The GOP can no longer be defined solely by the acronymn terms “Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis.” The “sabotage” meme is also begining to stick, as Political Animal Steve Benen observes in the Washington Monthly: “…the “sabotage” question — concerns that Republicans are deliberately hurting the country, holding back the economy on purpose, for the express purpose of undermining the Obama presidency — is gaining mainstream traction.”
Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert have a DCorps report on a new GQR survey exploring attitudes toward the Occupy Wall St. Movement and revealing “an intensely anti-establishment, anti-Washington, anti-Wall Street moment.” The report also indicates “On our thermometer scale, voters give chilly ratings all around. Everyone has dropped substantially, but support for the Republican Congress has completely disintegrated. More than half of all voters give these Republicans a negative rating, with a mean rating under 40 degrees. With House Republicans getting a remarkable 65 percent disapproval, the race for Congress is now dead even, after Republicans won by 8 points in 2010.”
Julian Brookes has a Rolling Stone post, “People are Ditching Their Banks and Shredding Their Cards,” noting: “Efforts like the Facebook-based Bank Transfer Day,, which is urging depositors to switch to a (low-or no-fee) credit union before Nov. 5, and Move Your Money, are having an effect, and local news outlets are reporting an uptick in fund shifts from big banks and into nonprofit institutions. Understandably, credit unions are piling on with ad campaigns urging potential customers to “ditch their banks” and “shred their cards.” Some credit unions have seen a 30 percent bump; others have doubled their membership.”
David G. Savage of the L.A.Times D.C. Bureau has an update on the GOP’s nation-wide voter suppression campaign, “Election laws tightening in GOP-run states”
Ron Brownstein’s National Journal post, “The Stained Glass Divide,” shows Dems doing a little better among the faithful than I expected: “Looking then at all adults, Republicans lead Democrats in identification among the very religious by 49 percent to 36 percent; Democrats lead Republicans among the non-religious by 52 percent to 30 percent; and Democrats narrowly lead among the moderately religious by 44 percent to 38 percent.”
In his CNN opinion post, James Carville makes a pretty tight argument “Why Rick Perry’s presidential bid is toast.”
Daniel Stone has a clip ‘n share for Dems at The Daily beast, “The Tea Party Pork Binge,” hammering conservative politicians for the disonnect between their pious government-bashing on the one hand and their eagerness to grab all the pork they can for their constituents, Eric Cantor being exhibit ‘A.’: “But away from the cameras, Cantor sometimes pulls right up to the spending trough, including the very stimulus law he panned in public. Letters obtained by Newsweek show him pressing the Transportation Department to spend nearly $3 billion in stimulus money on a high-speed-rail project–not the one he derided in Nevada, but another in his home state.” More juicy revelations here.
Jessica Brady has an interesting post at Roll Call Politics, discussing how conservative challengers in GOP primaries are a potentially-powerful asset for Democrats in their quest to retake majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Chris Bowers reports how “One part of Republican plan to derail Wisconsin recalls collapses,” when Republican state Senator Dale Schultz took a stand against a bill requiring the recall effort to be conducted under new, redistricted state maps. Bowers notes, however, that the state GOP has another bill in the hopper, which could obstruct the recall by requiring that recall petititions be notarized.

Feeling frustrated with your bank or disgusted with megabanks in general? Danielle Douglas has an alternative to consider in her WaPo article “Credit Unions Pounce After Banks Raise Fees.”
Douglas quotes from an ad placed by a Kensington, MD credit union: “There’s no reason to pay your bank, when we’re here to pay you, with: no-fee checking and debit card, no minimum balance requirements . . . dividends paid quarterly.”
Douglas explains further,

In the past month, the National Association of Federal Credit Unions recorded a 350 percent increase in Web traffic to its online credit union locator, CUlookup.com. The portal matches visitors with institutions they might be eligible to join based on affiliations, such as school, employer or church.
A Facebook group has designated Nov. 5 “Bank Transfer Day,” calling on customers to move their money into credit unions to avoid soaring fees. The event has gained momentum in the blogosphere and spilled into the mainstream media, drawing attention to an often-ignored sector of the financial industry.

Douglas may have overstated the case in saying that credit unions lack extensive ATMs. Many credit unions, for example, are part of the no-fee CO-OP ATM network, which has more than 28,000 CO-OP ATMs nation-wide, more than any major bank. Bank of America, for example, reportedly has an estimated 18,000 ATMs.
Rank and file Dems may be interested to know how banks spend their depositors’ money on politics. According to Opensecrets.org’s most recent analysis of FEC data for the 2012 election cycle, so far Bank of America has given 69 percent of its political donations to Republicans and Wells Fargo has doled out 65 percent of its political contributions to GOP candidates. The American Bankers Association has distributed 73 percent of its political donations to Republicans this cycle, while The Credit Union National Association has so far given 55 percent of its political contributions for this cycle to Republicans (but gave more to Dems in ’08 and ’10).
Good stats for Dems to keep in mind, leading up to Nov. 5, “Bank Transfer Day.”

There’s a lot going on this morning, what with stocks sliding in the wake of last night’s debt limit fiasco in the House and a bad GDP report, and people in Washington finally beginning to realize that yes, the Tea Party folk are perfectly willing and able to deliberately wreck the U.S. economy if they don’t get their way.
But because it didn’t get that much attention, and yet it represents a microcosm of the strange new territory Americans politics seems to have entered, I want to mention a small but telling incident from yesterday.
At 4:03 p.m., Sarah Palin did a Facebook post that didn’t explicitly tell Republican House members how to vote on the Boehner plan, but did pretty clearly threaten primary challenges to those who forgot the mandate they supposedly had to turn Washington upside down. It also strikes the classic Palin note of self-identification with right-wing activists in “flyover country” against “elitists.”

I respectfully ask these GOP Freshman to re-read this letter and remember us “little people” who believed in them, donated to their campaigns, spent hours tirelessly volunteering for them, and trusted them with our votes. This new wave of public servants may recall that they were sent to D.C. for such a time as this….
P.S.–Everyone I talk to still believes in contested primaries.

A prediction: If the withdrawal of the Boehner plan last night due to insufficient Republican support turns out to be a big moment in this fiscal melodrama, the Palin Facebook post will get a lot of the credit or blame, depending on your point of view.
If I’m right about that, Palin will have proven once again that for all her manifest flaws, nobody quite knows how to play the media–both the “lamestream” and the conservative ideological variety–quite like St. Joan of the Tundra. I mean, really: the Republican House Study Committee and Jim DeMint managed to badger all but one presidential candidate plus 183 conservative organizations into signing the “cut, cap, and balance” pledge that swore signatories to exhibit unwavering hostility to any debt limit increase plan other than their own. Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty have been careening around Iowa the last week shrieking at Congress to vote down the Boehner plan. Sarah Palin, meanwhile, waited to the very last hour and simply did a Facebook post, yet it’s her intervention that will probably be remembered.
You have to admire Palin’s economy of effort.
UPDATE: Dave Weigel has a good metaphor for Palin’s involvement in the debt limit vote:

Her Facebook note was familiar to anyone who’s put out a call for friends to help him move, and watches one of the friends show up at the last minute to lift one box then dig into the pizza you’ve provided.

At the New Yorker, George Packer offers a vivid reminder that unemployment rates significantly understate the number of people struggling to survive in this economy, and requiring a bit of help from their government, if it deigns to offer it:

In the midst of the debt crisis in Washington, D.C., Danny Hartzell backed a Budget rental truck up to a no-frills apartment building that is on a strip of motels and pawnshops in Tampa, Florida. He had been laid off by a packaging plant during the financial crisis of 2008, had run through his unemployment benefits, and had then taken a part-time job stocking shelves at Target in the middle of the night, for $8.50 an hour. His daughter had developed bone cancer, and he was desperate to make money, but his hours soon dwindled to four or five a week. In April, Hartzell was terminated. His last biweekly paycheck was for a hundred and forty dollars, after taxes. “It’s kind of like I’ve fallen into that non-climbable-out-of rut,” he said. “If you can’t climb out, why not move?”
On the afternoon of July 1st, Hartzell was loading the family’s possessions into the rental truck–and brushing off the roaches that had infested the apartment, so that the bugs wouldn’t make the move, too–when a letter arrived from the State of Florida. Four days earlier, Governor Rick Scott, a Republican backed by the Tea Party, had signed a law making it harder for Floridians to collect jobless benefits, and the letter informed Hartzell that he was ineligible for new benefits after losing his job at Target. “I guess it’s just all water under the bridge at this point anyway, being that we’re going to stake a new claim,” Hartzell told his fifteen-year-old son. “Right, Brent?” Then the Hartzells drove ten hours north, to rural Georgia, where no job or house awaited them–only an old friend Hartzell had reconnected with on Facebook, and the hope of a fresh start.
On the day the family moved, there were officially 14.1 million unemployed Americans, or 9.2 per cent of the workforce. Hartzell himself probably isn’t counted in these statistics. In recent years, he has fallen into the more nebulous categories of the part-time employed, the long-term unemployed, and the “marginally attached”–the no-longer-looking unemployed. Economists report that the broader, and more accurate, unemployment rate is 16.2 per cent. Three years after the economic meltdown, nearly one in six Americans are out of work.

