their spirit, of their culture, of their enjoyment. She had seen nothing anywhere, not for many years.

The past is always a better place in AS, just as Rand's childhood was a better time, of servants and lessons and comfort, and, if not love, at least a sense of belonging. Protected by her parents' wealth, revolution and war and starvation were distant things. But they could not protect her forever and as she grew to adulthood life became harsh and uncertain. Rand, smart and stubborn and prickly, whose opinions once formed were formed forever, fixed on the masses, the common man, as the source of life's suffering. They were inferior and jealous, just like cold, mistrustful, serious little Alisa's schoolmates and playmates. All they all wanted to make her suffer, as she had suffered at the hands of Russian revolutionaries.

Dagny finally reaches her apartment, a nearly empty penthouse. She sates her need for greatness by listening to Richard Halley's last work. He is the only composer Dagny likes, and, of course, the only one worthy of appreciation.

It was his forth Concerto, the last work he had written. The crash of its opening chords swept the sights of the streets away from her mind. The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It was a "No" flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. The sounds were like a voice saying: There is no necessity for pain--why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?--we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom?...The sounds of torture became defiance, the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the song of rebellion--and of a desperate quest.

"We who hold the love and the secret of joy." Dagny's a special little snowflake, who alone appreciates that which is good in the world. Everyone else but a few Ubermensch--bad. Dagny and and the few people she considers equals--good.

Is it any wonder that 14-year-olds adore this book? The struggle to break free from the oppression of family and the fantasy of the perfect life after freedom is achieved, the certainty that they and they alone understand human feelings and needs, and the self-pity that accompanies the hormonal agonies of suffering they feel they are forced to endure. Throw in a a clique of back-stabbing girls or a vampire and you've got every teen show on the CW.

Rand expositions that Halley had been ignored by the dull masses until he reached middle age, at which time the dull masses suddenly recognized his genius--the "man who could give to sounds a greater eloquence than they had ever carried." His first great work of art was a retelling of the myth of Phaeton.

[Halley] had changed the ancient Greek myth to his own purpose and meaning: Phaethon, the young son of Helios, who stole his father's chariot and, in ambitious audacity, attempted to drive the sun across the sky, did not perish, as he perished in the myth; in Halley's opera, Phaethon succeeded.

Of course he did. In our fantasies and daydreams we always come out on top. Phaeton was not strong enough to control the sun chariot, but try telling that to a 14-year-old.

Phaethon: Dad, can I drive the chariot today? You let Aeetes drive the chariot when he was my age.

Helios: Sorry, son, Aeetes was a lot stronger than you. You'll have to wait another year.

Phaethon: That's not fair! You always loved Aeetes more than me! I know I could do it!

Helios: Not until you're 18.

Phaeton: That is so lame! And it's not like I have anything else to do. Everyone else goes to Crete and Mycenae during vacation and we never go anywhere!

Helios: All right! You can drive the chariot, but only if you're careful and you don't go too fast.

Phaeton: Great! Don't worry, I'll be successful because I have the audacity to strive for greatness. As the child of a great man, I'm sure to be great too. What could go wrong?

Phaeton's ambition and audacity were more important than silly things like ability, strength and training. He dared to reach for greatness and such heroic characters deserve recognition for their specialness. People who were born to greatness like Rand deserve credit just for seeing their own unlimited potential. Reality is too boring, too small for such giants. A mediocre career as a screenwriter and novelist, hampered by a tendency to have her characters spout political philosophy instead of dialogue, wasn't enough for Rand. She had to recognized and lauded for her intellect, as she was is childhood, and if her reality wouldn't recognize her greatness then by golly Rand would create one that did.

During this time Rand wrote Red Pawn, in which a heroic woman infiltrated a Russian prison camp to save her husband. Both the bad guy and the good guy fall in love with her and the camp commander sacrificed himself so she could be free. In The Night Of January 16, an independent young woman who refuses to bow down to society's pressure to conform to its morality is put on trial for murder. Both a bad guy and the good guy fall in love with her. We The Living was the story of a young woman's erotic journey from Milan to Minsk suffering at the hands of the Communists while trying to become an engineer and keep her ideals alive. Both the bad guy and the good guy fall in love with her.

Making yourself the hero of your stories isn't necessarily bad. In the hands of a good writer it won't make very much difference to the reader. In the hands of a bad writer, however, the wish fulfillment overtakes the story:

Note that self-insertion isn't automatically bad. After all, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be a hero in your favorite show — provided that you remember to insert your flaws as well as your fantasies. After all, not everybody loves and adores you in real life, so they're not all going to love and adore you in a fanfic, either. Play it this way, and even if somebody does notice that you've just written an Author Avatar, they probably won't mind too much. Self-insertion, complete with flaws and realistic reactions from everyone involved, is just as good a way to make a new OC as any other. What was originally a self-insert can even adapt and evolve into a genuine Original Character.

Even hooking up with your dream character can be acceptable provided they do so realistically..... The trouble is that a new writer doesn't think about that. They think only about ways in which their Author Avatar can be perfect, can within minutes hook up with the sexiest character available, cure their faults, force their beliefs on others, and ninja-kick their way to being the hero, rather than working on a realistic way they can enter the plot.

While Dagny's soul is crying out in pain, stabbed to the core by the looters-n-moochers who are trying to destroy her, her brother James is busy with his own looting and mooching. After a tryst (sordid and unemotional) with his girlfriend (unattractive, bitchy and badly dressed), James gets the bad news that the San Sebastian Mines and his railroad line were nationalized by Mexico. He joins the Board at a hasty meeting and takes credit for Dagny's foresight, then meets with her to joyfully break the news that the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule has passed.

The Rule collectivizes the railroad industry and Rand describes it in loving detail. Railroads would be forced to provide service to unprofitable areas and eliminate new competition in overbuilt areas. Dagny is enraged by this interference in the free market, because in a Rand fantasy the railroads did not need government laws, powers and funds to join major business centers and the only bad monopoly is a government monopoly. James is thrilled; that'll teach his know-it-all sister, and punish her for her competence! Dagny tries to reason with her competition in the West, Dan Conway, the owner of the Phoenix-Durango line, but he's been broken by the looters-n-moochers. Dagny says:

If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give the the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we'd better start slaughtering one another, because there isn't any right in the world!

[snip]

I thought there was room enough there for both of us.... Still, if I found that there wasn't, I would have fought you, and if I could make my road better than yours, I'd have broken you and not given a damn about what happened to you. But this---Dan, I don't think I want to look at our Rio Norte Line now. I.... Oh, God, Dan, I don't want to be a looter!"

Rand was a Fundamentalist. Like Ross Douthat, clutching his Bible in wild-eyed panic to defend himself from the invisible hordes who want to snatch it from his pudgy, soft white hands, Rand divided the world into The Chosen and the Gay-Eat-Gay Rulers Evil Barbarian Hordes. Rand witnessed the rise and fall of revolutions and the convulsive violence of the struggle for power and learned the exact opposite of what a normal, feeling person would learn. In Dr. Zhivago, the author shows that the revolution ruined lives and caused a tremendous amount of human suffering; in AS, the socialist revolution ruins machinery and makes the trains run late. Rand's father lost his business so the most important thing in the AS world is owning businesses, running them the way one wants to, and keeping all the profits. If Rand's father were a poet she probably would have created a pale, cliched, badly written copy of Dr. Zhivago, in which all of the world's unappreciated poets rise up and slaughter the modernists.

Fortunately for Dagny's tenuous sanity, the next person who walks through her office door is The Colorado Kid, Ellis Wyatt.

The man who entered was a stranger. He was young, tall and something about him suggested violence, though she could not say what it was, because the first trait one grasped about him was a quality of self-control that seemed almost arrogant. He had dark eyes, disheveled hair, and his clothes were expensive, but worn as if he did not care of notice what he wore.

"Ellis Wyatt," he said in self-introduction.

She leaped to her feet, involuntarily. She understood why nobody had or could have stopped him in the outer office.

Wyatt thinks Dagny agrees with the Dog-Eat-Dog Rule and coolly tells her that she must do a good job transporting his oil across the country or he'll destroy her. Dagny is mortified that he believes she is a looter, or perhaps a moocher, but she is also elated to find another UUbermensch.

She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle; she wanted to cry to him: I'm not one of them! But she knew that she could not do it. She bore the responsibility for Taggart Transcontinental and for everything done in its name; she had no right to justify herself now.

I'm not one of them. I'm special. Yet Dagny actually does something to back up that little cry of superiority; she accepts responsibility for her actions. Fundamentalist worshippers always pick and choose which beliefs they will follow, abandoning ones they don't find emotionally satisfying and emphasizing the ones that make them feel special, so we are accustomed to seeing Libertarians ignore this very important aspect of Randian greatness. Nothing is ever anybody's fault, things just happen for systemic reasons and assigning blame and punishing the elite for their illegalities is just looking backwards instead of forwards. Dagny would have bitch-slapped your typical Koch-fed Reason Libertarian into next week for daring to make excuses about economic failure. Excuses are a sign of weakness and the mewling weak must be eliminated before they drag everyone down into the dirt with them. The only exception is the very few members of the rabble who worship the Ubermensch, who achieve a little bit of greatness by recognizing Rand's Dagny's greatness.

Dagny now has nine months to build the Rio Norte Line to Wyatt's oil fields in Colorado. She meets with Hank Reardon in his offices and he agrees to provide the Reardon Metal rails in time, for a hefty profit. He and Dagny work out the deals of the contract, which passes for flirting with them.

His smile had a discernible quality now. It was enjoyment. "You always play it open, don't you," he asked.

"I've never noticed you doing otherwise."

"I thought I was the only one who could afford to."

"I'm not broke, in that sense, Hank.

"I think I"m going to break you some day--in that sense."

"Why?"

"I've always wanted to"

"Don't you have enough cowards around you?"

"That's why I'd enjoy trying it--because you're the only exception."

Yeah, that's not creepy at all. Both Wyatt and Reardon have an air of violence about them, as did Grandpa Nate Taggart; Rand equates strength with violence and sees nothing wrong with committing violence in the name of Greatness. This was most famously demonstrated by her admiration for a pathetic little serial killer.

The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roarke, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others." (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.)

Reardon tells Dagny that they'll just have to "pick up the slack" for all the incompetent people in the world and work harder to compensate for the lice's stupidity and weakness. "People like Jim Taggart just clutter up the world," Reardon tell Dagny. They forget all about the rest of the world as they discuss replacing everything made of steel with the miracle metal Reardon developed through brains, skill and endless experimentation, which is either half as light as steel or even lighter; Rand is not consistent. Ships made of Reardon Metal will never sink; a torpedo will not dent one. A mile of chicken wire will cost pennies and last hundreds of years. Kitchen pots will be sold at the dime store and last generations. Dagny's trains will go from 20 mph to 250 mph.

But Reardon can't shake off his feeling that there is something wrong with him, since everyone else says so. He only cares for material things, not "spiritual goals or qualities." Dagny can't understand his "feelings" and is alarmed by what appears to be an expression of guilt, but she knows in her heart they they are two minds who think as one, and that's all she needs to know. Reardon tells her, "Dagny, whatever we are, it's we who move the world and it's we who'll pull it through." Nobody else matters because as long as they are doing great things they are great people.

This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. This was the way she had expected to live--she had wanted to spend no hour and take no action that would mean less than this.

The real world doesn't exist, and doesn't deserve to exist. The world of ordinary people, alternately flawed and wise, kind and thoughtless, caring and uninvolved--is too mundane, to boring, too--human. And people are too human too. They have needs, which just drag you down from your quest for greatness. They demand emotional responses like concern and love, warmth, interest, openness, which you are unable to understand and which make you uneasy, knowing that you are missing out on something undefinable, something out of reach and eternally enigmatic. You can do a math problem or answer a history question or speak five languages, but the language of mankind is forever beyond your reach, and in your loneliness and confusion and resentment you close your heart to your fellow man. You tell yourself that everyone else is just a stupidhead anyway and you don't want their friendship or love or attention. And one day they'll be sorry because you'll be the most important person in the whole world and everyone will recognize your Greatness and when you are gone and they have to try to survive without you they'll be sorry then, and all you'll do is laugh, laugh, laugh.

Stupid people. Who needs them anyway?

Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Part 2

Chapter III The Top And The Bottom

"It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." Abraham Maslow

In her review of Atlas Shrugged, Megan McGalt said:

The movie left out the things that could have made it gripping: the aesthetic that deftly mixes comic books, film noir, and WPA murals; the reverance [sic] for genius and innovation; the stories that dramatize pure principle. These things are barely name checked, much less used. The best stories--like the nationalization of the San Sebastian mines, or the attempt by the 20th Century Motor Company to run its business along the lines of the communist motto "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"--are compressed into two lines, explained ineptly.

McArdle must have thoroughly enjoyed Chapter II, which goes from James Taggart's meeting with the top businessmen in New York to Dagny Taggart's conversation with a lowly news vendor in the lobby of her office building, which is Rand's version of the proverbial bus passenger whose views echo the writer's perfectly. Taggart meets with his friends in a skyscraper bar, which is ugly and nonsensical (it is built to resemble a cellar) because everything the Bad Guys do is ugly and nonsensical. It is extremely unlikely that a popular bar would have a ceiling so low one actually has to stoop to walk under it, but Rand does not feel constrained by everyone else's reality since she is making up one of her own.

James's meeting with a small group of like-minded industrialists is a scene we have seen described a hundred times before, as libertarians put finger to temple and imagine what liberals do together in one of their secret socialist cabal meetings. Evidently they band together to create new laws that pretend to be about fairness but actually are passed to squash competition. As Megan McGalt described:

Well, I dare the [regulation] defenders to tell me why casket sales need to be tightly regulated. You don't even necessarily legally need a casket to get buried in, according to the folks I talked to at the Institute for Justice, which is helping a group of Louisiana monks defend their casket-making business from the predations of industry insiders. The construction of a box is not one of those complicated things that only licensed professionals can master. And even if it were, it's not like the occupant is going to be hurt by a badly-constructed casket.

The regulatory board, naturally, "has nine members, eight of whom are funeral industry professionals". And the explanations of why the monks should not be able to sell caskets are embarrassingly bad; the best the Journal could come up with, apparently, is this: [snipped quote]

The real story, of course, is that caskets are a huge margin business for funeral homes. You can see why--it's easier to mark up a fancy box than to put an enormous price tag on preparing the body, which could cause an emotional freak-out on the part of the family. It's hard to maintain those kinds of margins in the era of the internet, especially since caskets are the very definition of a commodity business--there's just not much differentiation in styling or quality in a wooden box.

So funeral directors are doing their best to protect their business. I don't really blame them. But that doesn't mean that the rest of us should cooperate by enabling ridiculous licensing schemes.

See? Regulation exists to squash competition, just like Ayn Rand said. McGalt does not discuss, for instance, how the regulation of polluters like Koch Industries would also squash competition, but we suspect that it would lead to the end of competition in the toilet paper market and therefore the Koches should be able to pollute at will. After all, the poisoned people can always stop buying Koch products and Koch will be forced by Free Market Equilibrium to change its more lethal practices--as long as government regulation doesn't spoil the whole thing, of course.

Rand's Bad Guys do whatever Rand needs them to do, regardless of logic or reality. Nobody is accountable to stockholders and everyone sits around weakly, just waiting for their businesses to eventually fail. The industrialists do take some action to preserve their markets; they band together to to eliminate Reardon, who is buying up failing business he needs for the production of Reardon Metal. But they ignore the activity in Colorado, although it seems that every bit of machinery Dagny sees was made there. They are more concerned with helping Mexico become a successful socialist country, because when you are writing a How I Became The Most Important Woman In The World fantasy, you can contort your characters so they are socialists and monopoly capitalist simultaneously.

James Taggart asks Orren Boyle, owner of Associated Steel, if Mexico will nationalize the San San Sebastian mine, the only privately owned mine left in the country. Boyle made his money by getting huge government loans; all the Bad Guys made money through inheritance and favors, all the Good Guys made money through talent and hard work and mental toughness, even if they inherited great wealth. Because Boyle is weak he is also stupid; he says the mines won't be privatized. He tells James that Dagny has put her worst trains on the Taggart railroad line to the San Sebastian Mine and they all agree that nobody can do anything anyway, but James promises to himself that Dagny will pay, oh yes she will.

Throughout the conversation a weak, sycophantic, despised man sits at the table; he is James' lobbyist in Washington. We pause to take note that Megan McGalt's father was a lobbyist for New York construction firms, something that she stopped mentioning a long time ago, preferring to call him an academic instead. In Rand's world, lobbyists are nasty little men who are hired by the Good Guys because the latter are forced by an increasingly socialist government to protect themselves. Our Ubermensch accept the necessity of such men but despise them and everything they stand for, which is supposed to convince us that Dagny and Reardon are pure and uncompromising in every way while they are enjoying the advantages lobbying gives them.

In Grandpa Taggart's day there were other ways of dealing with Senators and their legalistic shenanigans; Nat Taggart murdered a state legislator who planned to revoke Taggart's charter for personal profit and threw down the stairs a government official who offered him a loan. But he was a Good Guy, living up to his Galtian potential, so that was okay. Rand has no problem with murdering the weak, or simply the unlucky, as long as one is achieving greatness, a characteristic she held in common with communists, the people she hated most in the world.

