US Election 2004

With a presidential election loss, the losing party turns its knives inward in an attempt to explain its defeat.  However, the explanation for Kerry’s loss has been available for 24 years:  he was the candidate of the New Left.

In The New York Times Magazine (5/17/1970), in the context of the activism of the New Left, it was asked, “Are We in the Middle of the ‘Second American Revolution’?”.  In her contribution to the question, novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand explained how the New Left was not a revolution but a putsch.  More importantly, she put the issue in a broader context:

Physically, America is not in a desperate state, but intellectually and culturally she is.  The New Left is the product of cultural disintegration; it is bred not in slums, but in the universities; it is no the vanguard of the future, but the terminal stage of the past.

Intellectually, the activists of the New Left are the most docile conformists.  They have accepted as dogma all the philosophical beliefs of their elders for generations:  the notion that faith and feeling are superior to reason, that material concerns are evil, that love is the solution to all problems, that the merging of one’s self with a tribe or a community is the noblest way to live.  There is not a single basic principle of today’s Establishment which they do not share.  Far from being rebels, they embody the philosophic trend of the past 200 years (or longer):  the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis, which has dominated Western philosophy from Kant to Hegel to James and on down.

But this philosophic tradition is bankrupt.  It crumbles in the aftermath of World War II.  Disillusioned in their collectivist ideals, America’s intellectuals gave up the intellect.  Their legacy is our present political system, which is not capitalism, but a mixed economy, a precarious mixture of freedom and controls.  Injustice, insecurity, confusion, the pressure-group warfare of all against all, the amorality and futility of random, pragmatist, range-of-the-moment policies are the joint products of a mixed economy and of a philosophic vacuum.

There is a profound discontent, but the New Left is not its voice; there is a sense of bitterness, bewilderment and frustrated indignation, a profound anxiety about the intellectual-moral state of this country, a desperate need of philosophical guidance, which the church-and-tradition-bound conservatives were never able to provide and the liberals have given up.

Without opposition, the hoodlums of the New Left are crawling from under the intellectual wreckage.  Theirs is the Anti-Industrial Revolution, the revolt of the primordial brute—no, not against capitalism, but against capitalism’s roots—against reason, progress, technology, achievement, reality.  [A. Rand, “From a Symposium,” The New Left:  The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Signet, 1971), p. 97]

In this election, the media has focused on two alternatives:  Kerry’s New Left and Bush’s Evangelicalism.   But, is there an alternative to the faithful of the left and the right?

What this country needs is a philosophical revolution—a rebellion against the Kantian tradition—in the name of the first of our Founding Fathers:  Aristotle.  This means a reassertion of the supremacy of reason, with its consequences:  individualism, freedom, progress, civilization.  What political system would it lead to?  An untried one:  full, laissez-faire capitalism.  [Ibid., p. 98]

In another piece in the same published collection, Rand explores the anti-industry, anti-technology, environmentalist, and thus anti-man, agenda of the New Left.  At one point, she explains why these ideas persistent and have not been fought effectively. 

There are three major reasons why you, and most people, do not protest.  (1) You take technology—and its magnificent contributions to your life—for granted, almost as if it were a fact of nature, which will always be there.  But it is not and will not.  (2) As an American, you are likely to be very benevolent and enormously innocent about the nature of evil.  You are unable to believe that some people can advocate man’s destruction for the sake of man’s destruction—and when you hear them, you think that they don’t mean it.  But they do.  (3) Your education—by the same kind of people—has hampered your ability to translate an abstract idea into its actual, practical meaning and, therefore, has made you indifferent to and contemptuousof ideas.  This is the real American tragedy.

It is these three premises that you now have to check.  [A. Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” The New Left:  The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Signet, 1971), pp. 131-132]

Rand’s The New Left has been republished in an expanded edition including three essays by Peter Schwartz and retitled The Return of the Primitive:  The Anti-Industrial Revolution.  Whether your personal concern is rebuilding the Democratic Party, correcting the “me to” Republicans, or fighting the violation of your rights, The Return of the Primitive is an essential book to read in order to feed your argument with correct concepts, and inform your actions.  

Image Source: Ayn Rand Bookstore

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