• A piece on the influence of Ayn Rand in the conservative movement. (3/6/09)
• A look at the GOP’s much-heralded, but mind-boggling, charts. (3/26/09)
• Photos from the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot. (4/6/09)
• The inside scoop on a civil war in the right-wing blogosphere. (4/21/09)
• A piece on the damage done to Tom Tancredo by his racist, karate-chopping confidant. (6/2/09)
• A conversation with Jim DeMint, where the senator compared America to pre-World War II Germany. (7/9/09)
• A prescient account of the dilemmas the “birther” movement threatened to cause the GOP. (7/17/09)
• An early look at the problems birthers were causing moderate Republicans at town hall meetings. (7/20/09)
• A glimpse of Saul Alinsky’s surprising new fan base. (8/11/09)
• An exclusive look at a propaganda-filled health care “survey” from the RNC. (8/27/09)
• A report from inside the How to Take Back America Conference, where fear of fascism and a “gay agenda” dominated. (9/28/09)
• Ahead-of-the-curve coverage of the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, where a Tea Party candidate split the GOP vote and led to a Democratic victory. (11/19/09)
• A spotlight on conservative attacks on Mike Huckabee for granting clemency to a future suspect in the shooting of four police officers. (11/30/09)
• A look at the strange campaign of the antiwar Republican Adam Kokesh to unseat John McCain. (12/18/09)
• A series of conversations with key Republicans who expressed their unwillingness to embrace party-switcher Parker Griffith. (12/22/09)
• A preview of Tucker Carlson’s journalism venture, The Daily Caller. (1/17/10)
• An investigation of the “perfect storm” that led to Scott Brown’s Senate win. (1/20/10)
• A heated conversation between Andrew Breitbart and Joseph Farah over the value of “birtherism.” (2/6/10)
• An account of growing pessimism among Tea Partiers that the passage of health care reform could be prevented. (3/17/10)
• After reports of the RNC’s lavish spending, a look at past conservative donor frustration with RNC habits that made the latest incident the “nail in the coffin.” (4/2/10)
• And, finally, a heartfelt farewell. We miss you too, Dave.

On first blush it sounds like “Atlas Shrugged” with a bit more violence, and with 9-12 Tea Partiers taking the place of underground intellectuals. And it will also ruin for all time a term political scientists have enjoyed and Beck recently discovered. (In that clip, an early title for the book is “We Are Americans: The Overton Window.”)

I’m partial to an Atlas show because I reread the novel recently and was stunned. It was as if Rand had seen the future. Writing half a century ago, she predicted today’s explosion of big government in shockingly accurate detail.

The “Preservation of Livelihood Law.” The “Equalization of Opportunity Law.” The “Steel Unification Plan.”

Don’t these sound like laws passed by the current Congress?

All were creations of Rand’s villain, Wesley Mouch, the evil bureaucrat who regulates business and eventually drives the productive people out of business. Who is today’s Wesley Mouch? Barney Frank? Chris Dodd? Tim Geithner? I’ll ask my TV audience to vote.

Way back in March I reported on Rand’s comeback as an intellectual force for conservatives and libertarians, especially the comeback of “Atlas Shrugged.” Stossel has always been on this kick, though, treating “nanny state” regulations as blunt and clumsy incipient fascism.

Demonstrators march at Saturday's Tea Party rally. (Photo by Aaron Wiener)

After four hours of listening to libertarians, Stephanie Chrise decided to get up and get argumentative. The Texas orthodontist, in town one day early for Saturday’s massive “taxpayer march on Washington,” had just heard Yaron Brooks, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, give a stemwinder of a speech based on the late objectivist philosopher and novelist’s work. Politicians from both parties, said Brooks, were looters who were stealing from Americans. Mike Huckabee was “more leftist than some of the Democrats.” Too many people had voted for the Democrats to redistribute wealth because they believed that “morality came from helping out this person who’s in distress.” To Chrise, it all sounded too selfish.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“I’m a Christian,” said Chrise, standing at one of the microphones set up for audience questions, wearing a glittering red baseball cap and a commemorative T-shirt from the April 15 San Antonio Tea Party — the rally where Glenn Beck recorded a live broadcast of his Fox News show. “I believe that we were given unalienable rights based on our God-given rights.” She struggled, but got to her argument. “Once we earn money, we should help people.”

