One Perspective: Are 'selfishness,' 'extremism' accurate in describing Tea Party?

By Dane Smith
The Daily Record Newswire

Yes: Barry Goldwater was proud of extremism, and Ayn Rand preached selfishness as the supreme virtue — and both are key to Tea Party dogma.

Some conservatives have taken me to task for using the words “selfishness” and “anti-government extremism” to describe elements of the Tea Party movement.

A couple of the points are well taken. I’ll accept that those of us who are optimistic and not angry — and who see our democratic governments as a positive force for goals like racial and educational equity and other public good — should not disregard or demonize all this populist sound and fury.

We really should engage Tea Partiers and try to reason with them over their frequent claims that our governments are somehow illegitimate. And we can freely empathize with their concerns about growing national debt (the lowest federal income tax rates in decades are a main reason) and about the Wall Street bailouts that began under President George W. Bush.

Generalizing about motives for an entire group is always hazardous.

But I chose the words “selfishness” and “extremism” carefully, thought long and hard about them, and stand by them.

I actually hoped for a response and a chance to dig in to some of the fundamentalist roots of the Tea Party movement, including philosophical underpinnings that openly embrace selfishness and extremism, sometimes using those very words.

Any analysis of modern American conservatism reveals an oversized reverence for “rugged individualism” — personal liberty as the overriding or dominant value — especially as it pertains to money and keeping it for oneself, and opposition to taxes.

This is a movement that glorifies the individual and is deeply antagonistic to the idea of collectivism in all forms, and especially our federal governments’ growth beginning with the New Deal and economic security programs of the 1930s.

It’s not at all bad, this recognition of the natural human desire to get and keep as much for oneself as possible. Adam Smith’s founding capitalistic premise in the 18th century was that each person seeking his or her own enlightened self-interest actually works to increase prosperity and the common good.

And this makes perfect sense.

Balancing our natural selfishness and our private interest with a roughly equal measure of selflessness and public interest is a great formula for mental health and public policy.

But an obsession with selfishness, exemplified by the libertarian author Ayn Rand, has been an embarrassing sideshow in the conservative movement for a long time — and it’s in ascendance in the Tea Party.

One doesn’t have to Google very far to see her name associated with the movement, her buzz phrases on signs, and her teachings on the internet websites.

Rand may be one of the most important philosophical shapers of fundamentalist economic conservatism and libertarianism, and she influenced millions of impressionable readers, including myself when I discovered her books in the early 1970s.

Her best known works were novels, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” The latter is a huge volume filled with celebration of selfishness as the supreme virtue and unbridled capitalism as the pinnacle of human endeavor.

Rand actually wrote a nonfiction manifesto called “The Virtue of Selfishness” in which she expressed utter contempt not only for government, but also for God, religion and “altruism” in all forms.

She had little respect for thousands of years of received wisdom by any and all those sages in every culture who taught human loving-kindness and selflessness as the higher virtues.

Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, may have served a useful purpose in the Cold War against leftist extremism and communism.

But she didn’t distinguish between those Marxist dictatorships and the wealthy Western democracies like our own, which feature a highly successful mix of private ownership of the economy and high-functioning democratic government in serving human needs and curbing market excesses.

Ayn Rand’s fingerprints are all over the conservative movement — former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was an early acolyte — and although some describe me as a “liberal” for worrying about Tea Party extremism, my fellow worriers include a long list of conservatives and Republicans.

These include Bush administration mastermind Karl Rove, who has openly questioned whether the Tea Party-style candidates are electable and good for the conservative cause.

Pride in purity of thought and extremism is nothing new to conservatism or liberalism. But it was conservative godfather Barry Goldwater who made the word most famous, with his declaration on receiving the GOP presidential nomination in 1964 that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

One can judge for oneself whether these Tea Party assertions and policy proposals are extreme:
• Advocacy of secession or “nullification” and state defiance of federal law — a throwback to the slave-state arguments that led to the Civil War and our darkest hours as a nation.
• Repeated references to taking up guns and arms and shedding blood in defense of “liberty.”
• Assertions that our president is a Nazi, a “gangsta,” a non-native and a Muslim.
• Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul’s (he was named for Ayn Rand) observation that Civil Rights legislation might be an unconstitutional intrusion on individual rights to discriminate.

An important conservative, former National Review magazine editor David Klinghoffer, recently labeled some leaders of this new conservatism as “crazy-cons” and said that it was dominated by “demagoguery and hucksterism.”

I think it’s best not to call people names when what we really mean to say is that their ideas are extreme and dangerous.

And heck, I’ve had some crazy ideas in my day, as in my early 20s, when I thought Ayn Rand and the virtue of selfishness carried to its extreme was the answer to all our problems.

But I was wrong — and I can admit it.

Dane Smith is president of Growth & Justice, a progressive research organization that focuses on economics and state-and-local budget issues. He also spent 30 years as a writer for the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press, where he delved into state, local and federal governments and politics.