The Great (Wo)Man Theory

Three 20th century figures still ruining our lives today:

Ronald Reagan
Holy mother of god, if one more person says “Well he may not have been perfect, but he did win the Cold War,” I’m going to shit myself. Presiding over the end of a war is different than winning it. Soviet-style communism had had one foot in the grave since 1917. Political systems in which extravagantly-mustachioed despots are able to intentionally and unnecessarily starve millions of their own citizens don’t last forever. When Ukrainians started eating each other, that was the beginning of the end. Perestroika was more about bread than missiles.

So if we cross off “Won the Cold War” from our list of pros, what are we left with? I’m having trouble coming up with one. On the con side, I have “Once said that ‘Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,’ thereby bequeathing upon the American people a pernicious legacy of small-government fundamentalism that continues to destroy us from the inside out.”

Margaret Thatcher
The UK’s answer to Ronald Reagan. We can thank her for lots of the austerity bullshit currently preventing Europe from appropriately handling its sovereign debt crisis.

Ayn Rand
L. Ron Hubbard wrote (science) fiction that transmogrified into holy scripture. While I think we can all agree that Scientologists are crazy, their influence is mercifully limited to bad actors.

Ayn Rand on the other hand wrote fiction that transmogrified into holy scripture, and that holy scripture influenced people like Alan Greenspan. From what I’ve been able to piece together, Ayn Rand’s argument was that poor people should be left to die because they’re not as good as rich people. This argument gels nicely with libertarianism – perhaps the most puerile political theory to ever receive serious mainstream consideration – and now forms the basis of the modern Republican Party. The fact that they’ve latched on to social Darwinism while rejecting real Darwinism tells you pretty much all you need to know about the GOP’s intellectual rigor.