Dagny always felt she was destined for greatness, unlike the rest of the world, which was destined for the dirt where they could more easily be trodden upon by the elite.

Dagny Taggart was nine years old when she decided that she would run Taggart Transcontinental Railroad some day. She state it to herself when she stood alone between the rails, looking at the two straight lines of steel that went off into the distance and met in a single point. What she felt was an arrogant pleasure at the way the track cut through the woods; it did not belong in the midst of ancient trees, among green branches that hung down to meet green brush and the lonely spears of wild flowers-but there it was. The two steel lines were brilliant in the sun, and the black ties were like the rungs of a ladder which she had to climb.

It was not a sudden decision, but only the final seal of words upon something she had known long ago. In unspoken understanding, as if bound by a vow it had never been necessary to take, she and Eddie Willers had given themselves to the railroad from the first conscious days of their childhood.

I can imagine Dagny's childhood was a little different from most girls'.

Maid: Miss Dagny, it's time for your bath.

Dagny Taggart, aged 4: You fool, do you think a moocher like you can tell me what to do? One day I shall rule this nation while you and your progeny will sink back into the muck from which you came. And I can't wait until I make it happen!

Maid: That's it, Missy. No more cookies before bedtime. The sugar makes you cross.

Dagny: Curse your weak, redistributionist soul!

This small child, this little girl, thinks of nothing but conquest over the entire world. Ordinarily a child with this attitude would be accompanied by either Rod Serling or a male nurse carrying a tranquilizer gun, but poor, misunderstood Dagny's only companion is her pet dog, Eddie Willers.

She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait, she thought, and grow up to that world.

As we mentioned before, Rand gritted her teeth throughout childhood and waited impatiently for the agony to be over. She felt that the only quality worth having was intelligence and that everyone else, from her classmates to the adults in her mother's social and intellectual circles, were stupid and therefore without any worth at all.

Implicit in Alice's reminiscences about her childhood is the fact that, from her parents and from the other adults she encountered, love and admiration were purchased by the qualities of her mind. When her mother paraded her before the relatives, it was because Alice's bright lucidity inspired their admiration; when her father smiled at her during his visits to the nursery at the end of the day, it was because she had told him of some activity--a game she had invented, a picture in a children's book she had built a story around--that demonstrated the quickness of her mind. Alice learned well the lesson contained in the reactions she received....But she placed on intelligence what can only be termed a moral value; intelligence and virtue were to become inextricably linked in her mind and her emotions; where she saw no unusual intelligence--not the capacity for dedicated productive work that she believed to be its consequences-she saw no value that meant anything to her in personal terms.

A child who is not loved has great difficulty loving others. Many children attempt to mold themselves into something that will gain that love, but others will try to mold the world instead. They will spend their lives trying to create a world which mirrors the one inside, demanding that everyone else acknowledge that they are right and the rest of the world is wrong, wrong, wrong.

[Dagny] never tried to explain why she liked the railroad. Whatever it was that others felt, she knew that this was one emotion for which they had no equivalent and no response. She felt the same emotion in school, in classes of mathematics, the only lesson she liked. She felt the excitement of solving problems, the insolent delight of taking up a challenge and disposing of it without effort, the eagerness to meet another, harder test. She felt, at the same time, a growing respect for the adversary, for a science that was so clean, so strict, so luminously rational. Studying mathematics, she felt, quite simply and at once: "How great that men have done this" and "How wonderful that I'm so good at it." It was the joy of admiration and of one's own ability, growing together. Her feeling for the railroad was the same: worship of the skill that had gone to make it, of the ingenuity of someone's clean, reasoning mind, worship with a secret smile that said she would know how to make it better some day.She hung around the tracks and the roundhouses like a humble student, but the humility had a touch of future pride, a pride to be earned.

"You're unbearably conceited," was one of the two sentences she heard throughout her childhood, even though she never spoke of her own ability. The other sentence was "You're selfish." She asked what was meant, but never received an answer. She looked at the adults, wondering how they could imagine that she would feel guilt from an undefined accusation.

Who is calling Dagny selfish and conceited? Knowing Rand's childhood, we suspect she is referring to Dagny's mother, who is utterly absent from the story, at least so far. In the end Rand has her revenge against mothers who don't appreciate their superior offspring; Reardon's mother is a harpy and Dagny's is simply non-existent. Dagny raised herself, it seems, and did a mighty fine job of it if she does say so herself. She didn't need help growing up just as she doesn't need her teachers in math, and obviously the other subjects didn't matter. Dagny boot-straps her way into running the railroad by asking her father for a job, which "amused and a little curious," he gives her. She works as a railroad operator, which the internets tells us is a person who "report[s] trains to the Dispatcher, copie[s] train orders, and delivers clearances and order[s] to the crews." Dagny works at night so she can go to engineering school, which she also starts at 16. Wisely, the other rail men do not protest or inhibit the career of the daughter of the railroad's owner, but Rand asserts that Dagny's rise was due solely to everyone else's incompetence.

Dagny's rise among the men who operated Taggart Transcontinental was swift and uncontested. She took positions of responsibility because there was no one else to take them. There were a few rare men of talent around her, but they were becoming rarer every year. Her superiors, who held the authority, seemed afraid to exercise it, and they spent their time avoiding decisions, so she told people what to do and they did it. At every step of her rise, she did the work long before she was granted the title. It was like advancing through empty rooms. Nobody opposed her, yet nobody approved of her progress.

Nobody stopped her because Daddy would have fired them, but in Rand World the moochers do not act because they are weak, not out of self-preservation. They do not try to protect their jobs when the boss's daughter starts usurping their power because they are afraid to make decisions, yet they were hired by her father's company and worked for him for years. For someone enamored of capitalist success, Rand seems to know very little about how companies are run and seems to care even less. Ubermensch must succeed effortlessly to prove their superiority so they do, no matter how nonsensical the story becomes.

Of course James starts in public relations at age 21, because he is a loser who just wants to schmooze with Washington power brokers. And of course the Board of Directors elected him president of the company, because Dagny only suffers from sexism when the story demands it. Mostly Dagny suffers from the stupidity and mediocrity of the rest of the world.

It was only in the first few years that she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or an enemy with a mind better than her own. But the longing passed. She had a job to do. She did not have time to feel pain; not often

.

Ordinarily a childhood like Dagny's would lead a fictional character into a short but glorious career as a Supervillain, but Dagny is not lucky enough to have a Superman to her Lex Luthor.

The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude--a gray spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything, or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.

Nobody has anything to teach teenage Dagny; she knows everything and has already achieved perfection of character and morality. Everyone else is a stupidhead and stands in her way. She has no friends or boyfriends, doesn't go to movies or dances or dinner parties, doesn't travel for pleasure, doesn't like or love anyone. She is utterly cut off from humanity and instead of yearning for a human connection, she yearns to find someone who is exactly like herself, except better, of course, or they would just be another loser. Because that is how people are judged in Rand's world: first by intelligence, then by usefulness. Dagny's old boyfriend Francisco d'Anconia, who captured Dagny's attention by being intelligent and successful, disappointed her by also being useless and thus was rejected, not achieving the rank of Ubermensch.

After meeting with James and discussing her sabotage of the Taggart Mexican line, Dagny stops off in the lobby to talk with the news vendor and indulge in her only activity unrelated to the railroad, buying and smoking cigarettes. Dagny and her news vendor agree that men just aren't men anymore, they are weak and frightened creatures. The vendor is special somehow; his business has failed and his family and friends are gone, but these signs of inferiority mean nothing compared to his ability to recognize the superiority of his betters.

Dagny liked to stop at his newsstand on her way out. He seemed to be part of the Taggart Terminal, like an old watchdog too feeble to protect it, but reassuring by the loyalty of his presence. He like to see her coming, because it amused him to think that he alone knew the importance of the young woman in a sports coat and a slanting hat, who came hurrying anonymously through the crowd.

As always, the biggest sign of a person's superiority in Atlas Shrugged is that they recognize the worth of a poor, suffering, unappreciated, hard-working Galtian who just wants to do a good job but is surrounded by weaklings and idiots. But before too long Dagny will find what she is looking for--a person as unemotional, selfish, arrogant and alienated as herself.

Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

The most important thing to remember about Atlas Shrugged is that it's bad. Very, very, very bad. Obviously, consistently, blatantly, incontrovertibly bad. The writing is bad, the characters are loathsome, the action is doled out as if by an eyedropper, the morality is corrupt and the Ubermensch are about as Uber as your basic mouth-breathing, mother-hating serial killer. (More on him later.) Therefore, anyone who enjoyed Atlas Shrugged, or modeled his life philosophy on it, or gave herself a nom de cretin modelled after one of Shrugged's characters, is an idiot whose thoughts do not deserve a single moment of consideration. Randians have all the intellectual heft of someone who read Madam Bovary and thought it would be a swell idea to have affairs and swallow arsenic. Or someone who read Animal Farm and put on a piggy costume and overworked a farm horse. Or someone who read John Carter Of Mars and spent the rest of his life dreaming of bedding alien women. To paraphrase Neil Simon, Atlas Shrugged sucks and its fans are the suck-ees. And we have 1,168 pages of proof. Let's take a look.

Let the mocking begin.

Chapter 1 The Theme

The theme of AS, going by the first chapter, is that everything and everyone sucks except for Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon and maybe a few other people. This might not seem like much of a theme, but that's what happens in dreadful books. The theme is greed is good, or every emotion but triumph is bad, or only a half-dozen people deserve to exist despite--or because of--the fact that they are sociopaths. Sometimes you get lucky, like in this book, and all these themes are included.

The story opens with one of the Good Guys, Eddie Willers, at work in a depressed, crumbling New York City. We know he is one of the good guys because his every thought and action revolved around his job and he has absolutely no life outside of it. He is doggily and doggedly devoted to his boss, Dagny Taggart, the daughter of the founder of Taggart Transcontinental railroad, and has been since they were small children together. Rand flashes back to Willers' childhood, when the two discussed the nature of greatness and when Willers often contemplated a giant tree on Dagny's property. The tree seems to hold up the world, like Atlas himself, yet is destroyed by a bolt of lightning and its rotted and empty core exposed for all the world to see. This passes for subtlety in Rand's world.

Willers is having troubles at work. It seems that the entire world became tired of money and decided to stop trying to make it. Mine owners stopped digging ore, businessmen stopped selling steel, manufacturers stopped manufacturing, repairmen stopped repairing, salesmen stopped selling. Everyone just decided, out of the blue, after centuries of selling everything they could get their hands on, from Indian burial goods to trees to beaver to bison to cotton to cloth to everything else that the US has manufactured, to change their nature, their entire way of life, and stop buying and selling. They now want to share and be equal. They've gone and quit business-ing, and not in a good Galtian way either.

Willers decides to talk to the railroad's president, Dagny's brother James. James is a Bad Guy. We know this because his appearance, his voice, his character, his morality, and every single solitary thing he does and says is repellent. He and all the other Bad Guys are exactly alike--without a single redeeming feature.

[James] had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of this tall, slender boy, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the gawkiness of a lout. The flesh of his face was pale and soft. His eyes were pale and veiled, with a glance that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past things in eternal resentment of their existence. He looked obstinate and drained. He was thirty-nine years old.

Why is James so weak when Dagny is so strong and self-assured? They have the same bloodline--which Rand informs us is both noble by birth and ennobled by the blood of their boot-strapping industrialist father because Rand always wants to have it both ways. But he is missing something, or rather everything, that Rand tells us are invested in a very, very few people, a very special few people, a people of mastery and greatness, the only worthwhile people on the entire planet. You might even call these people a Master Race.

James is petulant, forced by the shape of his mouth to ignore Willers' attempt to solve the railroad's problems with supplies, workforce, and a global wave of socialism. He doesn't want to make money by running a successful railroad, he would rather everyone fail and watch his world crumble around him. He doesn't want oil man Ellis Wyatt's business despite the fact that Wyatt has magically found a way to make tapped-out oil wells spout forth in abundance. Unlike Dagny, James doesn't care if his railroad doesn't reach Colorado, which has magically been revealed to hold every resource known to man despite the fact that it had already been settled and its oil resources, for one, sold off. James tosses Willers out of his office and the action, such as it is, cuts to Our Heroine, Dagny Taggart.

Dagny Taggart is everything that Alisa Rosenbaum (Rand) is not. Rand was the unattractive, bourgeois daughter of a businessman who lost his money in the revolution, not the beautiful daughter of a rich industrialist and a noblewoman. She studied history and went to the state film school. Dagny (and Rand's alter-ego in her semi-autobiographical We, The Living) is an engineer, and obviously the rational, mathematical, precise, unemotional profession appealed to Rand. Unsurprisingly, Rand had been an unhappy child. Intelligent but combative, unappreciated but endlessly critical, stubborn and self centered, Rand was never able to be close to anyone.

Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote “a scathing denunciation of childhood,” headed with a quote from Pascal: “I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.”

Rand respected her father and strongly disliked her mother, whom, oddly, she called by the Russian variant of her patronymic, Borisovna. From the beginning, she and Anna Rosenbaum did not get along. The daughter viewed her mother as capricious, nagging, and a social climber, and she was painfully convinced that Anna disapproved of her. Anna considered her eldest daughter to be “difficult,” Rand recalled. It’s easy to imagine that she was. Although formal photographs from the time show a beautifully dressed, long-haired little girl with an arresting composure and huge, dark, intelligent eyes, her face is square and her features are slightly pudgy; when animated, they assume the stubborn, hawkish look of her adulthood. She had few friends and little inclination to make new ones, and she was physically inert in an era of passionate belief in physical exercise. Her mother nagged at her to be nicer to her cousins and more outgoing and athletic (“Make motions, Alice, make motions!” Anna would cry) and was exasperated by her penchant for becoming violently enthusiastic about the things she liked—certain European children’s stories and songs, for example—and immovably indifferent, even hostile, to the things she didn’t. But Anna also articulated many of the values that Rand would later become famous for expressing. In a letter from the 1930s, for example, Anna wrote to Rand, “Every man is an architect of his own fortune” and “Every person is the maker of his own happiness.”

[snip]

Anna was also more broadly, and proudly, educated than her husband was. She read and spoke English, French, and German, and until the Belgian governess arrived she taught Rand and Natasha to read and write in French. Though Rand made good use of these advantages as she grew older, she viewed her mother as hypocritical and shallow, an opinion not entirely borne out by the evidence. She once characterized Anna as an aspiring member of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia whose main interest in life was giving parties, and she suspected that Anna enjoyed books and plays less than she enjoyed the appearance of talking about them at her frequent gatherings of family and friends. Anna subscribed to foreign magazines, including children’s magazines, which Rand read and was strongly influenced by as she began to write her own early stories. Still, until the 1917 Revolution changed everything, Anna seems to have been an artistic social climber (though a remarkably intelligent and resourceful one, as we shall see) who wanted her daughters to rise in the city’s Jewish social hierarchy—a project for which Ayn Rand was particularly unsuited.

Using the background of a pre-revolutionary Russia, [biographer Anne] Heller paints Rand’s early childhood as comfortable, but pained. Born Alissa Rosenbaum, Rand struggled to win her mother’s approval, as well as acceptance by her bourgeois peers. Rand asserted her intellectual ability at a young age, and constantly evaluated the inferiority of the people who circled her. This early disassociation with the people surrounding her, allowed for a later developmental flaw, which Heller catalogues as a quick rejection of dissenters. She often recounted how she valorized a fellow classmate, but when Rand the girl, she inquired about who the girl valued most. The child responded with her mother. Rand explains that this she never spoke to her again because of the banal response. In her flippant rebuff, Rand simultaneously preserves her own ego, and perpetuates her understanding of the world around her. Heller notes that Rand spent her life overestimating some people and underestimating others, and “she rarely reconsidered.” What Rand interprets as a strength in future objectivist pursuits, Heller highlights as a connection to Rand’s method of camouflaging insecurities. A compelling example of Rand’s continual re-interpretation of her childhood, Heller retells a story of Rand’s mother, Anna, cleaning out the nursery. Telling the young Alissa to sort out and de-clutter her toy room, Anna promised her daughter’s toys would be returned in a year’s time. Alissa, thinking she was outsmarting her mother, picked her favorites to put in storage. When the time elapsed, and Alissa requested her toys returned, Anna explained she gave them away to charity because she knew that Alissa did not need the toys. An adult Rand referred to this story as the moment when she understood that altruism was truly selfish, she understood her mother’s actions as spiteful. However, Rand’s adult analysis exemplifies her childlike understanding of human relationship to materials. Heller’s detailed storytelling reveals how frequently Rand misunderstood interactions with others, and perhaps, how her understanding of success evolved.

Naturally Rand's alter-ego doesn't enjoy childhood any more than Rand did, and grown-up Dagny is as emotionally clueless and stubbornly needy as grown-up Rand.

