Ayn Rand, Capitalism's Wicked Witch

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New York Times Co. / Getty Images Ayn Rand is having another moment, and critic Allen Barra thinks we should once and for all recognize her as a fraud and an ideologue with creepy followers.

Any objectivity about the founder of Objectivism is impossible. I’ll lay my cards on the table—Ayn Rand and her followers have given me the creeps since high school. Rand herself always looked to me like Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Krebb in From Russia with Love, and her disciples like extras from Village of the Damned.

The appeal of Rand’s philosophy to confused teenagers—and what other kind is there?—was obvious: Existence is summed up in a neater, tighter package than in Christianity or Marxism. To many of the students in the upscale all-white high school I attended, Objectivism offered a rousing guilt-free defense of privilege; ambiguities and loose ends were the product of “faulty thinking.” The Randians were bullies, roving around and looking to start debates in which they could ask questions and make anyone who didn’t have ready answers seem weak and foolish. “Check your premises!” they would say, looking you in the eye with a finger pointed at your forehead.

Rand’s real heirs are Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who read passages from her books to their audiences, careful to avoid writings that would alienate the fundamentalist right.

Four decades later, the cult of personality that created Rand’s movement is still strong, but it’s unlikely to survive two new biographies: Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns. Heller is a better biographer, and Burns better on Rand’s influence on the right wing’s politics and economics. But they agree more than they disagree. If you read both books back to back, you have a 700-page portrait of a humorless, puritanical didact who was contemptuous of, among many other things, homosexuals, American Indians (arguing that Europeans had a right to take their land because the natives did not recognize “individual rights”), Medicare, family values, beatniks, hippies, and libertarians, whom she regularly referred to as “scum,” “intellectual cranks,” and “worse than anything the New Left has proposed.”

Ayn Rand and the World She Made. By Anne C. Heller. 592 pages. Nan A. Talese. $35. She opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was vehemently against the draft (but called those who evaded it “bums”), and “regarded the feminist movement as utterly without legitimacy.” In her novels, she glorified rape—if it was committed by the right kind of man. Heller quotes her most famous disciple and lover Nathaniel Branden as saying, “What she wanted was a man whose esteem would reduce her to a sex object.”

So much for the small stuff. Rand was also, despite her avowed love of America, contemptuous of democracy. In an admiring 1958 letter, the economist Ludwig von Mises told Rand, “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: You are inferior, and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted, you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.” And apparently women, too. In a 1936 novel, We the Living, a stand-in for Rand tells a Bolshevik with blood-chilling candor, “I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods.”

Heller and Burns have both found an even scarier Rand text, what Heller describes as “a stunningly harsh and antisocial novella called ‘The Little Street 1928,’ based on the actual trial of a notorious killer named William Hickman...” The real Hickman had strangled and dismembered an 8-year-old girl in Los Angeles, but Rand admired Hickman’s “disdainful countenance, his immense, explicit [sic] egoism.” This, Heller adds, “is practically a diagnostic description of narcissism, and also a description of Rand herself.”

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I wonder why it took this country sixty years to find out Ann Rand was a fraud? When she came out with her book the Fountainhead... the whole world knew she was a fraud. But not the US. Glenn Beck needs to tell his moronic listeners that Rand hated Christians and thought they were all mentally unbalanced.

Not all of Glenn Beck's listeners are moronic. In fact some are very intelligent and well schooled, enough so that some recognized Rand to be a tweedle long before now. However when you make a statement as to Beck's abilities you do so through bigotry and ignorance. If you had followed his thread, better yet, his guest's threads, you would see that Mr. Beck has indeed a very good handle on the decent of our economy into a hole from which there is no evident recovery. How would anyone propose to pull this nation from a 19 trillion dollar debt in the next 10 or 15 years. If you visit the nationaldebtcalender .org and just watch for a moment you will see where we are headed and it's scary I don't care who you are.

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Richard Wolffe is Daily Beast columnist and an award-winning journalist, and senior strategist at Public Strategies. He covered the entire length of Barack Obama's presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine. His book, Renegade: The Making of a President, was published by Crown in June.

Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.

Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Allen Barra writes about sports for the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. He also writes about books for Salon.com, Bookforum, and the Washington Post. His latest book is Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee.

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Ayn Rand, Capitalism's Wicked Witch

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