The Bitch is Back (And she’s going rogue…Ayn Rand, not Sarah Palin)

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If there is any woman making a comeback in politics today who might legitimately wear the adjectival crown of “mavericky,” who has been parodied on a national comedy show (The Simpsons, twice), and who really is going rogue, it most certainly isn’t Sarah Palin, about whom the less said the better. Between Palin and bimbo Barbie Carrie Prejean who can’t even hit Larry King’s underhand softball pitches, will conservatives please raise the conversational bar by elevating a woman with genuine intelligence in their camp? Oh, I don’t know, perhaps a certain former CEO of Hewlett Packard by the name of Carly Fiorina, now gunning for Barbara Boxer’s senatorial seat?

I’m talking instead about Ayn Rand, who after more than a quarter century after her 1982 death is enjoying a level of fame and influence that she arguably never received in her lifetime. Is it a case of a prophet being without honor in her home century, or are people simply mad as hell and are looking for a take-no-prisoners firebrand like Rand to posterize Tea Parties with such memorable Randenalia as “Atlas is Shrugging”, “Who is John Galt?”, and the über-cool “The Name is Galt. John Galt.” Shaken but not stirred.

Counter-intuitively (and counter to what liberals predicted), sales of Rand’s novels have increased significantly since the economic meltdown in 2008. And this despite Rand acolyte and inside-the-objectivist beltway Alan Greenspan’s non-mea culpa—blaming “market capitalism” instead of your own bad decision to manipulate the economy from the top down is tantamount to that old D.C. standby, “mistakes were made, but not by me.” According to Brian Doherty’s cover story on Rand for Reason magazine, book sales reported by the nonpartisan marketing service Bookscan, which measures actual cash register ka-chings, during one week in late August of 2009, Atlas Shrugged saw a 67% bump in sales over the same week in 2008, and a 114% increase over the same week in 2007. And according to her publisher New American Library, Atlas sold 25% more in the first half of 2009 than it did for the entire year of 2008. Through the end of September, 2009, in fact, sales of Atlas has exceeded 300,000 copies, putting it in competition for sales with the top 20 new novels of the year, which ain’t bad for a 52-year old 1,000-plus-page novel chock-a-block full of lengthy speeches about philosophy, metaphysics, economics, politics, and yes, even sex and money.

Talk of a feature film or television mini-series is back in serious consideration, with Rand-fan Angelina Jolie interested in playing the Atlas heroine Dagny Taggert, and Charlize Theron with her sites on the same role for television. (Don’t hold your breath on either one, as I’ve been hearing this since I first read Atlas back in 1976.) Two new biographies have just been issued: Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Both have received critical acclaim in numerous widely-cited reviews in major publications as fair and balanced accounts of the life and influence of this Russian immigrant. I have not read Heller’s work, but am told it is quite good in tracing Rand’s intellectual development to important influences in her Russian heritage. I carefully read Burns’ book and found it to be a page-turner from start to finish, with fresh perspectives and deep insights I’d not previously encountered in the two “insider” biographies in the late 1980s by Barbara Brandon and Nathaniel Brandon, both of which were eagerly devoured by Rand watchers. Distance in time and ideological space is the only hope for some semblance of contextual insight, and Burns—who is anything but a card-carrying objectivist and as far as I know as never word a dollar-sign broach—grounds the goddess in the concrete instead of the abstract.

What I most appreciated in Burns’ account is her documentation of the unmistakable influence Rand has had on the development and current status of the American right. You can no more understand the right without Rand than you can understand it without Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan. The dismissal of Rand by both the left and the right as mind candy for college kids no longer holds water. It is simply false. It may be true that many of us (myself included) were first introduced to Rand in college, but then that’s when most of us are introduced to most of the philosophical and literary figures in history, so how is that any sort of dismissive argument?

And yes, of course, both biographies deal with—as they must—Rand’s sordid and salacious personal life, which must also carry this disclaimer: Criticism of the founder of a philosophy does not, by itself, constitute a negation of any part of the philosophy. I made this point in an essay I penned in 1993 for an issue of Skeptic magazine on cults, which I entitled “The Unlikeliest Cult in History,” which you can read here. By most accounts, Sir Isaac Newton was a narcissistic, misogynistic, egocentric, curmudgeon, and yet his theories about light, gravity, and the structure of the cosmos stand on their own and would be no more or less true if he were a saintly gentleman. Rand’s critique of Communism may have been energized and animated by the horrific experiences she and her family endured under the brutal Communist regime in Russia (including the confiscation of her father’s business), but those criticisms of Communism would be just as true or false (they’re true) had she been raised a farm girl in Iowa.

Recently I gave a talk on my book, The Mind of the Market, to Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia, where I was hosted by the economics department, who I discovered have a tradition of purchasing enough copies of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged for the entire incoming freshman class (much to the dismay of many of the liberal faculty in the non-econ departments). There I met an economics professor named Jennifer Dirmeyer who is researching and writing an article on the nature of Rand’s characters, which typically appear bigger than life and very black or very white. What is the appeal of these men and women and the lives they lead that makes people want to read her books and inveigle others to do so as well? It is, I think, because in this postmodern age of moral relativism and contextualism Rand stood for something clearly, unequivocally, unreservedly, and with passion. Her characters are Homo economicus on steroids: ultra-rational, utility-maximizing, freely choosing übermensch. But that is the ultimate appeal of Rand, which Jennifer Burns believes is this: “Rand intended her books to be a sort of scripture, and for all her emphasis on reason it is the emotional and psychological sides of her novels that make them timeless. Reports of Ayn Rand’s death are greatly exaggerated. For many years to come she is likely to remain what she has always been, a fertile touchstone of the American imagination.”