The Russian Revolution, the centennial of which has just passed, changed the world in more ways than one can count. But one little-noticed way in which it affected American intellectual life was by giving us Ayn Rand.
Born Alisa Rosenbaum into the family of a successful Russian Jewish businessman, the future novelist was 12 when the Bolsheviks took power and dispossessed her family. Nine years later, she fled to the United States, where she found her ideal of a free, individualistic, vibrant society—and saw it threatened by, she felt, the same forces of collectivism from which she had escaped. For the rest of her life as a writer, thinker, and crusader, Rand fought against the specter of communism and for her vision of freedom, often in controversial ways. Her “Objectivist” philosophy preached rationalism, atheism, strength, and selfishness (conditional, it should be noted, on respecting the rights of others). The liberal establishment despised and hated her, especially because of her influence on young people. Conservatives appreciated her anticommunism and defense of the free market but were scandalized by her rejection of religion and Christian morality. Even libertarians, in some respects her philosophical stepchildren, have had a complex love/hate relationship with Rand.
Decades after Rand’s death, her influence endures, including at the highest levels of American power. As recently as 2005, House speaker Paul Ryan effusively praised Rand and her work building a “moral case for capitalism” (though later he repudiated her “atheist philosophy” in an interview and seemed to write off his interest in Rand as a youthful infatuation). Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is apparently a fan. So, reportedly, is Donald Trump (even if many Rand supporters believe that if he were in a Rand novel he’d be one of the baddies). Between 2008 and 2014, Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s magnum opus, dropped off the top-10 list of Americans’ favorite books, but it has no shortage of ardent champions, including Angelina Jolie and a handful of other Hollywood figures. (Alas, this has not saved the recent three-part movie made from the book, a wretched affair notable mainly for its complete recasting of each installment.)
At the gala held in New York last month by the Atlas Society to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, the keynote speaker was businessman and author Andy Puzder, who almost became Labor secretary in the Trump administration. Puzder takes his Rand devotion quite seriously: He says that his six children had to read The Fountainhead as a condition for getting their driver’s permits.
In her own remarks at the gala, Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman offered a ringing defense of the value of Rand and talked about the group’s efforts to get her included in college curricula. Modern-day college students are “not going to start with Bastiat,” she said, referring to the 19th-century French classical liberal economist. “To lose Ayn Rand as a pathway to liberty would be a great strategic error.”
Rand is a more interesting and worthy writer and thinker than she is generally given credit for by liberals and conservatives alike—but I have my doubts about Atlas Shrugged as a good pathway to pro-freedom ideas. Like so many other young people, I had an Ayn Rand phase at the age of 20 or so, which ended when I read (or tried to read) Atlas in its entirety. I thought it had some excellent descriptive writing and two genuinely riveting characters—railway executive Dagny Taggart, a surprisingly nuanced mix of strength, ardor, and vulnerability; and steel magnate Hank Rearden, torn between his passion for Dagny and his self-respect as a married man who honors his commitments. There’s also an interesting, unpredictable storyline involving an idealistic shopgirl who marries Dagny’s scummy brother James thinking he’s a heroic achiever; she suffers a tragic disillusionment.
Unfortunately, what good there is in the book gets lost in endless speechifying (by the time she got to Atlas, Rand had never met a point she didn’t feel compelled to repeat five or six times in a row), a large cast of grotesquely caricatured bad guys (and gals), and an even larger cast of intellectual straw men. If a character argues that a business owner has some obligations to his family, Rand must take it all the way to the claim that it’s his duty to hire a completely incompetent relative.
Worse, the book has a troubling streak of cruelty, most obvious in the scene involving a horrific train crash caused by bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance. In an infamous sequence, Rand offers a rogue’s gallery of doomed passengers who, she clearly implies, brought it on themselves by their wrongthink: the philosophy professor who denies objective reality, the ignorant housewife who thinks she has “the right to elect politicians” to control industries, the anti-property-rights economist, the elderly schoolteacher who has taught kids that right and wrong are determined by the will of the majority, etc. We are informed that “there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas.” Rand fans have told me that she’s not blaming the passengers, only saying their bad ideas have a systemic influence that, in various ways, contributes to the cause of the crash. Yet Rand introduces her poison-pen character vignettes by darkly noting that “there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them”—clearly suggesting that they should be seen as guilty. This is morally perverse, and disturbingly similar to the left-wing, radical belief that no one complicit in “oppression” is innocent.
Atlas has had no shortage of critics over the years—dating back at least to Whittaker Chambers’s famously scathing review in National Review in 1957—and even some of the book’s admirers would concede that it has problems, including its black-and-white moral, political, and economic vision and its adamant insistence that people with “wrong” altruistic ideas are never sincere and always after power. Yet, granting all that, one may still believe that Rand’s ringing defense of individualism, reason, and achievement should be in the mix of ideas presented to high school or college students, particularly at a time when various flavors of collectivism—some old, like socialism, and some new, like identity politics—seem to be growing in strength among the young.
Rand was not one to accept partial or qualified agreement: You either saw the light or did not. Yet perhaps the best way to ensure that her work gets its proper due is to approach it like that of any other author, with both appreciation and critique, agreeing with some ideas and rejecting others. The Atlas Society, which has parted ways with some other Randians—its founder and recently retired CEO David Kelley joked at the gala that they are “still fighting over custody of Objectivism”—has moved toward such an approach. Even atheism is negotiable: In her talk, Grossman mentioned Rand followers who are “amorphous Christians” and argued that reaching out to people of faith can clear a “potential stumbling block” to bringing people to Rand. Puzder, a Catholic, also told the audience that he sees no essential contradiction between religion and Rand.
My own recommended reading list for the discovery of Rand is The Fountainhead and We the Living, Rand’s only book about Soviet Russia. Both were written before Rand’s thought solidified into dogma and before the ideologue in her crushed her writerly talent. And both show that she is capable of nuance and empathy—not to mention recognizably human dialogue. But something about Atlas Shrugged’s combination of utopia and dystopia clearly strikes a chord with a portion of the American public.
Atlas will never be hailed as the Great American Novel, although it will likely continue to win new fans. Perhaps we should be grateful for its semi-fringe, semi-cult status: glad that its call for liberty still resonates, and glad, too, that our condition is not so bleak that the book’s radical morality would widely be accepted as the best cure for what ails us.
[Correction, November 27, 2017: As originally published, this article mischaracterized Jennifer Grossman’s remarks on religion. We regret the error.]
Cathy Young is a columnist for Newsday and a contributing editor to Reason.
