The recent simultaneous publication of two biographies of Ayn Rand has made me think about my own youthful adherence to her “philosophy.” It especially has prompted me to point out how, ironically, the Right now embodies much of the outlook that Rand detested and condemned.
I became a devotee of Rand for a few years partly because of the influence of my college roommate (who, like me, has since moved on) and partly because it was a convenient youthful rebellion against my leftist parents. I was raised to consider myself part of an intellectual elite. My parents, as Jews, never identified closely with the genuine Proletariat and eventually developed doubts about the ability of the masses to create a perfect society. Therefore, the vision that Rand held out, of a cohort of New Intellectuals who rejected the stale collectivist thinking of the past, had some appeal, all the more so when contrasted to the behavior of the New Left, much of which was getting frankly clownish by the end of the 60s and which seemed so much more shallow than the Old Left I knew from my parents’ experience. Also, as my Dad observed when I mentioned that Rand’s followers (not to mention her and her inner circle) had a large Jewish component, “Jews are always attracted to any messianic movement.”
As I said, I moved on. Nowadays, what I notice is that the Right has been taken over by the very people who most embody the traits that Rand detested most and frequently condemned.
Exhibit A: the cult of Sarah Palin.
Can you think of anybody who better qualifies as the inverse of Dagny Taggart (the heroine of Atlas Shrugged) than Sarah Palin? The Right nowadays detests intellectualism, distrusts expertise and experience (see Charles Pierce’s Idiot America or Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason), and considers ordinariness to be a badge of honor. The whole theme of Rand’s first meganovel, The Fountainhead, was that exceptional people are the source of all progress and that they are being dragged down by the exaltation of the second-rate. Who could be more second-rate than Sarah Palin? She built her whole career on being just a hockey mom. And her devotees adore her because “she’s just like us.” The more she screws up in interviews, the more they love her.
Exhibit B: the denigration of Barack Obama
Somebody like Barack Obama, who rises from a food-stamp childhood to graduation from first-rate universities, based on his own exceptional abilities, is condemned by the Right as an elitist, not to be trusted, “not like us.” Do you object that a similar record of bootstrap achievement didn’t lower the Right’s opinion of Alberto Gonzales? Ah, but it was always clear that even as Attorney General he was always the Bush family’s hired help, unthreatening, not a scary elitist who “thinks he’s better than us.” He never threatened the Right by acting like a truly independent leader. Now that he’s not working for the Bushes, he has become, notoriously, almost unemployed. You see other former Bushies on Faux News, but the impression I get (I don’t watch the channel) is that Gonzo does not appear there. I think Faux News is afraid that, now that he’s his own man, he’s smart enough to say something that might tear down their fictional universe.
Back in the days when the Right pretended to have some intellectual heft, it had little use for Ayn Rand. I remember when Bill Buckley’s National Review did a cover story slamming her. Ayn Rand and her followers hated to be associated with conservatives (in fact, she wrote a whole essay about what’s wrong with conservatism) and considered themselves a radical group residing outside the Left-Right political spectrum.
I guess the turning point was Ronald Reagan, who made it culturally acceptable for Rightists to say the government is the source of all evil while avoiding the question of how a country and its economy are going to function under the rule of enlightened self-interest when it’s practiced by unenlightened people.
Rand and her followers believed that the supermen who populate her novels would, with their exceptional abilities, be able to run the country. Their self-interest would be so enlightened, because they’re so outstandingly smart, that they wouldn’t do things like create exploitative monopolies, spew pollution, sell harmful products (like tobacco, which she glorified), or inflate bubble economies. The people of ordinary abilities would either lend their second-rate help, like Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged, or else would try to mooch on the accomplishments of the supermen, as did Peter Keating in The Fountainhead.
When you come right down to it, this vision of the supermen running the country was just as much of a pipe-dream as the notion that the Proletariat could run it. Even Alan Greenspan, a disciple of Rand and a man of outstanding abilities, failed to run his piece of the economy and now admits that his vision was flawed. It turns out that the smartest people in the room, when acting out of self-interest, do not have as enlightened a self-interest as would be needed to prevent the catastrophe we’re still suffering from. In fact, they brought it on.
Yes, I know what the Rand folks would say in answer to this: The bankers felt free to take foolish risks only because they knew that the government would come to their rescue. It’s true that the lack of controls built into the bailouts may indeed encourage future risk-taking. But do you really think those guys who were selling their shaky securities in 2007 were thinking about a future bailout? They were just thinking, “Tomorrow I’m out of here.” The supermen were not particularly enlightened about the consequences of their actions.
How enlightened, then, are the Sarah Palins of this country and her adoring followers? The idea that they could run a country freed of government intervention is just as scary as a proposed dictatorship of the Proletariat. It would not even be a country run by Eddie Willers and Peter Keating. In the Marxist vision, at least, and in Rand’s, for that matter, there was no room for religion in politics. Today’s yahoo Right would love to impose a theocracy on us; their Dobsons and Robertsons would become our American Taliban.
So if you hear some follower of Ayn Rand being interviewed on the Thom Hartmann show, consider that this person is less relevant to current American politics than the Marxists in the hills of Bhutan are to the politics of South Asia. So I have to reject the opinions of Jamesleo, who wrote the diary “Blame it on Ayn Rand,” and the opinions of xaxnar, who wrote the diary “Ayn Rand and the Wingnuts” and who claimed that there's a strong link between Rand and the teabaggers.
If you think the followers of Rand or Rand’s actual ideas are still an influence on the Republican party, keep Sarah Palin in mind. The people who love Sarah, plus the Republican diehards in Utah and Dixieland, have about the same relationship to Ayn Rand as the rulers of today’s China have to Karl Marx. They are giving lip service to a vision that was terribly flawed to begin with and that now serves only as a pathetic justification of their lust for power.