Dagny is smart, rich, beautiful, successful, and ostensibly utterly without weakness or flaw. She's Dagny Sue. She's rich but doesn't care about money, beautiful but doesn't care about make-up, clothes and jewels, passionate but doesn't care about (almost all) men, and owns a penthouse with only two rooms--one of the more amusing contortions Rand goes through to make her characters both culturally glamorous and spiritually pure. She is confident, decisive, always makes the right decision, and never meets a challenge that she cannot overcome. Like the rest of Rand's Ubermensch she is utterly perfect, and just as much a fantasy as Edward Cullen and the rest of the Cullen vampire clan in Twilight. Edward can't just be a sexy vampire, he has to be a sexy vampire that **sparkles**!! And Rand's Ubermensch can't just be superior, they must be perfect, just as everyone else without exception must be base and depraved.

Meanwhile teenage Alisa Dagny Sue is riding the rails, deciding and improving all over the place, making sure her trains run on time. She meets or discusses a few other Ubermensch along the way, although some seem to be Lesser Ubermensch like Eddie, faithful and supercompetent servants who are happy to spend their lives doing their smaller jobs superlatively, in the service of their UberMasters. Dagny returns to New York and again we are gifted with another scene of someone tapping James on the forehead and shouting, "Hello! Anybody home?" before staking off in disgust. Dagny notices that the Ubermensch seem to be disappearing around her and is puzzled. Before she makes a Decision, however, we are introduced to Our Hero, Businessman Ken Hank Reardon.

Chapter 2 The Chain

We meet Hank Reardon as he is watching the first pouring of Reardon Metal, a new metal that is stronger, lighter, and cheaper then steel, although strangely it includes a lot of copper, a soft metal. Naturally nobody wants the metal or even wants to test it at first, and they all hate and envy Reardon for his competence in the face of their weakness. Reardon is tall, very slender, a blue-eyed blond. He had boot-strapped his way from starting work in a mine at 14 to working at foundries and steel mills, to owning mines (who knew mining paid so well?), foundries and mills of his own. Reardon has a bracelet made of his new metal and we follow his long, triumphant walk home to his family of wife, mother and assorted relations and hangers-on, all of whom are, of course, repellent.

Reardon's family exist so Rand can show us how pure and perfect Reardon is by contrast, and so Reardon can meditate on his inability to respond to them emotionally. Every word his wife utters is a passive-aggressive, veiled or not-so-veiled insult. Every word his mother says is a passive-aggressive, whiny complaint or bout of self pity. Reardon despises them yet treats them with respect and civility, because he is perfect.

What did they seek from him?--thought Reardon---what were they after. He had never asked anything of them; it was they to wished to hold him, they who pressed a claim on him--and the claim seemed to have the form of affection, but it was a form which he found harder to endure than any sort of hatred. He despised causeless affection, just as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved. He wondered what response they could hope to obtain from him in such manner--if his response was what they wanted. And it was, he thought; else why those constant complaints, those unceasing accusations about his indifference? Why that chronic air of suspicion, as if they were waiting to be hurt? He had never has a desire to hurt them, but he had always felt their defensive, reproachful expectation; they seemed wounded by anything he said. It was not a matter of his words or actions, it was almost...almost as they were wounded by the mere fact of his being.

Reardon habitually speaks coldly to anyone if he condescends to speak to them at all, withholds affection, and has no interest in anything or anyone but himself and his achievements. He cannot understand others' emotions and expresses very, very few of his own. His only source of joy is the triumph of success and the only characteristics he admires in other people are the ones he holds himself. In fact----

Hare's Checklist and other mental disorders
Psychopathy, as measured on the PCL-R, is negatively correlated with all DSM-IV Axis I disorders except substance abuse disorders. Psychopathy is most strongly correlated with DSM-IV antisocial personality disorder.

Factor1: Personality "Aggressive narcissism"

Glibness/superficial charm
Grandiose sense of self-worth
Pathological lying
Cunning/manipulative
Lack of remorse or guilt
Shallow affect (genuine emotion is short-lived and egocentric)
Callous/lack of empathy
Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

It's not a perfect match, but it's close. Rand's heroes exhibit all the characteristics of deeply disturbed individuals; they are unable to relate to others, unable to feel emotions, monomaniacally focused on their own glorification and success, and are also filled with self-pity because nobody appreciates their superiority. And those are the good guys.

The rest of the chapter consists of people standing around saying cruel things to each other, asking Reardon for money, and saying cruel things to Reardon about money, while Reardon wallows in self-pity, wondering to himself why nobody cares about him.

Another Brick In The Wall

Digby outdoes herself:

Of course the real question is why on earth did the administration pull this cadaverous joker [Alan Simpson] out of his own cushy, federally funded retirement to head up the ill-conceived deficit commission in the first place? The only generous reason I can think of is that someone thought that he would sabotage it,

Oh no! We've been stopped by an enormous wall! Can't see through it, can't see over it, can't see under it!

but there's no evidence they want to do that.

The appointment is the evidence. Digby sees Obama sabotage his Catfood Commission, yet still can't believe he's obeying the elite who put him into office because he wants to obey them.

And in this era of batshit insane politics, counting on some right wing kook to discredit anything is a very risky thing to do --- even they must know that.

So you have to assume that Simpson's fulfilling his designated role. He will make a deal. All he asks is that the geezer parasites, current and future get it out of their heads once and for all that this society should provide some basic security for everyone.

So close, yet so far. All it takes is one teeny, tiny step to make it through that wall. One little push.

I'll help.

Obama does not care about you. You are not his friend. You are not his constituent. He does not have warm and shiny feelings for you. He does not want you to live long and prosper. He wants to make a lot of money and get a lot of respect. He wants to prove before the entire world--and by that we mean the daddy who abandoned him--that he is both Special and Fits In. And like all authoritarians, all hurt children who bury the pain, he is perfectly willing to make a few small sacrifices to get what he wants.

And we are those small sacrifices.

Digby can't see over the wall. If she did, she wouldn't be part of the liberal tribe anymore. So she stops thinking. Just like that--she comes to a screeching, rubber-burning, head-rocking stop. She doesn't let herself see the blindingly obvious.

Yes, lesser of two evils and so on and so forth. But at the very least, we should not lie to ourselves. At the very least, let us admit that we are screwed, so we can turn from the party of investment banking to the party of the poor and dispossessed. Even if we remain powerless we might finally help a few people in the process.

Personal History Lesson

This is a segment of Glenn Beck's January 15, 2008 interview with Jonah Goldberg.

GOLDBERG: Well, at first the phrase Liberal Fascism as you know, H.G. Wells was arguably the most popular liberal/Progressive intellectual and English speaking language in the first half of this 20th century, hugely influential socialist, founding member -- or member of the Fabian socialists, met with FDR in the Oval Office --

GLENN: Hang on. Jonah, I have to tell you. I feel like the dumbest guy in the world. I really do. What's so amazing, this shows us how our educational system has failed us. While I was on vacation over the holiday, I found out about the Fabian movement. I had never even heard of it. You want to talk about something that is unbelievably frightening in today's world. It describes what we're doing now, who our politicians are now.

GOLDBERG: These global elites, H2L is a global fascism where we seceded our sovereignty, our global control to what he called a world brain and that's what you see in things like the UN, all these places where, you know, the Supreme Court today is, you know, the liberals in the Supreme Court are invoking foreign laws to figure out what our Constitution means, and it is this sort of elitist, aristocratic, nondemocratic, bureaucratic management by the chosen sort of master brains of the globe that, you know, Bill Clinton, this global Clinton initiative and all these sort of things, it's a big part of what they are trying to do.

GLENN: When Hillary Clinton first said -- and it was in one of the debates. They said, are you a liberal? She said, no, because that means big government, et cetera, et cetera. She said, I like to refer to myself as a Progressive in the early -- because it invokes a real American feel, the Progressives of the early 20th century. That made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

GOLDBERG: That was great and that was a classic Clintonism because what she did there was -- it's like when she talks about her family values, upbringing in Illinois and being a conservative girl. She wants credit for the things she used to believe even though she doesn't believe them anymore. And the same thing with this Progressive thing. She says, oh, well, liberal means big government and I'm not for that; that's why I call myself a Progressive. Well, the Progressives were the original big government people.

GLENN: Right. They were the ones who brought us prohibition and the income tax and everything else.

GOLDBERG: You know, look. When people say, oh, when I argue that Progressives were specific -- and one of the reasons I do that is because the Progressives were in large numbers openly pro Mussolini in the 1920s. This is before Naziism. They liked what Mussolini was doing. But when I say this, you know, a lot of liberals will say, how can you say that? You know, fascism means racism. Well, in fact, it doesn't. Naziism means racism. Fascism doesn't mean racism. But if you want to define it by racism, the Progressives were unrelentingly racist. You know, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, her whole agenda was to keep the inferior races from overbreeding. She spoke to a rally at the KKK in the late 1920s. All of the Progressives were deep seated believers in one form or another of eugenics. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the liberal saint of the Supreme Court, he considered the first and primary goal of public policy to build a race, not a state, not a nation. A race. He was a huge believer in eugenics. The New Republic which openly supported Mussolini in the 1920s also bought entirely into the eugenics movement. And all of this stuff remains like the crazy aunts in your attic no one talks about, it informs the spirit of Progressivism today which is now liberalism.

