I'm no Randian. I generally cede the floor to Whittaker Chambers on this matter, who in his 1957 National Review takedown of Atlas Shrugged , made plain the reasons why objectivism was a different critter from recognizable conservatism.
There is one scene in The Fountainhead, though, that I think has had lasting value in the marketplace of ideas. Ellsworth Toohey, the architecture critic for The Banner newspaper, explicitly tells Howard Roarke why he's strived at every turn to thwart Roark's career as an architect. It's because he knows that Roark's designs are excellent, that his work is identifiable by its fealty to integrity on all levels. Toohey can't have that. He's after a world in which mediocrity and sameness characterize human endeavor.
The scene was brought to mind when I came across the news item concerning San Francisco school board member Alison Collins, who has the same mission with an updated identity-politics twist.
I was heartened to see that she'd gone a bridge too far even in one of post-America's most progressive cities. She's facing a storm of backlash:
San Francisco School Board member Alison Collins is under significant pressure to resign after tweets she posted about Asian Americans back in 2016 were brought to light by a parent group seeking to oust her. As I pointed out yesterday, one of Collins tweets said, “Many Asian Am. believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS…They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.'” Today the San Francisco Chronicle reports on the significant backlash to those statements.
School board member Jenny Lam called for Collins to resign from the board.
“I’m shocked, dismayed, personally hurt by the remarks about Asian American students, parents and teachers,” Lam said, adding the board makes decisions that affect tens of thousands of people and it’s critical to have leaders representing all students.
Lam said she spoke to Collins on Friday.
“I asked, and I think it’s in the best interest of the school district and leadership for her to step down from the Board of Education,” Lam said…
Mayor London Breed also strongly condemned the posts, but did not directly call for her resignation.
“All of our young people in our schools need to feel respected and supported, and you simply can’t use words like that,” she said in a statement. “Asian people in this country have long faced very real racism, including here in San Francisco, and you can’t just broad brush their experience in a way that is so harmful and offensive.
Mayor Breed didn’t initially call for Collins’ resignation but she has since changed her mind. She now says the Asian community deserves better:
Collins has tried to backtrack, with some kind of drivel about how people have to understand the context of her 2016 statements, that she was in a lather because Donald Trump had just won the election.
The central point remains. Collins cannot abide by anyone rising above the average and distinguishing himself or herself by attaining levels of achievement, that, from a statistical standpoint, are by definition rare.
She can't stand the thought of the human being digging deep into himself or herself to explore the potential of his / her mettle.
This has been the common thread of the leftist vision as it has morphed from Marx and Engels through Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro to - well, Collins.
The individual soul is worth nothing to the leftist. The point is to take away that which makes a human being more than just another member of the animal kingdom, his or her nobility, his or her ability to distinguish between bad, good, better and best.
Collins doesn't seem to have been chastened by the response to her pronouncement, but at least it's served to demonstrate that most people are still aghast at that degree of collectivism. Or maybe, and this is a less sunny consideration, merely the candor with which it's been expressed.
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