This tale of tragedy is totally aside from the number of Americans who have jobs but whose employers are using the leverage supplied by the economy to keep their wages and benefits low, and their mouths shut. It’s a perfect environment for the bullying of middle-class working Americans, in the workplace and in state legislatures and in Congress. We are a long, long way from anything resembling what used to be called “The American Dream,” and you don’t have to be a big believer in class warfare to note that all the abstract arguments for austerity and limited government are on behalf of people who have for many years cruised through hard times doing very well, without much thought for their fellow-countrymen in this nation conservatives claim to adore.

It took me a few minutes to get my head around the recent report that 35 percent of adults, not just 35 percent of cell phone users, now own smartphones, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. More than a third of American adults, not just kids, are using cell phones to check emails, surf the net and noodle with apps.
The app world boasts a few stunning statistics of its own, including the sheer number of available apps — 425K for Iphones and over 200K for Androids, figures soon to be ancient history.
There are a number of apps that provide a broad range of useful political data, such as Walking Edge, a database for canvassers that pinpoints homes of undecided voters and supporters, custom-designed, unfortunately, for Republican-friendly campaigns. Hopefully, a Democratic version is on the way, if not already up and running.
Plenty of political consultants are offering to provide fund-raising apps for individual campaigns. From what I can gather, however, the quantity of useful partisan advocacy apps for Democratic activists could be more impressive. Much abbreviated political dialogue takes place though mobile Twitter and Facebook applications. But apparently, major app providers are struggling with questions of content and taste in deciding which ones to provide. There are a few good pro-Democratic apps, including:

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has a mobile sign-up widget here.
‘The Democrats,’ the party’s official app, has some useful localized features, along with alerts, events, even some issue analysis
ActBlue Mobile makes cell bill add-on contributions to worthy Dems quick and simple
You can view screen samples for the “Obama 2012” app here.
Some others include ‘Democrat News,’ ‘Democrat Quotes,’ and ‘The Democrat News App‘

But, more are needed (readers please add good ones not noted above). Some possibilities include a series of daily apps, among them:

Message of the day – The DNC should craft a succinct message on a topic of current interest for rank and file Dems. It could be a rebuttal of the GOP message of the day, which has been part of their echo chamber for years
The Daily Stat – An interesting statistic for bolstering Democratic policy arguments
Political One-liner – sort of ‘snark du jour’ for the water cooler
Republican outrage of the day – A variation on Keith Olbermann’s ‘Worst Person of the Day.’ So much material here that it might be hard to pick just one.
‘The Read’ – Flagging a single must-read daily article or internet post for the time-challenged that explains a policy or issue of concern for Dems unusually well. App developer Handmark has a political digest called ‘Politicaster Left,’ (as well as Politicaster Right) but the offerings seem a little broad.
Candidate of the Day – Mini-bio of a featured Democratic candidate — local, state or federal — who needs some help in the form of contributions, similar to ActBlue, but spotlighting candidates of color and female candidates to improve Democratic candidate diversity. Press a button and your five measly dollars are automatically sent to them and added to your cell bill.

The apps world is expanding exponentially, and smart phone apps have huge potential for helping Dems, more than Republicans, to optimize small contributor fund-raising, educate voters, GOTV and lobby. A commitment to meet this challenge by the pro-Democratic technorati could be a game-changer.

Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director, Governance Studies of The Brookings Institution, has a post that should be of interest to Dem candidates and campaigns: “Ten Ways Social Media Can Improve Campaign Engagement and Reinvigorate American Democracy.”
West explains:

…Using social networking outreach tools such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter, a number of Democratic and Republican candidates raised money, identified supporters, built electoral coalitions, and brought people in closer touch with the electoral process. Despite social networking’s track record for generating democratic engagement, though, it has proven difficult to sustain political interest and activism online over time and move electronic engagement from campaigns to governance…

Brookings convened a panel of experts on using digital resources in politics to address reviving political engagement among citizens. It would be good if Dems considered the panel’s ten suggestions for using social media, which include, according to West’s report:

Future Political Effectiveness Is Going to Be Based on Social Networks Because that is Where “Trust Filters” Operate. In a world of information over-flow, it is hard for people to evaluate competing claims. Politicians often disagree not just on interpretations, but on the facts. Increasingly, people are using their personal networks to fact-check claims, evaluate the quality of information, and alert them to what is important in the world. As pointed out by Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, these developments allow individuals and their networks to “act like broadcasters and publishers” and therefore transform the nature of political communications. Those seeking to engage citizens and get them involved in the political process must win the trust of social networks to be influential during the contemporary period. Future political influence is going to be network-based because those are the filters used to access and evaluate political information. Unless you can get past those trust filters, you will not be able to engage the public and influence the course of electoral events.

Read more…

After the online political explosion of 2008, it’s natural to assume the 2012 presidential cycle will be strongly affected by use of social media like Facebook and Twitter.
But as Ken Thomas of AP explains in an early analysis of 2012 campaign technology usages, it may be new and functionally useful apps rather than social media that will make the key difference:

While social media may generate new interest in 2012, technology could play an important role in the more mundane, shoe-leather work of registering new voters and turning them out.
In 2008, campaign supporters who knocked on doors of potential voters largely used paper “walk sheets” that were printed out at local headquarters. The results of the door-to-door meetings were keyed into databases to guide the campaign’s work to persuade voters on Obama’s behalf.
This time, the campaign is exploring ways of streamlining the process, from bringing more uniformity to how the information is taken down and entered into a database to using mobile devices, tablet computers or improvements to the website to help volunteers find key households or input data gathered at doorsteps. The approach could save time and help the campaign be more strategic about the households it targets.
The Democratic National Committee, for example, experimented with an app in 2010 that used global positioning systems to help canvassers find targeted households in certain neighborhoods, something that could be used more broadly in the presidential campaign.

New tools for old school tasks may be the wave of the immediate future.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
As the 2012 Republican presidential field began to take shape earlier this year, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty looked like the perfect on-paper candidate: a former blue-state, blue-collar governor from the Midwest who was cozy with both social conservatives and Tea Party folk, and who didn’t have Mitt Romney’s problem of heretical past positions. Nobody, to be sure, was going to confuse him with the fire-breathing orators whose rhetoric he purloined, but at a time when a generic Republican was consistently running more strongly against Barack Obama than any actual candidate, he was, as David Frum noted, the most “generic” of those available, and virtually everyone’s second choice.
But in the months that have transpired, T-Paw-mania has stubbornly failed to develop. Pawlenty remains mired in the single digits in both national polls and most surveys of early primary states, now routinely trailing the previously obscure and entirely untested pizza magnate, Herman Cain. His stump style continues to provoke mockery and yawns. His big policy announcement, an “economic plan” that proposed gigantic new upper-end tax cuts and relied on hallucinatory levels of economic growth, was trashed by experts, including some Republicans. And when he finally produced some campaign trail heat by taunting Mitt Romney with a description of the Affordable Care Act as “ObamneyCare,” Pawlenty immediately invited bipartisan catcalls for refusing to defend the label in the first major Republican candidates’ debate. So is T-Paw just another overreaching politician who looked in the funhouse mirror of ego and flattery and saw a boring nebbish transformed into a putative leader of the free world? Were the initial hopes inspired by his candidacy as overblown as his bombastic video ads?
Perhaps. But the available evidence suggests that he is simply playing a different game than his critics imagine: a small-ball strategy focused not on gaining national media attention, or destroying Mitt Romney, or gaining millions of Facebook or YouTube followers. Instead, his campaign is all about doggedly pursuing a path to victory that begins in Ames, Iowa, on August 13.
To many national political observers, the Iowa GOP Straw Poll in Ames is just a bit of meaningless pageantry that typifies Iowa’s excessive role in the presidential nominating process. But it serves the objective function of winnowing the field, particularly among candidates with similar constituencies. In 2008, for instance, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback was considered a viable contender until Mike Huckabee beat him for second place in Ames, establishing himself as the preferred candidate of conservative evangelicals and other social conservatives in the state. Huckabee, of course, went on to upset Mitt Romney in the actual Caucuses five months later.
T-Paw’s strategy is to do to his social conservative opponents–Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann–what Huckabee did to Brownback. And he’s poured everything he has into putting together the most impressive organization of any candidate in Iowa, including a large field staff, Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, Romney’s 2008 straw poll coordinator, and a host of local luminaries. He’s also become the first candidate to buy TV ads in Iowa. He’s poor-mouthed his prospects, saying that he only needs to gain “one of the top few spots” in Ames. But as The Iowa Republican‘s Craig Robinson observed:

Tim Pawlenty isn’t trying to sneak up on anyone in Iowa. When you look at the size of team that he has assembled, it is clear that he intends to do more than just compete here in Iowa. He intends to win it.

Pawlenty will be aided, as well, by the fact that Mitt Romney has announced he’s skipping the Straw Poll he won in 2008, and that Jon Huntsman is skipping Iowa altogether. And even if Texas’s Rick Perry, who has theoretical appeal to the Tea Party and social conservative activists in Iowa, jumps into the race in a few weeks, he’s not going to have time to assemble the kind of labor-intensive bus caravan effort necessary to show well in Ames. A decisive win over Bachmann and Cain in the Straw Poll–a real possibility since Bachmann is 18 Iowa visits behind Pawlenty in her native state, while Cain has shown signs of organizational weakness–could help Pawlenty begin consolidating social conservative support to win the Caucuses, and go a long way towards his ultimate goal of becoming the “true conservative” alternative to Mitt Romney.
At that point, all sorts of horizons could open up for the Minnesotan. While he’s shown very little strength in New Hampshire, Romney’s long-standing front-runner status in that state makes him vulnerable to the kind of less-than-expected, Pyrrhic victory that unraveled the campaign of Democrat Ed Muskie (another New Hampshire neighbor) back in 1972. Indeed, if Jon Huntsman somehow gets traction among independents in the Granite State, the state primary could begin to resemble its 2010 Republican Senate primary, when long-time frontrunner Kelly Ayotte nearly succumbed to a left-right squeeze from wealthy centrist Bill Binnie and social conservative Ovide Lamontagne.
And even if Romney wins New Hampshire decisively, T-Paw has some hidden strengths when the contest moves south. Pawlenty has slavishly pandered to the litmus-test demands of Palmetto State kingpin Jim DeMint and celebrity governor Nikki Haley, who shares a pollster with Pawlenty and is rumored to be in his camp. (Celebrity congressman Joe “You Lie!” Wilson, for his part, has already endorsed him). His campaign manager, wunderkind Nick Ayers, got his start in Georgia politics, which helps explain why Newt Gingrich’s national co-chair, former Governor Sonny Perdue, endorsed Pawlenty the moment Newt’s campaign imploded. And while Rick Perry could make a regional appeal in the South, that’s a long way off, and southern conservatives have long shown a willingness to back conservative Yankees against regional favorites (e.g., Bob Dole over Lamar Alexander in 1996).
In any event, this scenario helps to explain why Pawlenty’s doing what he’s doing: obsessively campaigning in Iowa and not worrying much about his national standing. Even his infamous wimp out on “ObamneyCare” makes sense given Iowans’ well-known antipathy for intraparty negative campaigning, and the more obvious fact that Romney is not his target in that state. The fact that Pawlenty has a clear strategy with a plausible path to victory does not, of course, mean it will work. In a year when Republicans seem to want an ideological crusader as much as a conventional candidate, T-Paw’s lack of charisma–which once led a Minnesota magazine to entitle a sympathetic profile of the governor, “The Cipher”–could be the political death of him. But if he fails, it will be because he couldn’t overcome who he is, not because he’s running a bad campaign for president.