GLENN: Okay. So Jonah, because my eyes are starting to be opened, I look at this stuff and honestly when I first read over the holiday about Fabianism, I had to get to the Internet right away because I thought, there is no way this stuff is true because there's no way I didn't learn this. There's no way I haven't heard this. This has got to be fringe, this has to be -- this is not what I'm reading. Because I was reading a fringe book. And then I go to the Internet and I look it up and I see H. G. Wells, I see all these people. The stuff that George Bernard Shaw has said is phenomenal.

GOLDBERG: I've argued this for years, I've never heard a good rebuttal. I think he was the most evil intellectual in the English speaking world.

GLENN: Have you seen the phrase that he said where you don't have a right to be -- you must be a useful member of society and you must eat and if we can't force you to eat and we can't force you to be a useful member of society, then we can gently and humanely kill you?

GOLDBERG: Oh, yeah. George Bernard Shaw like many of the Fabian socialists was very keen on gas chambers. The idea that this was something the Nazis thought of is simply not true. There are a huge number of socialist intellectuals who want to send the inferior stocks, the lower classes and the rest of the undesirables off to gas chambers, hang them from the nearest lamp post, all of that kind of stuff.

GLENN: But it's all friendly. It's all because it's for the good of society. It's for the good of all of us. It is fascism with a happy face.

GOLDBERG: That's right. Here's my favorite quote -- sorry to interrupt but I mean, I think you'll get it. Hillary Clinton said in a speech in 1996, a major address, you know, that was written in advance. She used this line and similar circumstances elsewhere. But she says we as a country need to move beyond the idea that there's anything, there's any such thing as someone else's child. Now, I'm sorry. My child is my child and my wife's child, maybe her child and my child, but it is not the State's child, it is not the collective child, it is not the community's child. I'm glad for their help sometimes when necessary, but the idea that our children aren't our own is the fundamental driving impulse of all of the isms of the left, progressivism, fascism, Naziism, communism. All of them sought to crack the outer shell of the nuclear family and get control of the children. Woodrow Wilson says the chief job of an educator is to make -- and he says this to parents -- your children as little like you as possible. That is the agenda and that is still the agenda that we have today.

GLENN: Jonah, I haven't gotten to the end of the book where you do talk a little bit about Hillary Clinton and everybody else. Do you go into Barack Obama or anybody else on the left? Do you --

GOLDBERG: I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry. I've been locked in a basement for four years working on this. So I get a little hyper. I mention Barack Obama briefly because he has the same influence as Hillary, a very radical guy who can get over the fact that he is a hero of the left and calls himself a man of the left, speaks about the need for violence, the confrontation and destroying the classes and all that kind of stuff. So I mention that briefly. But you see some of this in Barack Obama as well. And I think Barack Obama is a decent guy, he is not an evil person, I'm not using fascist the way the left does to simply say evil, evil, evil. Barack Obama I think is an honorable and decent guy, but he subscribes to this cult of unity, this idea of that if we just all join hands and march toward the sunny uplands of history and buy each other a Coke, everything will be solved. And that was the same with Hitler, that was the idea of leaders of men in Woodrow Wilson, this idea that we just rally around the spiritual fresh of one man of the nation, all our problems will be redeemed.

GLENN: Jonah Goldberg, I would like to talk to you off the air because I would like to develop a series for the television show and we can break this up, your book up in several different pieces over several different days. Every America needs to read your book. It is absolutely phenomenal. You will understand where we are, who is leading us, where it has come from. It is just a fantastic book and I can't thank you enough for writing it.
[my bold]

GOLDBERG: Glenn, I can't thank you enough for the support. Books need friends and you are great friend to have. GLENN: Thanks very much. Jonah Goldberg. The name of the book is Liberal Fascism. Please, please pick it up.

(Evidently Jonah has been reading Michael Crichton.)

It is the authoritarian struggle for control over others, beginning with your children. The liberals say that we have choices, while the conservatives demand that their children be like themselves. Authoritarians don't fear a cult of unity; that is their goal. They fear choices and change. They fear rejection and pain for disobeying their authorities--God, the priest, Mom and Dad.

A child can't live with rejection from his parents. He closes off his emotions, destroying any empathy that would otherwise develop. But he still has the same emotional needs for love and acceptance so he looks elsewhere for them. However nothing can replace his parents' love, so he is forced to either act out to make them to love him, cling even harder to the substitutes he has, or restlessly moving from one authority to another, looking for someone or something that will give him what he needs. He never questions the source of his patriotism or religious devotion or obsessive relationships and cannot tolerate anyone else doing so.

For a lot of people, 9/11 provided something that was missing from their lives. They finally had a reason for their vague feelings of persecution, mistreatment, neglect, isolation, fear and pain. They gained a sense of belonging, an identity and purpose. It was a godsend and they long for more attacks. It's not about the terrorists and the fascists and the eugenicists. It's about them.

Why We Fight

Jonathan Schwartz at A Tiny Revolution gives us a brilliant Michael Palin quote (from the commentary on The Life of Brian) that perfectly explains the reason for this blog.

PALIN: This was an interesting scene because I had this whole big crowd out there. I tell you it's very very strange to be up there. You feel superior to everybody, literally because you're up above them, but also because you're surrounded by the army, you've got the best costume, you've got the lead role. And once people start laughing, you do get—it is a brilliant form of subversion. And it's something I think modern revolutionaries should remember. If you can make fun of somebody, it's often very much better and far more effective than shooting them or making a martyr of them. And that's what works so well here. And it was really very very unsettling to play Pilate to this lot, and find them in end literally rolling over, in huge numbers of people just jeering at you. There's nothing more guaranteed to put you back in your place. And there's nothing you can do against it, really. I suppose you can kill people for laughing, but...

Nothing is more effective than mocking because it is a form of rejection that cuts straight to the heart. It is an immediate, collective decision by one's peers, a thumbs up/thumbs down, a roar of acceptance and pleasure or of rejection and scorn. Acceptance and love are what all of us seek, in all we do and in every person we meet. If we do not get this from our parents, we will continue to seek it out for the rest of our lives. It is an overwhelmingly powerful force and because it is based on shame and pain, it is usually disguised as a more acceptable force: religion, politics, ideology, even personal likes and dislikes.

We tend to divide ourselves into right and left because we understand that the left accepts people who tend to define themselves, while the right tends to let others define them. It's safe and reassuring to be given all the answers and a guidebook on exactly how to think, dress and feel. But because the right doesn't choose its own rules, or even likes and dislikes, they are never sure if they are "right." They need constant reassurance that what they are being told is correct, since they are not allowed to decide for themselves. And that makes them vulnerable to the left, since the left is open to, and therefore the source of, that which is new and trendy. After the right accepts something new the followers finally are able to accept it, but it leaves them seeming terminally unhip and eminently mockable.

Mocking is so powerful that the right is trying to get David Letterman fired for a tacky joke they embellished for effect. The right knows they are vulnerable, and dimly know they are incapable of using laughter for effect themselves. To laugh at others you have to be able to laugh at yourself, to see yourself in others and others in yourself. This empathy lets you understand and therefore forgive others and yourself. You don't fear judgement, from your fellow man or from God*, since you are able to love yourself as well as others. And what more could God ask from us?



*Still don't believe in gods, but he's a useful rhetorical device.

The Happy Couple

What a surprise. After making posts on proposals, rings and babies, Megan McArdle announces she is getting married. She might as well have a head of glass, since everything that passes through it is laid bare for the public to see.

It's why she's such a good example of how conservatives base political decisions on personal issues. It's not ideology or Libertarianism or an elite education or even God. It's Mom and Dad, and growing up listening to complaints about dishonest unions and those nasty people who are holding back their betters.

McArdle and Suderman will have a child they can't afford and spend every penny they can borrow to give him or her an elite education. They will live on the fringes of an elite society, both part of it and outside it, hanging on through sheer will and cunning. They will be very happy, except when they are not.

UDATE: The blogging about wedding purchases has begun. And there's a tiara.

No, there really is.