There were annoyed and angry shouts of “No!” from the crowd of around 300 Tea Party activists. There was also some applause. The people who’d come to this “Intellectual Ammunition Strategy Session” at the National Press Club, sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a more political, libertarian think tank, were sympathetic to what Brooks was saying. But some of them were skeptical, too, and applauded Chrise.

“There are things we can do for people that are altruistic,” said Chrise, “that are not socialist.”

Brooks didn’t flinch, and tried to give Chrise an objectivist way out — as long as giving to charity made her happy, she could do it. But for no other reason. “Our sense of morality needs to come out of our own lives,” he said. “It’s your life, in my view, that needs to become the focus of your life.”

Chrise leaned back into the microphone. “That’s exactly what Satan said.” As Brooks continued, Chrise made her way out of the room, stopping occasionally to shake hands, but hurrying as other participants shushed her.

By the standards of Q&As at political speeches, and certainly by the standards set during the town hall meetings that scored members of Congress this summer, Chrise’s dissent was mild stuff. It was, however, a revealing snapshot of the people who trekked to Washington to participate in the weekend’s historic protests. (In the run-up to the big day, FreedomWorks told reporters that 30,000 people would show up at the west lawn of the Capitol. Privately, some in the conservative group hoped and thought that the number would hit 100,000. The likely attendance number, around 60,000 to 70,000, would still make it the largest conservative protest ever to storm the Capitol.)

The arrival of the Tea Party movement has been a godsend for libertarian and conservative organizations, as they’ve offered their services to help organizers and upped their media bookings to talk about the small government grassroots that sprung, seemingly, from nowhere. In April, Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks argued that Tea Party protesters “represent a potentially potent new constituency for fiscal discipline and government restraint.” Sales of Ayn Rand’s books have surged this year, and organizers speak with pride about how members of the movement know more about bills in Congress than congressmen or senators. But as the movement arrived in Washington, some seams between the social conservative and economic-minded wings began to show.

A Tea Party crowd watches a clip from "The Fountainhead," the film adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel, on Friday. (Photo by David Weigel)

The past week’s meeting of the new conservative grassroots and the jacket-and-tie organizations had its awkward moments. According to FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon, speakers at the march on Washington were not censored, and vetted only to make sure they’d stick to the message of the day. That freedom occasionally allowed the more extreme aspects of the movement break through to. Hi-Caliber, a rapper who occasionally appears on Monica Crowley’s radio show, roused the audience with a new, event-specific rap, and drew some of his loudest cheers when he indulged the conspiracy that President Obama was born outside the United States.

I don’t need another lecture from this socialist hypocrite
You say it’s your birthday
But where’s your birth certificate?

James Andura, the owner of a Chrysler Dealership in New York, told the crowd that his business had been “stolen” by the government in a speech that delved deeper and deeper into fear that Americans were losing their freedom to a fascist takeover. “If we the people don’t stop this insane march toward socialism and tyranny,” said Andura, “we might see a situation just like in many countries through history, where a set of circumstances put in a person or a regime that believes in totalitarianism.”

One day earlier, inside the “Intellectual Ammunition” session, full-time conservative and libertarian activists found themselves packaging their philosophy for people from middle America who were more likely to have been roused to action by Glenn Beck than by the Austrian economists. A steady stream of activists came into the National Press Club’s ballroom–the building’s biggest, the site of marquee speeches by celebrities, governors, and members of Congress — and grabbed free Ayn Rand Samplers, with excerpts of her novels and nonfiction, between taking photos of one another’s T-shirts and talking about how they heard about the march, how far they’d traveled to get there, and how thrilling it was to meet like-minded peope.

