Maligned by public..Ayn Rand

"Who was Ayn Rand? A true American philosopher"

by

Joseph Cotto

September 3rd, 2012

The Washington Times

Ayn Rand meant many things to a great many people during her life. Taking this into account, it should come as no surprise that her legacy remains the subject of immense controversy.

Despite this, very few actually know much about the hugely influential philosopher. It is easier to blindly criticize or follow her ideas rather than reach an understanding about who she actually was.

Rand was born into a family of wealthy Jewish merchants in St. Petersburg, Russia during 1905. She grew up as the Tsar's harsh, sterile rule succumbed to the grueling, hardscrabble tenure of Vladimir Lenin. After communism became the law of the land, Rand's family lost everything and she was left with little future. In college, Rand read the works of Aristotle and other great Western thinkers. Her scholarship developed in her a burning desire to escape from the Soviet Union.

Eventually she got her chance.

On her arrival in the United States in 1926, she is said to have wept at the sight of New York's skyline. She settled in Hollywood, where she was able to continue her philosophical studies while working as a screenwriter. As time passed, her interest in film waned. She turned her talents toward writing novels, in which she developed and publicized her now-famous philosophy: Objectivism.

In 1943, The Fountainhead was published. Its plot revolved around a forward thinking architect frustrated by a persistent stream of small minds. The book became a runaway bestseller and gave the world its first widely read taste of Objectivism.

Soon after that success, in an effort to further articulate her Objectivist principles, Rand began working on what would become her magnum opus. Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged outsold The Fountainhead, and found its place among the 20th century's most influential works of American fiction.

The dystopian tale of America after the small percentage of its movers and shakers go into hiding, Atlas Shrugged communicates Objectivism's bedrock concept: rational, non-aggressive individualism. Both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged became so widely read that the Modern Library listed the latter first and former second on its list of the twentieth century's best novels.

Rand's literary success allowed her to promote Objectivism full time until her death at the age of 77, in 1982. Boiled down to a single sentence, Objectivism can be described as utilizing reason to achieve maximum personal and professional productivity. One of the few contemporary philosophies solidly rooted in classical principles, it stands as a compelling alternative for many who are disenchanted with other dominant belief structures, such as existentialism and postmodernism. After the dawn of the new millennium, Objectivism gained a considerable amount of mass interest and shows no sign of losing it.

Rand is frequently called selfish, greedy, sophomoric, and far worse for her strong emphasis on pure reason and enlightened self-interest. However, it is undeniable that she stands as one of the most pivotal figures in the history of American philosophy. Insofar as contemporary literature is concerned, she simply has no parallel.

I am no member of the Ayn Rand fan club, to be sure. As a matter of fact, when it comes to unregulated international trade, her views can only be described as sophomoric at best, and disastrous at worst.

Nonetheless, she adhered to her principles when it was easy to abandon them. She stood up for Western Civilization at a time when much of academia thought it to be repugnant. She persevered in the face of too many hardships to mention, and did so with the utmost integrity. In short, Ayn Rand lived the American Dream in the most comprehensive sense imaginable.

For all of this, no matter how strongly one detests her politics, she ought to be revered. 

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Ayn Rand talks with Mike Wallace in a 1959 interview

Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand

1959

Part 1

 

Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand

1959

Part 2

 

 

Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand

1959

Part 3

She's in, she's out, she's in...Johnny Carson interview and an essay--Ayn Rand

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She's in, she's out, she's in...Johnny Carson interview and an essay--Ayn Rand

Johnny Carson interview

Part 1

1967

Johnny Carson interview

Part 2

1967

"Ayn Rand's Long Journey to the Heart of American Politics"

by

Jennifer Burns

August 14th, 2012

The New Republic

In the heyday of her celebrity, it often seemed that the only appropriate public response to Ayn Rand was dismissal. In 1961, Newsweek magazine sent a reporter to investigate the growing circle of devotees clustered around the right wing novelist. Visiting the New York City headquarters of Rand’s Objectivist movement, the reporter declared the Russian-born Rand an “apparition” with a “glare that would wilt a cactus.” After a similar pilgrimage, a writer for Life magazine forthrightly concluded that Rand was the leader of a cult. A review of Rand’s essay collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in The New Republic simply referred to Rand as “Top Bee in the communal bonnet, buzzing the loudest and zaniest throughout this all but incredible book.”

And yet, some fifty years later, Rand is the avowed intellectual inspiration of presumptive GOP Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan. Ryan offers no apologies for interest in Rand’s philosophy and makes little effort to hide his allegiances. Just how did Rand travel from the fringes of a 1960s subculture to the heart of American politics?

It clearly wasn’t via the traditional institutions of mainstream conservatism. The original mandarins of the conservative movement, from William F. Buckley, Jr. to Whittaker Chambers, all roundly rejected her atheistic philosophy of selfishness and her assertion that capitalism was a moral system.

Rather, Rand made her fortunes among the young foot soldiers of the right in the 1960s, who thrilled to her iconoclastic rejection of mainstream values. Rand’s Objectivism, as she called her comprehensive philosophical system, attacked all American pieties but one: The national creed of getting rich. This put her in perfect step with the anti-authoritarian mood of the times—while offering the additional benefit, unlike your average hippy guru, of not threatening her followers’ material fortunes.

