So I don't mind the idea that the Russian emigre's books shaped Ryan's word view. I just think he wasn't a very discerning reader. The first clue came in that same 2005 speech. "The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," he said. There is a term for characters in Rand novels that proclaim a desire to spend their lives serving the public. They are villains. Or as she put it in one of her works of nonfiction:
Since there is no such entity as "the public," since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that "the public interest" supersedes private interests and rights, can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others. If so, then all men and all private groups have to fight to the death for the privilege of being regarded as "the public."
Perhaps describing himself as a Rand-inspired public servant was merely a poor choice of words. I cannot recall a politician in a Rand novel who wasn't written with contempt, but she didn't think there was anything inherently wrong with a man representing his fellow citizens in Congress.
But a congressman with a voting record like the one Rep. Ryan has amassed? He'd be banned from Galt's Gulch, the invite-only alternative society where the heroes of Atlas Shrugged congregate, by unanimous vote. Even Eddie Willers, the novel's only sympathetically written squish, would've seen Rep. Ryan's career from 1999 to 2009 as indefensible. "If we're going to actually win this we need to make sure that we're solid on premises, that our principles are well-defended, and if want to go and articulately defend these principles and what they mean to our society, what they mean for the trends that we set internationally, we have to go back to Ayn Rand," Rep. Ryan said. Now let's look at what he did.
How would Ayn Rand feel about the Department of Homeland Security and the federalization of airport security? Had an unusually canny infiltrator carried out a successful terrorist attack on Galt's Gulch, does anyone see a scenario where the book's heroine, Dagny Taggart, starts submitting to genital pat-downs by agents of the state before being permitted to board a plane?
How would Lawrence Hammond, the capitalist automaker, and Dan Conway, the upstart who out-competed an entrenched corporation, feel about Rep. Ryan's 2009 vote for the auto-industry bailout?
Do you think Francisco D'Anconia would've felt admiration for Rep Ryan's TARP vote? I think the copper tycoon would've eviscerated him with slyly cutting remarks during a Georgetown cocktail party.
What line from Ayn Rand's work did Rep. Ryan return to before voting for the prescription drug benefit? As Dave Weigel notes, Rep. Ryan has explained many of these votes to fellow conservatives by insisting that he hated casting them but felt the need to be a team player during the Bush Administration. But that isn't an explanation that helps him in the moral universe of Atlas Shrugged. Characters who act contrary to what they know is right in the name of loyalty to others are considered moral monsters. All the worse if their immoral acts involve redistribution of wealth. If Rep. Ryan existed in Ayn Rand's word he'd get chewed out by Ragnar Danneskjöld after he hijacked shipments of subsidized drugs and dumped them into the ocean. And he'd probably vote to fund Project X and entrust it to some executive branch analog of Robert Stadler.
This isn't just about the past.
Don't think that circa 2009 Rep. Ryan became a Randian. His positions are still wildly inconsistent with Objectivism. Said John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, in the overlong, gratingly repetitive speech that Ryan says he returns to, but that I always skip when re-reading the novel:
So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate -- do you hear me? no man may start -- the use of physical force against others.To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force-him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man's capacity to live.
No surprise that Ayn Rand was opposed to the War on Drugs. Rep. Ryan? He's for it, among many other instances of the state initiating force against citizens. "I think a lot of people would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking," Rep. Ryan observed in 2009. If so, I'd advise him to avoid any Acela rides that traverse long tunnels.
