#aynrand

The names since claiming Rand as an influence, if not a lifelong guide, are many. President Reagan cited Rand as one of his intellectual—Can we use this word with Reagan?—ancestors. A lot of prominent senators and congresspeople have, too. Mike Pompeo, a legislator and later C.I.A. director and secretary of state during Trump’s first term, was an Ayn Rand man. (“Atlas Shrugged really had an impact on me.”) And so we come to Trump himself, who remarked of The Fountainhead during the 2016 political season, “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to everything.”

There is one thing one ought to keep in mind as these kinds of people cite Rand and her books. In almost all cases they have not read Rand. It is a little like the market fundamentalists who have the habit of citing Adam Smith: Very few have actually read An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith’s famous 1776 work. This is obvious from the prevalent ignorance among these people of what Smith actually wrote. Read in an historical context, he was not an advocate of free markets in the way the fundamentalists among us assume. His name simply acquired, over years of citing-him-without-reading-him, a sort of totemic significance.

As these people bastardize Adam Smith, Ayn Rand bastardized Nietzsche (among others) and those claiming to have read Rand but plainly have not—the borderline illiterate Trump most certainly among them—use her as a kind of hood ornament, as we say in America, to give an impression of intellectual heft while invoking a few uncooked ideas: Government is bad, the market must not be regulated, corporations must not be impeded, social-welfare spending is wasteful and wrong. Rand’s Objectivism, crude in its own right, is reduced to a handful of slogans.

In the annals of English literature, certain lines of criticism have left a lasting sting. One of the most memorable of these came from the screenwriter and cartoonist John Rogers, who had this to say about the relative merits of J.R.R. Tolkien and Ayn Rand: 

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.