How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon

[Dardedar]

Passed along from Larry W.

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How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon
The perverse allure of a damaged woman.

By Johann Hari
Posted Monday, Nov. 2, 2009,

"Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?

Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in the darkest corners of American political life.* But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging against: compassion."

[Big snip...]

Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.

I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand: I feel sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it back into my face. What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people—large numbers of people—who see her writing not as psychopathy but as philosophy, and urge us to follow her. Why? What in American culture did she drill into? Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough, readable books can offer much of an answer to this, the only great question about her.

Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses through us all sometimes: I'm the only one who matters! I'm not going to care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling worth entertaining, ever.

This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre joke? In a country where almost everyone believes—wrongly, on the whole—that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for people who didn't make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.

She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors only," with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have preapproved. It's useful—if daunting—to know that there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable.

We all live every day with the victory of this fifth-rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls. Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers and even invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when he joined the Ford administration. You can see how he carried this philosophy into the 1990s: Why should the Supermen of Wall Street be regulated to protected the lice of Main Street?

The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties."

http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/

[Dardedar]

Precious. Video clip:

Atlas Shrugged Pt. 2 EXCLUSIVE TRAILER

As an old Canadian from high school days remarked:

"Folks I've known to swill her Kool-aid, use this theory to indulge in avoiding their responsibilities, lamely or not helping their spouses/kids/parents at all ... and were so self-involved that their homes burned while they were constantly playing about with their hobbies and reading crackpot philosophy that makes you feel good about being an asshole. I'd vote myself off that island with pleasure."

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-y­ear old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievab­le heroes, leading to an emotionall­y stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." --John Rogers

"A certain strain of mean-spiri­ted, anti-intel­lectual, faux libertaria­n uses Rand as a kind of touchstone­, as notes scribbled on their collective palm, if you will. You see the same thing among mean-spiri­ted, anti-intel­lectual, white supremacis­ts who talk as if they only ever read The Turner Diaries. And of course there are the GED evangelica­ls who only read Tim LaHaye's apocalypti­c wish-fulfi­llment fantasies.
These folks do the opposite of reading. Reading is engaging with a perspectiv­e and experience different from your own to cultivate your understand­ing of other people and the larger world. These folks incant their few or single tomes to secure their claim to being special, superior persons and to deepen their contempt for other people. It is a petty narcissism that has nothing to do with the art of fiction and is in fact anathema to it." --Huff Po comment