The Ayn Rand revival: economics, sex and atheism for dummies
By Susan Jacoby
At 15, I read Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, the turgid romantic tale of a misunderstood genius-architect and his worshipful consort. They stand against a collectivist world determined to destroy the extraordinary individual and his equally extraordinary soul mate. Then I followed up with the even more turgid 1200-page Atlas Shrugged , which also involves misunderstood geniuses, collectivism and a sexy heroine fit for a superman. I fell in love with Rand the individualist and her atheism was a bonus.
What makes Rand the perfect philosopher-queen for a 15-year-old is that every adolescent considers herself a misunderstood genius hounded by that intimate collective, the family (which Rand considered the archetypal individual-destroying institution). So it says a good deal about the intellectual and emotional immaturity of the far right that Rand, who never really went away because there is an endless supply of teenagers responsive to her exaltation of selfishness as truth, is enjoying a huge revival in support of the Government-Is-The-Root-Of-All-Evil narrative.
The last time I looked, the 1999 paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged was No. 8 on Amazon’s bestseller list. This followed the opening of a movie even more stultifying than the book, financed by a rich Rand follower and marketed by the Tea Party. The only reason a movie of Atlas Shrugged wasn’t made decades ago—since the book, though panned by critics, was always a cult bestseller—is that Al Ruddick, producer of The Godfather, wasn’t able to persuade Rand to give him final script approval. “I trust you,” she told Ruddick, “but the Russians will buy Paramount to destroy my book.”
Rand, it should be noted, was obsessed with communism because she was born in St. Petersburg in 1905 and lived through the Bolshevik Revolution, which resulted in the state’s confiscation of her father’s business. She was born Alisa Rosenbaum, the daughter of middle-class Russian Jews, and took the name Rand (so the legend goes) from the Remington-Rand typewriter she used after immigrating to the United States in 1926.
The influence of Rand on the current generation of anti-government activists is powerful. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), who is actually 41 but still looks like a teenager (I’m wondering if believing in Rand after age 25 stops you from getting wrinkles), credits his reading of Rand for the philosophy embodied in his deficit-cutting budget proposal. The Ryan budget would, among its other brilliant ideas, “reform” Medicare by turning it into a voucher program for old people to buy insurance. That no private insurance company will be willing to provide good insurance for 80-year-olds at any price (the sort of reality ignored by Rand in her worship of the market) is no problem if you embrace teenage logic. In the world of teenage fantasy, one never grows sick or old.
What’s fascinating about Rand’s appeal to the right is that the tea party (which, contrary to predictions by pundits, has turned out to be every bit as culturally and religiously conservative as the pre-tea party Republican base) is able to ignore her atheism, strong support for abortion, unconventional sexual views and oft-repeated disdain for the traditional family. I guess Rand’s views on money trump everything. In Atlas Shrugged, she writes, “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other.”
That phrase “blood, whips and guns—or dollars” is, as the commercial says, priceless. Rand apparently never heard of systems—say, slavery—that depended on blood, whips, guns and dollars.
In case you’re wondering about the cosmic meaning of the title Atlas Shrugged, it refers to the Greek mythological giant Atlas, who bears the weight of the world on his shoulders. One character asks another what Atlas would say if asked how he bore the weight and the reply is, “Atlas shrugged..” Like so much of Rand’s prose, this sounds like a dialogue between space aliens speaking a language that is surely not English. The conservative satirist P.J. O’Rourke uses the line in the opening paragraph of his biting Wall Street Journal review of the new movie: “Atlas shrugged. And so did I.”
I’ve thought a lot about why Rand has a such a powerful appeal to intellectually precocious teenagers. The primary draw is surely the general attachment of teenagers to the belief that they know much more than everyone else in the world. Another big part of the appeal is—surprise!—sex. Rand’s novels, clumsy as they are, nevertheless simmer with the sexuality engendered by a mating of superior man with superior woman.
The 1949 movie The Fountainhead, a trash classic starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, brings the less humorous sex scenes in the book to life. The primal scene, when Dominique (the character played by Neal) first encounters the prickly architect Howard Roarke (played by Cooper), takes place in a quarry where the under-appreciated Roarke, unable to find work as an architect in a lowest-common-denominator world, is operating a drill. A very big drill. Get it? The final scene, when Roarke has triumphed over his enemies, shows Dominique (now married to her idol) ascending an elevator toward Roarke, who has planted his legs in manly fashion atop a skyscraper. She views his crotch with adoring eyes as the construction elevator rises toward the top and over the top.
This vision is very much in line with Rand’s 1968 remarks about the possibility of a woman president. Rand declared that a “rational” woman would not want the job—though she could do it competently—because it would be a surrender of her femininity. “For a woman, qua woman,” Rand wrote, “the essence of femininity is hero-worship—the desire to look up to a man…This does not mean there is a romantic or sexual intention in her attitude toward all men; quite the contrary, the higher her view of masculinity, the more severely demanding her standards. It means that she never loses the awareness of her own sexual identity and theirs. It means that a properly feminine woman does not treat men as if she were their pal, sister, mother—or leader.”
Oh, what drivel!
I’m wondering if this idealization of feminine hero-worship, which comes through strongly in Rand’s novels, is the real reason why so many conservative men remain boyishly attached to her. Her attitude about relations between men and women bears about as much relationship to real sex as her attitude about money being the root of all goodness does to the real market.
The atheism of this third-rate philosophy fellow traveler has always bothered me, because Rand’s devotion to tooth-and-claw social Darwinism, her insistence that people owe nothing to one another, represent a stereotype that religious believers commonly use against atheists. That her “objectivism” is based on faith as strongly as Das Kapital or the Summa Theologica is obvious to anyone who has the good sense to fall out of love with her at 16 after falling in love at 15.
Perhaps the tea party legislators who believe that Rand’s objectivism is objective didn’t have the good fortune to have a father strongly attached to reality. My own father, Robert Jacoby, was an accountant who took both numbers and his children’s adolescent enthusiasms seriously. He pointed out to me that the house we lived in had been bought with a government-backed loan for veterans and that the university I planned to attend was financed by the taxpayers of the state of Michigan. My beloved Rand, he noted, was opposed to any taxpayer-financed help for anyone. Did I plan, on principle, not to go to a state university? “You haven’t even read Ayn Rand,” I said in the patronizing tone familiar to all parents of teenagers. He replied, with a wit I did not grasp at the time, “I’ve read Charles Dickens on 19th-century capitalism.”
Thanks, Dad. This column’s for you. I know you wouldn’t have minded a woman as the leader of the United States—as long as she didn’t think like Ayn Rand. Although I suppose you would have appreciated a bit more hero worship from your daughter.
By Susan Jacoby | 10:18 AM ET, 04/20/2011
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