Our adversaries are irredeemably evil. They are
animated by malice and greed. They want to enslave us, to make us mere
instruments of their unworthy desires. We have nothing to discuss with
them. The task of clear-eyed writers is not to engage
sympathetically with their ideas, but to expose them for what they
are so that the people can unite to defeat them.
This is the narrative offered
by Ayn Rand, whose mid-twentieth century work still
commands a huge audience. She advocates, as the only politics decent people
can embrace, an extreme and harsh libertarianism. Those who fail to
perceive the moral necessity of unregulated capitalism are evil or
stupid, probably both. All social insurance and regulation, from
Social Security to the prohibition of pollution, is a step toward Stalinist
tyranny.
The blogger John Rogers famously
observed:
"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."
Actually they both involve orcs—inherently demonic
creatures, irretrievably evil. And so does Lisa Duggan’s new book Mean
Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed. Duggan capably shows how Rand’s story
rationalizes plutocracy and cruelty. In her depiction, Rand is an
orc and so are her fans.
Duggan is a careful and honest scholar, and everything she
says about Rand is true. But she is selling a different version of
the same Manichean narrative. Her portrait of the libertarian right is as
one-sided as Rand’s portrait of the redistributive left. Duggan fails
to grasp some of the deepest sources of Rand’s appeal to otherwise decent
people—the value of individual creativity, the benefits of capitalism, and the
possibility of state overreach—and so misses opportunities to find common
ground with many who are drawn to Rand’s minimal-state dogma. Drawing
people, particularly young people, away from that dogma is morally urgent, but
it won’t happen unless Rand’s legitimate attractions are understood.
That is the beginning of my newly published review of
Duggan’s book at the New Rambler, here.