Jubilee Prosperity

A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt.
In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor
disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s
capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything
you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only
now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who
make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to
bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us.
We do not need you.”

“Atlas Shrugged” was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era,
Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before. Sales of the
book have reportedly spiked. At “tea parties” and other conservative
protests, alongside the Obama-as-Joker signs, you will find placards
reading “Atlas Shrugs” and “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Not long after the
inauguration, as right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck were invoking Rand
and issuing warnings of incipient socialism, Representative John
Campbell, Republican of California, told a reporter that the prospect
of rising taxes and government regulation meant “people are starting
to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas
Shrugged.’ ”

Rand’s style of vehement individualism has never been universally
popular among conservatives — back in 1957, Whittaker Chambers
denounced the “wickedness” of “Atlas Shrugged” in National Review —
and Rand still has her critics on the right today. But it can often
seem, as Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic recently
observed, that “Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood.” And while
it’s not hard to understand Rand’s revenge-fantasy appeal to those on
the right, would-be Galts ought to hear the story Anne C. Heller has
to tell in her dramatic and very timely biography, “Ayn Rand and the
World She Made.”

For one thing, it is far more interesting than anything in Rand’s
novels. That is because Heller is dealing with a human being, and one
with more than her share of human failings and contradictions —
“gallant, driven, brilliant, brash, cruel . . . and ultimately self-
destructive,” as Heller puts it. The characters Rand created, on the
other hand — like Galt or Howard Roark, the architect hero of “The
Fountainhead” — are abstract principles set to moving and talking.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 8:50 am and is filed under Prosperity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.