“We hit a 6-point buck and totaled our truck,” said Karen Bogart, an activist from Casper, Wy. who sported a “9-12 Project” hat from her association with Glenn Beck’s conservative grassroots organizations. “We put out a message to the other 9-12ers and they let us use their cars when we needed them. That’s just how 9-12ers are.”

Lin Zinser, the Ayn Rand Institute’s vice president for outreach, welcomed the event’s attendees by crediting them with the start of a Boston Tea Party-style revolution. They were, she said, “the heart, the soul, and the mind of America.”

“This president and this Congress,” said Zinser, “are ignoring the hard-working, producing, and self-sufficient Americans that you all represent.”

“You are not lying!” yelled a friendly heckler. The room broke up with laughter.

“How many of you think the president and Congress are ignoring your phone calls and e-mails?” asked Zinser.

“They are lying!” yelled another member of the crowd. Later, Zinser would spot a Glenn Beck T-shirt on one activist and thank her and the “Glenn Beckies” for building up the movement.

From there, four lecturers gave the captivated crowd lessons in the history of protest movements, in the Constitution, and in libertarian philosophy. (An audience that filled most of the room dwindled after a short lunch break, but remained above 100.) Iain Murray, a scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, gave the audience a short history of English citizen revolts like the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Glorious Revolution. He pointed to the demands of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt — “there should be no law within the realm save the law of Winchester” to argue that “the right of people to keep and bear arms was only right that people wanted in 1381.” The far-flung activists murmured in agreement; during the Q&A, one told Murray that he interpreted the Second Amendment in a way that gave Americans the right to take up arms against the government.

Fred Smith, the president of the energy and food industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, gave the audience a more pop culture and philosophy-centric presentation. He was introduced by a clip from the film “Other People’s Money” in which Danny DeVito, playing a liquidator telling stockholders to dump their failing business instead of hoping for someone to come in and save it. And he ended it by ripping off his white dress shirt to reveal a bright red “Capitalism” T-shirt designed by Bureaucrash, a libertarian protest group that began as a student organization at Hillsdale and has evolved into a new media-driven activist arm of CEI. In between, he attempted to prove to the activists that their suspicion that the environmental movement was anti-human and anti-progress was absolutely right.

“Death, poverty, and ignorance,” said Smith. “That is their mantra for the world they want to live in! And they get popular support!”

No one got a truly divided response from the crowd until Brooks, a pugnacious speaker who recited Rand’s extreme pro-capitalism dogma in a syrupy Israeli accent. He found some converts. Don Ballantine, a California activist who’d told TWI on Thursday that the Tea Party movement talked too much about issues and too little about freedom, said Brooks had hit the mark. One activist told Brooks he sounded like “the new Patrick Henry.” But before Crise’s walkout, there was some dissent.

“I need help,” asked one questioner, “in the argument of why it’s OK for CEOs to make ‘X’ amount of dollars in this crisis that just happened when they were taking peoples’ money and not paying attention.”

“Where are the perp walks?” shouted another voice in the crowd.

Brooks, undeterred, defended the right of corporate executives to make whatever they want. “Why is it any business what CEOs make?” he scolded. “You’ve got to get away from this zero-sum world of the left.”

Outside, she chatted with Mike Walsh, a software designer from New Hampshire, and Randy Alexander, a housing director at the University of Arkansas. The conversation got loud enough for an annoyed fan of Brooks to shut the press club ballroom’s door behind them.

“I thought a lot of what he said was good,” said Alexander, “but when he was done I said: There’s something about this that really bothers me. What we should be for is freedom to make up your own mind.”

“You want to be able to give through your church to your community,” said Walsh.

“His message, to me,” said Alexander, “was hollow, pointless and sad.”

“And he was on Glenn Beck,” said Crise, shaking her head. “That’s where I first saw him.”

