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Jewish World Review Nov. 5, 2008 / 7 Mar-Cheshvan 5769 Joe the Plumber and Ayn the Philosopher: The Road Back for the Right By Robert Tracinski
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Barack Obama's victory in the presidential election, combined with congressional gains for Democrats, will prompt a wave of soul-searching on the right. Among other things, we will be asking: What is the road back from the political wilderness? Where can we look for hope that the next four years will be a temporary lurch to the left from which America will soon recover?
Fortunately, a long search is not really necessary. The past few weeks have provided-too late, alas-two clear answers, from two seemingly different sources.
In the past week, Ayn Rand has been injected into the presidential race by Barack Obama, of all people, with his comment about opposition to high taxes coming from those who believe in the "virtue of selfishness"-which is the title of Rand's book on moral philosophy.
More recently, several readers have alerted me to a discussion on the right about the prospect of "going John Galt," a thread started by "Dr. Helen," the wife of famed Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds. The phrase refers to the idea of highly productive people going "on strike"-as they do in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged-to protest their exploitation under the higher taxes and meddling regulations that we all expect to face under an Obama administration.
The point isn't that people on the right will actually quit working. This is the right's equivalent of all the leftists who vowed to move to Canada after the 2004 election. Very few actually did so, because life in the United States is still far too good to give up-and because we still live in a free society, giving people of every political persuasion plenty of opportunity to pursue their goals through persuasion and activism.
So the point of all of this discussion is not that right-leaning voters are going to disappear to a valley somewhere in Colorado. The point is that Ayn Rand and her ideas are spontaneously coming to their minds as an answer to the financial crisis, to the panicked lurch toward statism, and to the prospect of an even bigger turn to the left under President Obama.
I have argued that a major source of our current problems is that the right has neglected to focus on the case for free markets, and particularly on the moral foundations of the free market. Well, they could not find a better place to start than with Ayn Rand's celebration of the independent achiever as the source of all values, and her defense of rational self-interest-the drive toward achievement and success-as the "motive power" of civilization.
That is precisely where some of them are beginning to turn. Of course, just about every conservative has long been aware of Ayn Rand and her ideas. Now perhaps they are starting to realize just how much they need her.
But is there an audience for these ideas? With the nation apparently turning to the left, what about the sense of life of the American people?
That, I can assure you, is still healthy. The final weeks of the election have introduced us to three men who remind us that, whatever horrible mistakes the American people have made in this election, the distinctive American outlook is not dead. Not remotely.
Those three men are Joe the Plumber, Tito the Builder, and Cory the Well Driller.
Joe the Plumber is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, the Ohio plumber whose chance encounter with Barack Obama induced Obama to admit that he intends to "spread the wealth." The incident made Wurzelbacher a minor celebrity, appearing on talk show interviews to explain why he opposes being punished for pursuing success and the "American dream." Wurzelbacher's example has been followed by Tito the Builder: Tito Munoz, a Colombian immigrant and naturalized US citizen who owns a construction company in Virginia, and who has become a featured guest at Sarah Palin's campaign rallies. And now there is Cory the Well Driller: Cory Miller of C. Miller Drilling Co., who wrote an eloquent open letter to Barack Obama that has circulated widely on the Internet and earned him at least one television interview.
These men represent the best of the American "common man," whose salient characteristic is that he does not regard himself as "common"-not in the sense of being a helpless nobody who requires government help to survive. That is why Obama's answer to Joe the Plumber so completely missed the point. Asked about the higher taxes Joe would pay if he buys the plumbing firm he works for and expands it, Obama replied that "there are two ways of looking at it-I mean one way of looking at it is, now that you've become more successful through hard work, you don't want to be taxed as much." To which Wurzelbacher replied "exactly." Obama continued:
It was clear that something Obama was saying just didn't connect with Joe the Plumber, and this is why. Obama was asking Joe to imagine all of the benefits that would come to him if he were not successful. But the whole key to guys like Joe is that they do not view themselves as being unsuccessful and do not focus on what would be best for them if they fail. They view themselves as successful-and they focus on how to achieve and improve on that success.
This is true of the American common man in general. Even when he is not (yet) successful, he thinks of himself as a potential success, as someone who is ambitious and hardworking and on the road to achievement. For him, self-reliance and success is the norm. The sign-off to Cory Miller's letter says it all; he describes himself as "just an ordinary, extraordinary American, the way most Americans used to be." Success and achievement-which Obama views as some kind of extraordinary luck-is viewed by these men as an ordinary product of hard work and dedication.
Note also that these manual workers-men without college educations-are surprisingly articulate. Now let me be clear: it is not a surprise to me that they are well-spoken. I am not among those snobbish elites who view anyone with a blue-collar job as someone who must have been too dumb to get into college. What is surprising to me is how much better these amateurs tend to be at explaining themselves than the hapless professional politicians.
In this regard, Cory Miller is the most interesting. The brief overview he gives of his career reads like the biography of one of Ayn Rand's self-made industrialists. He describes how he worked his way up from a single truck and a homemade rig to build the most respected well-drilling business in East Texas. He is a self-taught inventor who designed a new well screen service machine and a new mud pump, and he is an indefatigable entrepreneur who took on the crushing financial risks and impossible work demands of starting four businesses. He is clear about what made all of this possible.
As a guy who has signed the front of a paycheck, he also knows how many worthless louts and malingerers there are among the people to whom Barack Obama wants to spread his wealth.
While plumbers and builders and well drillers may seem very different from a high-brow novelist and philosopher, there really is a connection between them. Joe and Tito and Cory are exactly the kind of people Ayn Rand wrote about; they were her heroes in Atlas Shrugged, the inventors and achievers who hold the world on their shoulders. And Ayn Rand is the intellectual who gave full voice to the creed they have lived by. She defined what makes the ordinary American extraordinary.
For those of you who have read Ayn Rand, see if this passage from Cory Miller sounds in the least bit familiar:
Has this man read Atlas Shrugged? As far as I can tell, no. But he has lived it.
So as the right considers how to rebuild a political movement, all of the materials are already there in front of us. For future leaders and spokesmen, forget Sarah Palin. I suggest looking for people like Joe the Plumber, Tito the Builder, and Cory the Well Driller. As for future intellectual direction, I suggest Ayn the Philosopher.
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© 2008, Robert Tracinski |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