Shill vs. Shill

It's Shill for the Rich versus Shill for the Rich at The Atlantic today. Megan McArdle attacks liberals for "breathlessly celebrating Wal-Mart's "capitulation" on national health" and suspiciously intelligent and forceful commenters attack her in return. Here's one:

This reads like a comment on a blog entry. The context has to be sought out--you don't really include it. Why not begin your article with the substance of the story you're referencing? If you really think that "liberal" commentators have missed the point, you've hardly done your theory justice. You begin by summarizing your 3 examples' points, then you briefly mention several opposing points of view. Cryptically, you label the final one "on the other side..." as if it were in opposition to your previous point, which it is not.
I find this all somewhat interesting, but if you can't bother to write a complete story, I can't be bothered to follow your byline in the future. Reporting and analysis is difficult. That must be why so few of you are good at it.

McArdle's sorrowful announcement that business might have bad motives at times is a welcome break from her usual routine, but is old news to the rest of us. When you check her links, the "breathlessly celebrating liberals" turn out to be a little less than breathless. Or celebrating.

Strange as it sounds, a key pro-reform player in the healthcare battle is...Wal-Mart. America's largest employer -- known heretofore as destroyer of small business, crusher of unions, denier of decent benefits and force for global wage reduction -- signed on yesterday to the concept of an employer mandate for healthcare.

Yesterday, Wal-Mart, along with SEIU and the Center for American Progress released a letter articulating shared principles for health reform. And it went a ways toward ending my skepticism. I figured whatever SEIU and Wal-Mart produced would be a bland set of principles offered at a safe and uncontroversial moment. This is the opposite.

The throws its weight behind two primary policies. The first is the so-called "employer mandate." This is, essentially, a tax on employers that don't provide health care. It both helps pay for health care and helps get more people covered. It's a top priority for Organized Labor. The business community, however, loathes it and has spent the past year organizing aggressively against it.

Yes, Wal-Mart--the company famous for finding new and creative ways to squeeze
employee health benefits--has today endorsed, in principle, an employer mandate.
It did so in a letter issued jointly with the Center for American Progress and Service Employees International Union (SEIU):[snipped quote]
It's a broad statement and, as always, the meaning of the commitment depends a great deal upon the details. But this is not a small thing. By endorsing the idea of a
employer mandate, Wal-Mart has made the idea more difficult to demonize. It has
also--and I can't stress this enough--given some political cover to members of
Congress who might be sympathetic to the idea of employer mandate but hesitate
to take a vote that might be perceived as anti-business.

My goodness, that sure is a lot of breathless celebrating. You can just hear the jubilant triumphalism.

I sometimes think McArdle writes her blog not just for money and social advancement but also to continue her favorite practice of catty insults towards her enemies that so enlivened her high school days. Let's take a peek into Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine and visit a few of her attacks on liberals.

I see a lot of liberal blogs crowing that Obama's really taking it to the hedge funds who are holding out on the Chrysler bankruptcy. Hedge fund managers, you see, have a civic duty to lose large amounts of other peoples' money in order to ensure that the UAW makes as few sacrifices as possible in a bankruptcy.

I don't understand why these articles keep getting written. Moreover, I don't understand why they can keep getting written. Did progressives really think they'd woken up in Sweden on November 5th?

Liberals got made [sic] when this question was asked about them four years ago. But
I'll admit it--in my opinion, the conservatarian coalition is basically out of ammo.

Several liberal blogs are chortling over this statement I made early in the year:
"Will the economy decline in 2008? Paul Krugman is voting for doom. It's worth keeping in mind, however, that Paul Krugman has predicted eight of the last none recessions under the Bush administration."
I think it's obvious we're in a slowdown, and a recession seems likely-ish, but Britain's skirted recession for over a decade now, so I can't be too fatalistic. This is obviously hilarious--if you have an incredibly shaky understanding of statistics, and also, no knowledge of decision science.

I read liberal blogs defending Spitzer and spinning conspiracy theories about his downfall, and all I can think is "Really? You really want to hitch your wagon to this fallen star?" Why on earth?

What is with the liberal economists suddenly discovering, in wide-eyed shock, that economists who are attached to political campaigns spin things to favor their candidates?...Welcome to politics. I am skeptical that Brad De Long and Paul Krugman have never noticed the phenomenon before.

How many people who seem to pushing policy are merely stuck in adolescence, endlessly replaying a nightmare scenario of sucking up to petty powers and pushing down the "interlopers"?

Move Over, Alan Quatermain

Good God. I am in awe of this article. It's awesome. It just kicks ass.

To explain: We know Megan McArdle worships the rich. She sees herself as an authoritarian leader, one of the elite, and is unstinting in her support of their actions, no matter how venal, deadly, or just plain stupid. We also know she is not rich herself although she grew up surrounded by rich people, and therefore must be content with being a follower. If you are not rich but you support them you must justify this action to yourself; otherwise you're just some envious schmuck who watches E! to find out what kind of phone Paris Hilton is using. We also know from Stanley Milgrim that many people only need permission from an authority to do what they already want to do. And this morning, I hit paydirt.

[yap]

Even those who think wealth is good (or at least harmless) often implicitly suggest that the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of moral goals are separate questions. They would do well to read Benjamin Friedman's The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. The author, a professor of political economy at Harvard, has written an economic tome that is accessible to the average reader without failing to offer something new to specialists as well: a compelling argument that rising incomes make us not just richer people, but better ones.

[yap yap]

Economists have long known that what they call the “wealth effect” can stimulate spending: If people feel richer because the value of their home or stock portfolio has gone up, or because they think their income is likely to rise in the future, they will loosen up and spend more. Friedman suggests that people don’t merely become more willing to treat themselves to home entertainment systems and $4 cups of coffee as their wealth grows; they also become more generous to others. “With rising incomes,” he says, “more people become willing to donate time and money. And among those who do so, rising incomes also allow people to feel able to do more.”


But direct charity is only one of the ways we become more generous. Even more important is the tolerance that growing wealth brings for competition from others. There is a growing recognition that trade is a vastly more effective way to reduce global poverty than foreign aid; even Oxfam, a reliably left-wing nongovernmental organization, has jumped on the free trade bandwagon with a campaign against agricultural subsidies. Better still, trade benefits domestic consumers. Yet progress on that front is nearly impossible unless economic prosperity is rising fast enough to ease the fears of those who are threatened by a more open market.

Here's McArdle's justification for wealth worship: People with more money donate more money, and free trade helps the poor much more than actual, you know, help.

Damn! I feel like I've found the map to King Solomon's Mines, if his mines were huge, empty cavities filled with greed and vanity instead of gold and pearls.

They're Coming To Get You

Let's talk about victimization.

Why would the right, even when they controlled every venue of power in the land, consider themselves victims? Why do Christians think they are persecuted and hunted, when they are the biggest religious group in the country? Why do white male Republicans complain about being left out of the power structure and claim to be under attack?

It makes no logical sense whatsoever. We know many of them are sincere in their feelings of oppression and victimization. They genuinely feel they are being suppressed, ignored and persecuted despite all evidence to the contrary. Why?

Maybe because they were oppressed and victimized. Authoritarian parents (you knew that was coming, right?) do demand that their children sacrifice and suppress themselves, accepting their parents' definition of them, their parents' values, goals, and beliefs. This is not something most children can accept. They love their parents and want to believe their parents love them back. They would do anything to please them. But deep inside they are resentful of what they were forced to give up, and hurt and angry at the abusive insistence on repression and control. We must have someone to love. It's almost more important that being loved by someone. We may have been rejected, abused, manipulated and controlled, but we cannot stop loving our mother and father. We need that love, and rarely can admit that it was never there. We will not, except under the most extreme of circumstances, admit that our parents didn't love us for what we were, preferring to become a pale copy of them instead of finding out our true nature.

It's a silly thing, but look at this review of Twilight at the Corner. I assume that a Corner reviewer will push conservative "morals" and cliches, but this person takes resentment and victimization to heights seldom seen outside of a junior high school.

We have fully reversed the symbolism of [Bram] Stoker’s vampire, who represented a demonic assault on a virtuous community. Today’s vampire is the hip Other, and the community around him is either bungling, intolerant, or simply a source of comedic relief (as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Lost Boys, and Fright Night, for example). The modern vampire is in touch with his sexuality, but the community suppresses it. The modern vampire is coming to take away your girlfriend, and she kind of likes it. The modern vampire is the guy you wish you had been in high school, or the guy you wish you’d dated in high school, and Meyer has turned that into gold.

The trouble with this evolution is that fictional monsters serve a valuable cultural purpose. They remind us that we live in communities, and that our communities must be defended from those who would rend them asunder. Though he is no conservative ideologue, Stephen King always seemed to fathom this intuitively. His stories and books featuring vampires made them evil through and through. The difference between his Salem’s Lot and Stoker’s Dracula is that King is also a bit of a dystopian, so while the community in Stoker’s novel worked together in the end to stop the menace, King lets the community fall. Still, he’s wise enough to know that creatures lacking in fundamental attributes of humanity don’t make for good neighbors.