–

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The triumph of capitalism to be found in the Galt schtick is of a more traditional kind: It excites the troops and drives them to increase rightbloggers’ web traffic. (Not to mention their t-shirt sales.) In modern America, revolution is something you sell to suckers to get them to buy your products. Go Galt, like Go Gulf and Go Greyhound, is not a battle cry — it’s a marketing slogan.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. The last few years have seen a number of conservative insta-causes spring up, be proclaimed as the awakening of a silent majority, and be marketed like crazy … before sort of sputtering out. Think of the “Drill Baby Drill” mania of last year, the Palin merchandise industry, and the cult of Joe the Plumber.

A protester at the Chicago Tea Party on February 27 references Ayn Rand's novel. (Flickr: swyngarden)

?”Do you ever wonder,” wrote Dr. Helen Smith, “after dealing with all that is going on with the economy and the upcoming election, if it’s getting to be time to ‘go John Galt?’”

It is Oct. 12, 2008, and inspired by Barack Obama’s curbside debate with Joe the Plumber — and the likelihood of his election to the presidency — Smith, a forensic psychologist in Knoxville, Tenn., was tossing the readers of her blog a serious question. It had been years since she had read “Atlas Shrugged.”

“I had to refresh my memory with the Cliffs Notes,” she said Thursday in an interview. But the themes of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, and the themes of the climactic 40-page speech by self-imposed social outcast “John Galt”, had stuck with her.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

The themes had stuck with her readers, too. Within days, Smith had collected nearly 200 comments and a steady stream of e-mails from readers who were responding to the possibility of a Democratic victory by brainstorming ways to pull out of the economy. Four months later, Smith — a host of “Ask Dr. Helen” on the right-leaning web site PajamasTV — is collecting stories and suggestions from readers scattered across the country, all of them using the “Atlas Shrugged” analogy as a rallying cry against President Barack Obama’s economic policies.

Smith was a little ahead of the curve of what has become an incredibly popular meme. Across the broad conservative movement, from members of Congress to activists to economists, Rand’s final, allegorical novel is being looked at with fresh eyes. According to the Atlas Society, a think tank that promotes and analyzes Rand’s work, sales of “Atlas Shrugged” have tripled since the presidential election. One congressman says that Rand wrote a “rulebook” that can guide conservatives through the age of Obama; another calls Obama’s policies something right out of the mind of Rand. One economist says that Rand’s fantasies have become reality. Smith is one of many activists citing Rand to explain their decisions to sell their stocks, or to explain why the president’s “demonization” of run-amok CEOs is aggravating the economic slowdown. The popular meme is giving critics of the president’s policies a way to explain why, they believe, it’s doomed to fail — because Rand predicted all of this.

“Just this weekend,” said Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) on Wednesday in an interview with TWI, “I had a guy come up to me in my district and tell me that he was losing his interest in the business he’d run for years because the president wanted to punish him for his success. I think people are reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ again because they’re trying to understand what happens to people of accomplishment, and people of talent and energy, when a government turns against them. That’s what appears to be happening right now.”

The plot of Rand’s novel is simple, despite its length — 1,088 pages in the current paperback edition. The United States is governed by bureaucrats, “looters” and “moochers,” who penalize and demonize creative people. The country is in decline because creative people are disappearing — they have followed the innovative John Galt to a mountain enclave, “Galt’s Gulch,” where they watch society crumble. Creativity has gone on strike (the working title of the novel was “The Strike”), and the engine of capitalism cannot run without it.

For Campbell, this is a powerful and relevant story. The congressman calls “Atlas Shrugged” an “instruction manual,” and inscribes the copies that he gives to interns. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, also gives copies of the novel as gifts and refers to it to make the case against President Obama’s policies. “It’s an audacious scheme,” said Ryan in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference last week. “Set off a series of regulatory blunders and congressional meddling, blame the free market for the financial crisis that follows — then use this excuse to impose a more intrusive state. Sounds like something right out of an Ayn Rand novel.”

Before that CPAC speech, Ryan put in a call to Ed Hudgins, the director of advocacy for the Washington-based Atlas Society. “He called me a day or so before that speech to ask about the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ movie,” remembered Hudgins in a Thursday interview. In 2005, Ryan spoke at an Atlas Society commemoration of the centenary of Rand’s birth. Republican appreciation of Rand’s work is nothing new, but Hudgins sees something else happening under President Obama.

“A lot of Obama’s new tax and regulatory policies target the productive industries,” said Hudgins, “sectors that produce jobs, businesses that expand the economy. These are pretty nutty policies. They’re something out of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ in every way, shape, and form. Look at the mortgage plan, which rewards the eight percent of people who bought bad mortgages with money from the rest of us.”

Ayn Rand (Phyllis Cerf) and Atlas Shrugged (Amazon)

Hudgins is proud of the mileage Rand is getting these days, pointing to articles like Steve Moore’s January Wall Street Journal editorial “Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years.” Donald Luskin, an economist who endorsed Ron Paul for president and later served as an adviser to the McCain-Palin campaign, concurs with Moore. “The current political process is a lot like the process in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” he said on Wednesday.

Luskin, who named his daughter Roark after the hero of Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead,” sees basic economic concepts explained through the novelist’s work. “One of the reasons that the Laffer Curve works is because of the John Galt effect of creative people finding ways to cut back on their output if they know they’re going to be taxed, and demonized, for their success,” he said. “We have these sort of villains, like John Thain at Merrill Lynch, who tried to pay himself a large bonus. But then in response to that we have [Sen.] Chris Dodd slipping into the stimulus a new rule that in punishing Thain punishes everybody, even the good guys.”

This view of “Atlas Shrugged” has its detractors. “Ayn Rand romanticized capitalists,” said Jerome Tuccille, author of the libertarian history “It Usually Starts With Ayn Rand,” in a Thursday interview. “She saw them as great heroes. She doesn’t deal with these corporatists like Thain who were pushing paper around and using regulations to feather their nests. Some of these bastards like Thain should be in jail. I mean, I want them carted out of their houses, doing the perp walk at 3 a.m.” Will Wilkinson, a libertarian columnist for The Week magazine, worries about the hazards of Obama’s policy, but doesn’t consider Rand’s book a good handbook for resistance. “The book is a critique of the corporatist economy,” he said on Thursday. “I don’t see why Rand lovers would defend financial executives.”

The activists who have latched onto “Atlas Shrugged” don’t spend as much time thinking about the heroic-capitalist side of the analogy. For Dr. Smith’s readers, like their counterparts writing in to libertarian blogs and protesting Obama at “tea parties, ” the novel is most useful for the concept of “going Galt.” “I do some consulting on the side and the taxation on that income is unbelievable,”wrote one reader to Michelle Malkin. “So, to heck with this. I’m ‘going Galt’ on my consulting.” “I’m considering moving to a small family farm in a foreign country,” wrote a reader to Smith, “and looking into the practical side of the issue right now. It will take a year or two of preparation, but might be feasible and even comfortable.”

Smith, who’s still mulling over ways that she can “go Galt,” sees a possibility for a moral stand. During the Iraq War, she read about a painter who’d painted less, reducing his income, in order to dodge taxes and thereby make sure he didn’t fund the war. “I’d go John Galt just to not pay for programs I don’t believe in,” said Smith. “If we’re opposed to socialistic concepts — if we know they don’t work — why should we pay to support them?”

This, for Wilkinson, is another reason he’s still on the fence — although he’s “sympathetic” to the “going Galt” concept and the Rand comeback. “If we’re being honest,” he said, “it’s a right-wing version of ‘I’m moving to Canada if Bush wins.’”

“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” said Campbell. “The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit the rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

In Rand’s novel, creative people (the “Atlases” of the title) are hounded and punished for their labor by an oppressive, socialistic state. In response, they retreat from society to a hidden enclave where they watch civilization’s slow collapse.

How far, I asked Campbell, are we from the final chapters of the novel? “We’re still a ways away,” he said. “That will happen when people expect that there ought to be a recovery going on, and it isn’t going on.”