I’ve been doing a bit of traveling in Europe lately, and if you ask a European about the current economic crisis, nearly all of them will have the same opinion: “Economic deregulation, driven by banking and finance corporations, was the cause.” When I described to a Spanish friend the Republican narrative being shaped about the crisis—that the finance sector was pressured into loaning money to uncreditworthy borrowers—he sort of laughed and said, “So in your country the conservatives say that evil poor people took advantage of angelic rich people? That would be the first time in history that happened.”

Yes, but it wouldn’t be the first time in history Americans believed it. Far from it—the ultimate document of blameless rich folks, Ayn Rand’s 1957 individualist fantasy Atlas Shrugged, is climbing the bestseller charts for the first time in decades. In her book, a group of powerful industrialists withdraw from society in protest over taxation and regulation, and nearly bring about an economic collapse. It’s a revenge fantasy in which the best and the brightest teach the rabble a lesson. Atlas Shrugged is more than a thousand pages of dense prose that possess the moral depth of a Dirty Harry movie. Despite this Rand is hailed as a great thinker, even, in some circles, a philosopher. Her beleaguered industrialists are incarnations of everyman, or what every individual could be, if they weren’t repressed by the parasitic masses.

Of course, in the real world industrialists are not in any way repressed, overtaxed, or overregulated. In the real world most American corporations pay zero taxes in any given year. And as far as individualism goes, no corporation succeeds alone. A major ingredient of corporate success is the siphoning of public wealth. When a corporation receives tax breaks, the shortfall must be paid for by the public, sometimes for decades. When a corporation receives a no-bid contract, the inflated price for services is paid by the public, typically to the tune of billions. The real world contains corporate parasites, not corporate individualists. There is no John Galt, only Citi and AIG, begging like piss-bums on a street corner. This reality is why Rand’s book shouldn’t be taken seriously as anything other than science fiction—it draws its conclusions from a fantasy world that never existed, any more than did Middle Earth or Narnia. 

But Americans seem susceptible to this particular fantasy. Against all logic, tens of millions of us—the vast majority working class—seem willing to rally behind a moneyed elite that has stripped public wealth and made the U.S. a pauper nation. Millions who can barely keep their heads above water are willing to rally behind a Republican party whose two main tenets are lower taxes for the rich and no oversight of corporations. Is it stupidity? Mass hypnosis? Low self-esteem?

Atlas Shrugged fans generally discover the book in college because Rand’s individualist message—which she calls objectivism—resonates at an age when we are defined mostly by hormone and ego. The fatal flaw of Rand’s premise goes unnoticed because very few readers, particularly college freshmen, understand real world economics, and the role our government plays in funneling public money upward to private enterprise. Seeking a valid blueprint for managing economies in Rand is the equivalent of looking for valid social science in Star Trek, or religious salvation in L. Ron Hubbard’s scientology writings. Yet this is exactly what millions of new readers of the book may be doing. Don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t begin to criticize Rand as a writer. It simply isn’t my place. But I am well qualified to say that only the reality-challenged search for life answers in her fiction.

Lately, in the real world, our reality-challenged Republicans have been noting, rather loudly, that despite (or because of) Barack Obama’s recent moves the stock market keeps going down. The stock market has been tumbling for more than a year, and the process of bubble deflation will keep it going down, but somehow Obama is responsible. All that came before him—including the thirty years of conservative economic policies that gutted U.S. industrial might—has been wiped from memory. For such people 2009 is year zero, an island in economic history moored to neither past nor future. Deregulation made this mess, yet Republicans invoke Rand and Milton Friedman in calling for even more. Tax cuts have robbed the U.S. treasury of trillions of dollars, yet Republicans call for more.

My Spanish friend asked me to explain what the Republican plan is. He didn’t get it, so he wanted my take. I gave him an answer in metaphor, which I thought was very European of me. I said they are a team of doctors who have discovered they can’t remove a tumor by surgery, so have decided to try chemotherapy. The principle of chemo is pretty simple—you mostly kill the patient, with hopes of totally killing the cancer. The Republicans are practicing economic chemotherapy on a critically ill America with the goal of removing the twin cancers of our social safety net, and regulatory restraint on corporations. If the chemo kills the patient so be it. Republicans are the party of deregulation, and they would rather see America on a morgue slab before they admit the error of their ways.

By invoking Rand’s imagery of parasitic masses, they are mostly succeeding in their goals. Independent economists (read, those who are not employed by the Republicans or Obama) agree that the stimulus package was way too small. Among this group is 2008 Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, who says the package should be at least double the size it was. By forcing Obama to add tax cuts to the package, Republicans further succeeded in slashing an already too-small plan by another third. These efforts were cheered by red staters who stood to get jobs and extended unemployment benefits. Now they will ride out the recession with less help than they might have received, while most assuredly blaming Obama for their troubles. Every time we think we have seen the farthest limits to which people will go to deceive themselves, we are reminded anew of a horrifying, immutable truth: self-deception has no limits.