I attended the very first Tea Party rally/protest in Arizona at the State Capitol on April 15th, 2009. I carried a sign that said “Going Galt” which got lots of comments and high-fives. I am still a Tea Party, Don’t Tread On Me type of guy. I’ve read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged three times. I will admit I breezed through the Galt speech so as not to get bogged down and I don’t necessarily agree with Rand’s objectivism theory, but the rest of the book is very engrossing and tracks what is going on in this country right now. I no longer have a copy, having given my last one away to a friend to read.
Atlas Shrugged turned me into a conservative. The first time I read it was in college in the 60’s for a course assignment and I didn’t understand most of it. Not enough real life experiences yet to grasp what was being said. I didn’t understand the difference between a conservative and a liberal back then. The second time I read it, was when I was finishing up my tour in the Air Force and I enjoyed the book. I realized I was a conservative (or at least a smaller government libertarian). The last time I read it was during Obama’s first term and I could see exact parallels with Rand’s novel and Obama’s reign of terror as a radical left president.
I don’t consider Atlas Shrugged as a bible for my politics but it convinced me that liberalism was full of holes and unintended consequences of not-so-well-thought-out- policies. Do I like the novel? Yes. Do I subscribe to Rand’s ideology 100%? No. I don’t think it is necessary to denigrate completely everything one does not like parts of. Take the good and ignore the negatives. But as with most things in life, AS has its value and contributes its part in explaining the differences between the moochers and the producers. America’s problem now is how to reduce the moochers and enhance the producers.
Ayn Rand is who won me over too. I actually think The Fountainhead was enough, but I went ahead and read Atlas Shrugged too, and to me it was indeed a page-turner I couldn’t put down. I wouldn’t want to slog through Galt’s speech again now that I’m already converted, but I re-read Francisco d’Anconia’s “Money Speech” pretty regularly.