But Rand’s philosophy would have gone nowhere if it were confined to its original adherents. The early Objectivists were decidedly insular, and hardly the most effective evangelists of their cause. Objectivism was first promoted in New York City and across the nation by the Nathaniel Branden Institute, named after Rand’s best student and designated “intellectual heir.” When Rand and Branden had an explosive falling out in 1968, fueled by the end of their long-running, secretive extramarital affair, the movement splintered. (The affair shocked Rand’s followers, though it shouldn’t have: Rand dedicated her 1957 opus Atlas Shrugged to both her husband and Branden, which was clue enough that he was more than the apple of his teacher’s eye.) In the wake of the break-up, Objectivism’s infrastructure collapsed.

But this actually turned out to be the saving grace of Rand’s legacy. Her ideas were subsequently seized by a broader audience of libertarians who would inject her free market ideology into the political mainstream. The Randian founders of the Libertarian Party were little more effective than Objectivists at winning the ear of a broader public, but they did attract Ed Crane and Charles Koch to the cause. Together, Crane and Koch would found the Cato Institute in 1974. Cato joined a growing phalanx of pro-business, right-wing think tanks that, over the course of the 1970s, would refashion the intellectual consensus around the desirability of free markets and unregulated capitalism. As the political climate shifted away from Great Society liberalism, with even Democrats embracing a more market friendly “neoliberalism,” the ideas of Rand came to seem ever more plausible.

When Rand passed away in 1982, she was no longer capable of serving as the gatekeeper to her ideas. (The prurient details of Rand’s personal life, which may have served as a deterrent to some, also no longer seemed relevant.)  Rand had always  insisted that her ideas were a package deal. Libertarians who borrowed her political ideas but didn’t buy her epistemology were “a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people,” “plagiarizers,” and “scum.” Conservatives were far, far worse. “Futile, impotent and culturally dead,” conservatives could only “accelerate this country’s uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.” Despite their agreement on capitalism, unlike most conservatives Rand was a forthright atheist who supported abortion rights and opposed the Vietnam War. After her death, her philosophy was liberated from its origins; it was now possible to mix and match bits and pieces of Rand’s ideology to better fit the emerging conservative worldview.

Indeed, it was during the 1980s, when Rand was no longer around to raise a ruckus, that conservative intellectuals and politicians from Jack Kemp to George Gilder to Ronald Reagan began expressing admiration for her work, combining her economic ideas with their social conservatism. While Rand’s aging original followers feuded among themselves over her philosophical legacy, conservatives who had encountered her in college quietly folded her into their canon as they grew into power. (Alan Greenspan was among the few original adherents who managed to cross over into mainstream political success; his meteoric rise helped further to dispel the odor of fanaticism that once marked the Randian right.)

But the true public blossoming of Rand’s philosophy came with the arrival of the Tea Party in 2008 which transformed this subterranean undercurrent of conservative interest in Rand into a blaring declaration of love. Before the Tea Party, Paul Ryan had been one of the few conservatives willing to openly embrace Rand as a formative influence. Most conservative politicians preferred to cite thinkers like F.A. Hayek or Milton Friedman, who were both more high-brow than Rand and neutral on the topic of religion. But the very aspects of Rand that made journalists shudder in the 1960s—her angry division of the world into “producers” and “looters,” her cheesy novels—made her into a Tea Party favorite. Protestors at Tea Party rallies waved signs asking “Who is John Galt?” (a reference to the hero of Atlas Shrugged) and used Randian logic to argue that health care reform was immoral.

It may seem incredible that fictional plotlines are being used to critique policy, but it’s important to recognize that Rand has remained popular precisely because she was a bestselling novelist rather than a dry theorist. Rand waved off specific questions about how her policy proposals—like the abolition of taxation—would work, emphasizing her role was to inspire her readers to high moral purpose. With Galt’s Gulch, the capitalist Shangri-la of Atlas Shrugged, she brought to life the dream world of the successful striver surrounded by equals and unencumbered by the poor, the weak, or the unlucky. Only in this fictional world could her heroes duck the hard questions of fate and chance, for in Rand’s novels, everyone gets what they deserve.

By selecting Ryan, Mitt Romney is gambling that the radical free market capitalism of Ayn Rand has moved definitely from the fringes to the mainstream of American life. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that another Republican once embraced Rand: 1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Like Ryan, Goldwater tried to shave off Rand’s atheism, emphasizing his Episcopal roots and disagreeing with her atheism. Yet  his campaign speeches rang with the romantic capitalism of Rand’s novels; one of his speechwriters was a full-fledged Objectivist.

And it turned out that, thrilling as Rand’s ideas might have sounded to a reader wrapped up in her fictional world, few voters were interested in translating her capitalist utopia into reality. Of course, the culture of Washington has clearly changed in the fifty years since then; Romney is clearly hoping that the culture of the American public has changed as well. Before long, we’ll know whether his assumption is fact or fiction.

[Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of Goddess of Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.]

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

by

Jennifer Burns

ISBN-10: 0195324870
ISBN-13: 978-0195324877

A defense for Ayn Rand?

"Why You Shouldn't Dismiss Ayn Rand"

by

Gary Weiss

March 7th, 2012

The Huffington Post

I have a message for progressives, liberals, moderates, old-fashioned conservatives, neocons--in other words, pretty much everybody who detests the godmother of radical capitalism, Ayn Rand:

Don't underestimate her. Distasteful as it may seem, there is much to learn from her.

It's easy to write off Rand as a crackpot, or a marginal figure of little importance. Before I began researching my book Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul [St. Martin's Press, $24.99], I was like everybody else. She didn't matter to me. But as I examined the mindset of the people who dragged us into the financial crisis of 2008, from the Tea Party to Alan Greenspan, I found that Rand was always hovering in the background.

Rand died almost exactly 30 years ago, on March 6, 1982. During that time her ideas have become firmly entrenched in the mainstream. If Randians have their way, in the decades to come her Objectivism will become the dominant political philosophy in the land. As Yaron Brook, head of the Ayn Rand Institute, put it when I interviewed him for the book, in 50 years he sees Objectivism as "the primary challenge to whatever the status quo is." And then, in 100 years, the apostle of no-government capitalism will be "the dominant secular philosophy in the United States."

Brook is not being unrealistic, and if anything I think he is being conservative. It's a war of ideas, and the rest of us are losing.

Ayn Rand did more than make it moral to be selfish and greedy. Her best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, actually made it cool to be those things. As I traced the evolution of her thinking through the years, I was impressed by the extent to which she had had an impact on America.

I was even more impressed that she had an impact on me.

I'm not a Rand follower--an "Objectivist"--and never will be. I don't believe in laissez-faire, free-market capitalism. I believe in regulation and taxation and Medicare--all the things she hated (even though she became a Medicare recipient when it suited her purposes). But I can't deny that there were aspects of her work that appealed to me. It's foolish, I found, to pretend that Rand is a repulsive creature that only nutcases could fine appealing. If that were so, she wouldn't be as powerful--and dangerous--as she is today.

Rand's books were self-help manuals as well as philosophical tracts. They were and are extraordinarily popular, which is why I put her far above the Austrian economists in their influence on the Republican Party and the Tea Party. Sure, they've been critically lambasted, but so what? She didn't write for the critics. She was the Jacqueline Susann of philosophers, spiking her books with ample sex. While not overloaded with literary merit, her novels were definitely "good reads" in the Leon Uris sense. Nearly a half million copies of Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus, were sold in 2011. The Fountainhead, which was published in 1943, was a runaway best-seller and remains a brisk seller.

The two books contrast in many ways. Fountainhead plays second fiddle to Atlas today because it focuses not on capitalism but on self-interest and selfishness. The principal character in Fountainhead doesn't even like money. He's a character that the left and the right can both appreciate, if his extreme characteristics are moderated.

That's a subject that I explored with Oliver Stone, who for a time worked on a movie adaptation of Fountainhead. Stone believed that it would be possible to make a movie that would turn Fountainhead's lead character, an incredibly selfish man named Howard Roark, into an public-spirited altruist--a species of human that Rand believed to be evil incarnate. Why not? The positive character traits of Rand's heroes--their individuality, their integrity--are not the exclusive territory of the far right.

Stone points the way, I think, for progressives and liberals to make a greater effort to understand Rand, and even to adopt some of her views, so as to better counter the right's assault on social programs and the very concept of government.

Sure, the hyper-selfishness that she advocated was absurd. Rand was so intent on winning the intellectual argument over selfishness that she blithely misquoted the dictionary. But there is much to be said for people pursuing their rational self-interests, to use Rand's terminology, when doing so does not infringe on the rights of others. That's a concept the 99% should embrace. Why do we support social programs? Because it is in our rational self-interests.

Progressive taxation is not in the rational self-interests of the 1%, but it is in the best interests of society as a whole--a concept that Rand did not accept. One can make a good argument that taxation is in the interests of the 1%, as members of the greater society.

In the Randian worldview, however, there is no such thing as "the public," there were only individual people, with individual rights. That may be fine if you're a billionaire and don't give a hoot about other people. It's not so great if you're a little guy, which is why collectivism--ordinary people's collective prerogatives--is the antidote to the privileges of the 1%.

It's not in the rational self-interests of the 1% to support collectivism, but it is in the selfish interests of the rest of us. It's also far more in keeping with the view of the Founders, who included forward-thinking progressives like Thomas Paine. He advocated a guaranteed national income.

The Founders were certainly not Randian; they sacrificed for others. They were altruists. If they'd have thought only of themselves, there would have been no revolution.

Today, the revolution is being waged by the right. It will be successful--unless the rest of us stop ridiculing Ayn Rand and begin taking her seriously.


Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" explained to Mike Wallace

Ayn Rand's Playboy interview

Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul

by

Gary Weiss

ISBN-10: 0312590733
ISBN-13: 978-0312590734