AYN RAND IS DEAD 

Yet she lives on as a projection, an icon, a figurehead for the so-called Free Market.

Ayn Rand never actually understood capitalism. In her native Russia she constructed a fantasy of American capitalism from the early Hollywood movies she saw. When she moved to the U.S. and saw how capitalism actually works she did not conclude that she was wrong in her idealizations, but that everyone else was doing it wrong. She became the Apostle of a cult of so-called free market capitalism and wrote her masterpiece Atlas Shrugged buzzed out on Benzedrine.

Today Ayn Rand remains the Apostle of so-called “free speech,” “free market” billionaires who understand her writing even less well than she understood capitalism. The billionaires and co. are underwriting ferocious efforts to defeat corporate and environmental regulations, attack Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, rollback civil and reproductive rights and erode our already deeply flawed institutions of democracy. And they are shaping debates in ways that can often seem puzzling. 

There are many paths of analysis useful for understanding how we have arrived here, with a thoroughly dysfunctional end-of-empire mode of government by manufactured crisis. Clearly money, technology and media manipulation are central. But I would like to suggest that we all also turn our attention momentarily to… the plot of Atlas Shrugged.  

Many of us read this cartoonish tome in high school, when its portrayal of sexy heroic rebels going on strike against mealy mouthed corrupt controlling weaklings had the capacity to thrill. But the influence of this pulpy novel extends far beyond the kind of adolescent fandom that energized the Twilight series. Surveys and sales figures reveal Atlas Shrugged as a broadly read and deeply influential text. 

Numerous journalists have outlined the influence of Rand’s writings on politicians as well as tech moguls and corporate captains — Donald Trump, Elon Musk and many others see themselves as Ayn Rand heroes. But if we go a bit beyond tracing Rand’s “influence,” to tracking the feelings and fantasies drawn from her fiction, we may be able to further illuminate the energies propelling our current crises.

Recall: In Atlas Shrugged, the mighty producer class upon whom the welfare of all depends is drawn into a fierce war with the moochers, looters, corrupt bureaucrats and crazen corporate sellouts. All the latter are sucking on the tit of the creative titans, the job creators. Finally, the only way to win this war is for the producers to withdraw from the political and economic landscape controlled by the moocher hordes and their enablers. In a reversal of the labor theory of value and an appropriation of the workers’ strategy of the strike, the producers prove that all value is ultimately generated by the titans. As the world collapses, pushed along by producer sabotage and violence, chaos and widespread suffering ensue.  

The crucial point here is: how are readers to feel about this fantasy scenario? Does the collapse and the suffering and death tar them as immoral, and lead to reader shock and abhorrence? Well, no, of course. This is a Rand novel. Readers are meant to cheer the apocalypse, because it is deserved by the stupid and weak masses and those who pander to them. The destruction is thrilling, as are the sexy heroic titans who have caused it. Atlas shrugs, and we are left panting lustily at the spectacle of his (or her, Rand includes female titans) glittering muscularity, while the boulder smashes those who would hold him back.

Of course Rand didn’t invent any of this. She was an especially canny appropriator and combiner of social darwinism and Hollywood romance (she was herself a screen writer for a time). And the readers and moguls who take up her banner do so with massive inconsistencies — rejecting much of her version of atheist libertarianism, her support of abortion rights, her penchant for sadomasochistic imagery, and most importantly her rejection of authoritarian government. But it’s not really her ideas that are most in play in current political dramas, it’s the affect and images drawn from her fiction that suffuse the zeitgeist.  

For some on the radical right, the Bible is the source for imagining the worst and finding it good — the End Times and the Rapture are here! But for others, the relevant book is Atlas Shrugged. The titan heroes will stand sexy, heroic and tall in their bunkers as the world around them collapses, as it should if the world historical disastrous dominance of collectivism and solidarity rule the land.

Atlas Drugged imagines future projections of Rand in the service of inequality and authoritarianism. If only such projections might remain fantasies…… 

Lisa Duggan is a professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and author of Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed.