Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand Worship, Ctd

Beverly Gage says that the lack of a liberal Ayn Rand, for example, whom Paul Ryan adores (whether he's prepared to admit it or not), contributes to an imbalance between the two sides. According to the author, it's an indication of the overall weakness of the American Left. Furthermore, she warns, "liberals fail to take up the intellectual challenge at their peril." I dissent here on every level, including the implied notion that the work of Ayn Rand is in the slightest sense intellectual, or, for that matter, a challenge.

(Speaking of Ayn Rand, this essay on her makes for excellent reading.) Obviously in a sense she's right: Leftists have a slew of Marxist and Trotskyite texts, whereas the group that Gage identifies as mere 'liberals' have no literary tradition to speak of whatsoever. But having a required reading list for prospective liberals would be antithetical to the flexibility of most liberalism, whose greatest strength, in a sense, is that its not a creed, and can change and evolve according to the needs of the society in which it finds itself.

Besides, the holy texts of conservatism tend to be dreadful. Atlas Shrugged is not only a vast tome of thinly-veiled objectivist propaganda but in many ways better than a sleeping pill, befitting of that wonderful phrase, "chloroform in print."

Liberalism is far too abstract a political alignment to have texts as conservatism does. In a sense, the texts of liberalism are essentially the rest of literature. And having pseudo-philosophical political comment in the context of fiction is probably a bit dishonest — and besides, really dull. Conservatism needs its own canon because it doesn't feel the rest of literature speaks for it. Just as any discussion of the mainstream media on the Right is inevitably undertaken using a very distinctive tone of indignation.