Book Review: Capitalism’s Wicked Witch: Ayn Rand

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Allen Barra at The Daily Beast has posted a book review of two new biographies about the life of Ayn Rand: 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. Capitalism's Wicked Witch – The Daily Beast "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.

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.”

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.”

Oh, and for the last 30 years of her life, she was addicted to amphetamines.

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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She seems to have written more books than she read. Her novels are composed of overcooked ingredients from late 19th-century potboilers. They live only as illustrations of Rand’s simple-minded philosophy: the good (i.e., those with sufficient self-esteem) win out and the bad (collectivists, altruists, and sentimentalists with insufficient appreciation for laissez-faire capitalism) get punished. Her characters are two-dimensional with no shading, nuance, or mixed emotions. (Pauline Kael nailed The Fountainhead, both the novel and the film made from it, as “wildly extravagant Kitsch.”)

Rand also seems to have read very little on economics. Friedrich von Hayek, whose The Road to Serfdom (1944) became a conservative bible, was dismissed by Rand not on economic grounds but for daring to suggest that government and private enterprise might work together. Hayek says Burns “acknowledged there could be an important role for government-sponsored health care, unemployment insurance, and a minimum wage.” But then, Rand once told Time magazine, “I am a philosopher, not an economist.”

But was Rand even a philosopher? Beyond claiming Aristotle as an influence, glibly dismissing Plato as the “father of communism,” and alleging inspiration from Nietzsche, there is little evidence that Rand knew much about philosophy. She became one of the most popular pundits of the 20th century by throwing all other philosophy out the window and redefining terms to suit herself. Surely the term that suits her is not philosopher but ideologue.

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Rand left no real heirs, since as Burns writes, “Objectivism as a philosophy left no room for elaboration, extension or interrelation, and as a social world it excluded growth, change, or development.” Although she despised libertarians, her influence on their movement has been profound. Burns, though, pinpoints the unbridgeable gulf between Rand and conservatives: “Whereas traditional conservatism emphasized duties, responsibilities, and social interconnectedness, at the core of the right-wing ideology that Rand spearheaded was a rejection of moral obligation to others.”

Her 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. You can draw a straight line from Rand’s equation of JFK and Hitler to the tea-baggers who paint swastikas on pictures of Barack Obama.

Rand’s most influential protégé, though, is Alan Greenspan, who confessed to Congress in October 2008 that he had “found a flaw” in his ideology: He had never taken into account the power of human greed. Objectivist economics never anticipated Gordon Gekko. The result is a country whose financial structure, 28 years after Reagan was elected, looks pretty much like the landscape devastated by “collectivists” and “altruists” at the beginning of Atlas Shrugged.

It staggers the imagination to think what Rand’s reaction would be to find, in the 21st century, that America has become an economic client of the world’s largest collective state.