Atlas Shrugged

"If you read only one book about libertarianism, read this legendary 1957 novel, a 1,100-page deconstruction of the Marxian proposition, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ It took her 14 years to write Atlas Shrugged and that wasn’t working on it part-time. That was working very, very hard and at one point she stayed inside her house or on her property in California for a month. She was very intense. This is her magnum opus. Ayn Rand was born Alyssa Rosenburg in St Petersburg, Russia, and was 12 when the Russian Revolution took place and all her family’s property was snatched. Twenty-one. Oh, she was Russian. You should have heard her voice! So, Atlas Shrugged is the mature, the fullest expression of her rejection of any kind of collectivism. It’s probably the only novel of ideas that was written in the form of a detective story. It’s a real page-turner. The heroes of the novel are the entrepreneurs in America in the mid-20th century – the steelmakers, the coal miners, the productive people have all been disappearing from public view and nobody knows where they’ve gone. This happens over the course of ten years, and the heroine, Dagny Taggart, who owns a railroad, which is the controlling metaphor for the novel, tries to find out where they’ve gone, because she’s not able to run her business without all these wonderful suppliers. The ones who are left are all dolts taking government handouts. “ Atlas Shrugged is the mature, the fullest expression of her rejection of any kind of collectivism.” What she finds out is that a man, the hero, John Galt, who later becomes her lover, has been recruiting the best people everywhere to go on strike. Nothing in the economy can be done without these people, and they stay on strike until the nation comes to its senses and stops becoming a socialist economy. It’s basically about the Roosevelt administration and what it did to the economy. It’s a fantastical rebuttal. Well, she did. And there were lots of people who did in the 30s, 40s, 50s. Before Roosevelt, before the Depression, you can’t imagine how much less government regulation there was in the United States. And that’s the America that Ayn Rand and H L Mencken loved. It’s a whole kind of old-school libertarianism. It’s isolationism, free markets, free minds and not letting the state get too powerful. Individual rather than state power. It is the only page-turning critique of the welfare state, the bureaucratisation of the ‘altruistic’ impulse, and the transformation of America from a culture of self-reliance to one of self-entitlement by an author whose four mid-century novels (with The Fountainhead , Anthem and We the Living ) sold one million copies in 2009."

"Once again, she obviously doesn’t think of herself as a conservative. She got read out of the modern right by Bill Buckley and Whittaker Chambers. Chambers wrote a savage review of Atlas Shrugged in the National Review , ending with that quote ‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber – go!”.’ – saying it had a totalitarian sensibility behind it. So Buckley read the Randians out of the conservative movement and she was happy to be read out. Most fundamentally, Rand was a militant atheist and rejected conservatism’s attempt to ground free society in religious principles. Nonetheless, the fact is a whole bunch of conservatives have been inspired and energised by Ayn Rand. Paul Ryan, who is one of the brighter lights in the Republican Party these days, as far as a serious small government conservatism is concerned, has declared openly his inspiration by Rand. There’s a whole bunch of people on the right who have used Rand as the gateway drug, as Jennifer Burns, the new Rand biographer, puts it. And she’s certainly not loved on the left, that’s for sure. So Rand, in spite of herself, has been a huge influence on the right and this goes to the story of the libertarian streak in modern conservatism. But there’s also a streak in Ayn Rand that is very right-wing and explains in part why, despite her atheism and despite the obviously anti-conservative elements of her thought, nonetheless there are deeper elements that are very appealing to the conservative mind. Those are, firstly, her absolutism and secondly, her attempt to ground the case for liberty in nature. It makes sense for any party of order and stability to be very focused on order, to be drawn to the idea that there is black and white and right and wrong and absolutes and also to be attracted to the idea that there is a natural order of things. That no matter what anyone is saying, no matter what ivory-tower intellectual’s schemes for reform and social improvement are, there is an unchanging human nature, there is a transcendent moral order and for anyone who tries to defy these things, it’s like trying to defy gravity. Rand is an ally in that way of thinking because she is as absolutist a moralist as you can come across. Her intellectual project is to ground the case for liberty in natural rights – freedom and individual liberty are necessary to the fulfilment of human nature. I think ultimately that’s a philosophical project that’s doomed; it doesn’t work. But it absolutely is one that is congenial to the way that people with a right-wing sensibility think and I think it helps to explain why in temperament and sensibility if not in the details of her argument Rand has had such an influence. Yes, of course another strong element in Rand is a glorification of society’s winners – of the smart, the brilliant, the talented, the productive geniuses; she lionises them and makes them into heroes. And I have considerable sympathy for her project of doing so. But, at the same time, she expresses a fairly unmasked contempt for ordinary folks and society’s losers and underdogs. This also fits in with the basic alternative between a society of order and stability and a society of reform. You’ve got one side that is happy with the way things are and wants to keep them that way. Who are those people going to be? They are going to be the people who are thriving and prospering under current rules and the people who sympathise with life’s winners. You have another side pushing for reform who are the most obvious constituencies for change, people who aren’t doing so well under the current dispensation and the people who sympathise with them. I think there’s a deep resonance between Rand’s way of thinking and the conservative party of order/stability sensibility, one that she might not have recognised and might have thought was abhorrent but nonetheless is quite true. It is entirely possible to frame libertarian principles in a completely different way, to argue that it is capitalism that has lifted up the poor more effectively than any social programme – and that if you really care about the underdogs and losers in the world, that a free society with open and competitive markets is in fact your best bet for lifting up the unprivileged and less advantaged. But that wasn’t Rand’s way of making the argument. Her way of making the argument is one that fits in better with the right-wing point of view. Yes, you see it today in the Tea Party crowd; you see folks with their signs and their ‘Don’t tread on me’ flags, all very libertarian kind of imagery, with a ‘Take our country back’ Palinite middle-American white populism – all mixed together. Yes, and certainly the Tea Party movement is a backlash. Republicans were rudderless and incompetent and corruption-plagued, presiding over two unpopular wars and presiding over an economy that went down the toilet. Of course they were going to get bounced. The other guys come in and thought they saw in the election results a mandate to move the country in a fundamentally different direction. I think they over-read their mandate and they summoned up the Tea Party backlash in a dialectical fashion – and that’s constrained them to a considerable extent."