Earlier today J.P. Green offered a balanced assessment of Jon Huntsman’s general election prospects in the unlikely even that he wins the GOP presidential nomination. But it’s hard to imagine Obama’s former ambassador to China ever getting to that point. Here’s Dave Weigel’s brutal take on Hunstman after watching his launch event:

Huntsman 2012 is a joint production of the political media and the fun wing of the GOP’s consultant class. (His chief strategist is McCain veteran John Weaver, who made a hobby of criticizing McCain’s negative turn in 2008; his adman is Fred Davis, who made sure you knew Christine O’Donnell was not a witch.) There is no Huntsman groundswell. There was no Draft Huntsman movement. One metric to show this: He has about 5,000 Facebook fans. A reasonably busy senator has that many. The wildly ignored 2012 contender Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, has more than 120,000 fans. True, Huntsman’s team cleverly secured a second-place showing in the Southern Republican Leadership Conference [straw poll]. When that result came down, my colleague John Dickerson heard only two hands clapping.

As for the positive hype over Huntsman cleverly choosing the same Statue of Liberty site for his launch that Ronald Reagan used in his 1980 general election campaign: Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics points out that it’s the same place where the less-than-immortal 1996 campaign of Pete Wilson started out. Right now Huntsman’s destination looks more likely to resemble Wilson’s than Reagan’s, at least in 2012. His hunch that Republicans are looking for a nominee who is civil towards Barack Obama and even shares some of his views–but who eagerly embraces the least popular recent GOP initiative, the Ryan budget–just seems a bit counter-intuitive.

Paul Ryan is unusual among politicians because – unlike most — he is actually committed to a specific, explicitly formulated social philosophy – the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Here are three facts that make the depth of his commitment unmistakably clear:

• Paul Ryan was a speaker at the Ayn Rand Centenary Conference in 2005, where he cited Rand as his primary inspiration for entering public service. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said.
• He has at least two videos on his Facebook page in which he heaps praise on Rand. “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism,”
• He distributes copies of Rand’s books to his staff and requires them to read them.

So is Ryan really a committed and genuine follower of Rand? Let’s try just a little bit of intellectual honesty here. Just replace the name Ayn Rand with V.I. Lenin and imagine a Democrat trying to get away with doing the things listed above without being labeled a hard-core Leninist fanatic.
OK, so let’s accept that Ryan is a serious, dyed-in-the-wool Ayn Rand-ian. So what? Well, listen to these quotes from Rand about ordinary working people:

“The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains…
…Wealth is …made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools, by the able at the expense of the incompetent, by the ambitious at the expense of the lazy….
“What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?”

No, these are not out of context, uncharacteristic remarks and no, they are not referring only to people on welfare. They are the core of an organized philosophy that glorifies the wealth-creating businessman and dismisses the ordinary working stiff as a dumb and lazy parasite whose mediocrity is his own damn fault and who lives off businessmen’s productivity like a blood-sucking leech. It’s the philosophy at very heart of “Atlas Shrugged” the book that made Rand a right-wing hero.
Now here is Ayn Rand on God:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.

Ayn Rand on Faith:

…. The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

Ayn Rand on Christian Compassion:

Now there is one word–a single word–which can blast the morality of altruism out of existence and which it cannot withstand–the word: “Why?” Why must man live for the sake of others? Why must he be a sacrificial animal? Why is that the good? There is no earthly reason for it–and, ladies and gentlemen, in the whole history of philosophy no earthly reason has ever been given. It is only mysticism that can permit moralists to get away with it. It was mysticism, the unearthly, the supernatural, the irrational that has always been called upon to justify it… one just takes it on faith.

Ayn Rand on the Cross:

“It is the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. . . . It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.”

“Mysticism” and “superstition” were two of Ayn Rand’s favorite derogatory terms for religion and her dismissal of Christ for sacrificing himself for his “inferiors” ties together her contempt for both ordinary working people and Christianity at the same time. There are in her works countless statements that literally drip with scorn and loathing for the weak, the helpless, the needy – the people Jesus called “the least of these”. Her “Virtue of Selfishness” described such people as contemptible failures and parasites — inferiors to be despised, not comforted.

Read more…