A moral narrative to progressivism to counter the immorality of Ayn Rand

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the UK. Her election was a triumph for British Tories, the modern heirs to the classical conservatism of Edmund Burke. Though Thatcher is compared to Ronald Reagan, and modern American conservatives try at all costs to invoke Reagan’s legacy, the truth is that Thatcher and the Tea Party are worlds apart. Ironically, it is liberalism (or progressivism, depending on your preferred nomenclature) that can more easily emulate a Tory way of solving America’s myriad challenges.

The chief difference between Thatcher and the Tea Party is their rationale for small-government capitalism. Tea Partiers perceive their political opposition in sinister terms, for instance thinking President Obama is actually a Manchurian candidate from Kenya. In one poll, 41% of self-identified Tea Partiers thought the President was not a U.S. citizen. In another, 92% of them thought he was leading the country towards socialism. Slogans like “don’t tread on me” betray a fiercely individualistic — crossing into mean-spirited — worldview.

By contrast, Toryism seeks to maintain personal freedom within a larger moral culture. Thatcher remarked in a 1977 speech:

[C]apital and labour together can realise that their interests are the same. We need a free economy not only for the renewed material prosperity it will bring, but because it is indispensable to individual freedom, human dignity and to a more just, more honest society.

We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State.

This talk of a “moral society” is absent from the Tea Party language. Theirs is more evocative of Ayn Rand, who has been a major intellectual force behind Tea Party elites. Rand, for instance, speaks more frequently in the apocalyptic terms we come to expect from the teabaggers:

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

Charming.

What it leads to is a political discourse insistent on maintaining principle instead of bargaining for results. Again, the influence of Rand is apparent:

Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of “evil,” regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are “extreme”—i.e., consistent).

Rand’s Objectivist philosophy emphasizes the idea of objective truth — which conveniently is known only to her and her followers. Believing they know the objective truth, why should they settle for anything less? (Rand would never admit this, but this makes Objectivism frighteningly similar to Marxism.)

By contrast, Thatcher understood that the health of a democracy means respecting the decisions and beliefs of an opponent. (In fact, this is one of the crucial components of classical conservatism that Tea Partiers overlook.) When Maggie came into office as the education minister in 1970, she maintained some of Labor’s previous policies out of respect for the democratic process.

This is where the American left comes in. Since the right has punted the question of what makes a moral society — preferring instead to compose policy based loosely on the idea of “Get off my lawn!” — there is a vacuum in the moral culture of the nation. Progressives have rightly focused politics back onto economic inequality with the idea of 99% vs. 1%, but it is framed in a way that sounds more vengeful than visionary.

To reclaim the moral high ground, progressives should transform their legitimate grievances into a vision: a system that works for all, and one that is guided not just by short-term profit gains. It can only be realized by addressing the issues that Occupy Wall Street protestors have raised, but not in such stark terms. Ayn Rand’s acolytes believe the value of a human is directly tied to their net worth. Progressives now need to replace that with a value system that evaluates people’s worth based on their contribution to society’s benefit. It shouldn’t shame the principle of self-interest, but it should ask what social gains can be realized by thinking systemically.