By inverting the traditional vampire tale, so that the community is predatory and the monster an object of empathy if not admiration, we have found one more avenue along which to push the tired idea that community is, rather than a source of life and happiness, a locus of oppression. The Twilight series simply carries our modern love affair with the undead to its natural conclusion; the lovelorn vampire and the object of his infatuation get married and make a baby.

I’m all for multiculturalism, but this is too much. As Freud is supposed to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Likewise, sometimes the Other isn’t a cool countercultural rebel who puts a thrill up your leg, he is a monster who wants to suck your blood or, if he is technologically savvy and has a religious ax to grind, blow up your kids’ school bus. I’m not worried that the modern vampire movie will lead filmgoers to agitate for reconciliation with Osama bin Laden just because the terror master of 9/11 is also pale, has a funny accent, lives in a cave, and is a bloodthirsty egomaniac. But I do think there is value in entertainment that draws a clear line between good and evil.

While many parents are fine with having their youngsters read the Twilight series and watch the accompanying movies, I think there might be some merit in recent fare like the horrifically bloody (and financially less successful) Thirty Days of Night, in which vampires descend on a remote town in Alaska once they know daylight won’t return for a month. These creatures devour throats with viciousness, and the few townspeople who survive are saved only by the voluntary self-sacrifice of their leader. On the surface, Twilight might be more suitable for preteens, but maybe they could use reminding that creatures that prey on communities don’t often make cool boyfriends. Because there are monsters, Virginia, and sometimes they just need killing.

It's cute the way he insinuates vampires are liberals and also terrorists. The man has a sledgehammer touch with words. The author, Tony Woodlief, knows his audience and what they want, and gives it to them. A liberal, I mean a vampire, is a sexual being with unusual tastes. He'll take your girlfriend because he's cool and you're not. The community suppresses its members' sexuality but the liberal rejects the community and does what he or she wants. They don't listen to others tell them what is good or bad; they decide for themselves. That is especially frightening to the authoritarian. If nobody tells you what is right or wrong, how will you know? You can't depend on your own knowledge of right and wrong because that was taken from you. You parents told you what was right and what was wrong and if you ignored them or even disagreed with them you were punished. You know that sometimes they were wrong but you refuse to let yourself break away from your parents. You need their love and you need them to love you. [Correction: You need their love and you need to love them.] So now you are never quite sure what is wrong and what is right. You can't trust your own opinion because your parents said you were wrong to question religious teachings or your country's actions, or your parents' demands. You don't trust yourself to make a right decision. Without laws and God, people would be evil and do bad things, just like your parents said.

Poor guy. He can't watch Twilight without feeling angry at beautiful, popular Edward who wins the girl's absolute acceptance and besotted love. He can't watch True Blood without thinking that the vampires deserve to be hated and hunted for wanting to live out in the open and stop hiding in the shadows. And when he sees the townspeople ripped to pieces by the mostly unseen but constantly terrifying vampires in Thirty Days of Night, he gets grim satisfaction in seeing his nightmares come to life, proof at last that he is, indeed, the victim in this world, and never the monster.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

Okay, let's go over this again.

People raise their kids with callousness and cruelty because that is all they know. The kids grow up feeling afraid and unloved.

That makes them feel bad, so they try to find someone to give them what they want--security and love. They turn to parent-substitutes; authority figures. God is a parent substitute. So is the president. This is where the trouble starts, for nobody can go back in time and get the love they never received as a child. They can never go back to childhood and develop the self-esteem and self-confidence that comes from being loved and learning how to love others.

Therefore their search for a parent substitute is doomed to failure, an unacceptable situation that people fight tooth and nail to deny. Admit that your parents didn't or couldn't love you enough to teach you to love yourself and others? Forget that, they'd sooner kill you than admit it. So they try even harder to force their authority to give them what they need. The result is disaster.

There are no gods, no magic, no supernatural world. People would laugh at children for waving a stick and yelling, "Expelliarmus!" and expecting something to happen, yet they don't hesitate to wave a book or scroll and mutter Latin or Hebrew under their breath and expect a deity to listen and obey them. But they need a god, specifically a god who knows them personally (like a parent), loves them unconditionally (like a parent), is omniscient (like a parent in a child's eyes), and will always rescue them (like a parent is supposed to help their child). They will waste a huge chunk of their lives begging this parent substitute for proof of love and attention and never get it, because God is not their father or mother, he is an imaginary creature created out of need.

And people will do the same with the next parent substitute--their political and social leaders. Every president is a potential parent substitute, and we have come to speak of the presidency in parental terms. They must protect us and take care of us and tell us right from wrong. They must punish us when we're bad and reward us when we're good. But they aren't our parents, they are people with the same problems and issues that we have. They, too, are looking for safety and love. They, too, are damaged. But they are very, very rich, and can harm a lot of people while avoiding their own pain, by starting wars to feel safe and protecting their fellow elites to feel loved.

So here we are, debating whom the stimulus will help when we ought to know that the stimulus will help the elites feel safe and protected. We debate who created us, when we already know in our hearts. We fight and lie and deny, deny, deny--anything to avoid the simple truth. It's a tremendously painful truth that offers us nothing but more pain and hard work in the beginning, but it is the truth, and in the end that is the only thing that will set us free to love.

Merry Christmas!

Megan McArdle is giving me a discussion of authoritarianism for Christmas. I'm so excited! How did she know it was exactly what I wanted?

Right now we have only the teaser; a quote from Julian Sanchez about authoritarianism and the bailouts. I do not know anything about Mr. Sanchez except McArdle's excerpts, but those glimpses aren't exactly impressive. Money quote:

The only question is whether workers in a particular industry are naughty
children who need to be sent to the corner for a time-out, or well-behaved
children who should get a gold sticker for effort. This is, as I hope goes
without saying, a pretty authoritarian frame on either side.

No, Mr. Sanchez. Authoritarianism is not the same thing as what you would probably call the nanny state. The word has an actual definition, and if you and McArdle are going to discuss it, it would be nice if you looked it up. I don't say that to sneer. I very frequently look up common words, because they tend to gain various shades of meaning over the years and it's easy to misunderstand someone's particular interpretation.

When looking at political authoritarianism I use the definition of Bob Altemeyer, University of Manitoba professor.

Authoritarian followers usually support the established authorities in
their society, such as government officials and traditional religious
leaders. Such people have historically been the “proper” authorities in life,
the time-honored, entitled, customary leaders, and that means a lot to most
authoritarians. Psychologically these followers have personalities
featuring:

1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate
authorities in
their society;

2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities;
and

3) a high level of conventionalism.

Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these
followers rightwing authoritarians. I’m using the word “right” in one of its earliest meanings, for in Old English “riht”(pronounced “writ”) as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct, doing what the authorities said. (And when someone did the lawful thing back then, maybe the authorities said,
with a John Wayne drawl, “You got that riht, pilgrim!”) 1 (Click on a note’s number to have it appear.)

In North America people who submit to the established authorities
to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, 2 so
you can call them “right-wingers” both in my new-fangled psychological
sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a
country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist
Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even
though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing
authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political
views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established
authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly
conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Rightwing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey.

You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a
revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few
in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted their chosen
authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao. Happily they spent most of
their time fighting with each other, as lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of
Brian where the People’s Front of Judea devotes most of its energy to
battling, not the Romans, but the Judean People’s Front. But the left-wing
authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the
Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing
authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers
now to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of
right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the
United States for the past three decades. So when I speak of “authoritarian followers” in this book I mean right-wing authoritarian followers, as identified by the RWA scale.

That's a lot of definition, but both parties must agree on basics before discussions. I would add one aspect, maybe correction: While certain personalities might be more amenable to authoritarianism, it is something installed during childhood, by one's parents. Parents who demand absolute obedience, forbid questioning and disagreement, and refuse to acknowledge the separate identity of their child are authoritarian, and their children, who want love and acceptance, obey and grow to demand obedience in turn from their own children. Authoritarian children who are eventually thwarted in their need to control others as they were controlled can become very dangerous, as these incredibly strong drives send them outward, to either find someone to obey or force strangers to obey them.

Liberals can be authoritarians also, but tend to only get mild versions of the disease. Rigid people are not drawn to the amorphous, unfettered nature and goals of Democrats. They want rigid rules to follow, so they will know that they are correct in their behavior. They demand that nothing around them changes, for they can't cope with change. It was never allowed, and now it is unfamiliar and frightening. Liberal authoritarians, who also cling to authorities such as a religious, political or cultural group, however, are still authoritarians. They wouldn't side with the workers because the workers are not the leaders; management and the owners are. The "naughty children" aren't in charge, and insisting that they need help isn't authoritarianism.

Megan promises more, and I wait with bated breath.