By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
A lot of CEOs have terrible taste in literature, and some
of them like Ayn Rand a great deal. A few of those are true-believing
libertarians and there’s the odd nutty Objectivist, but many people are
attracted to Rand not because of her politics but because they have heroic conceptions
of themselves and thrill to Rand’s heroic aesthetic.
There’s just something about executives and celebrities.
Mark Cuban is a fan of The Fountainhead,
and Angelina Jolie sings the praises of Atlas
Shrugged. Eva Mendes is an admirer of Barack Obama’s, but she says she
won’t date a man who isn’t a Rand fan. Billie Jean King isn’t what you’d call
an arch conservative, but she’s a Rand fan. It might be related to working in
dramatically competitive enterprises.
Where you don’t meet a lot of Randians is in the
conservative world. They’re out there if you go looking: A fellow from one of
the Rand groups (the factions divide and subdivide, being essentially
Protestant in spite of their atheism) once approached me at a gathering and
began haranguing me about Whittaker Chambers’s 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged in National Review. (That sort of thing is what professional
libertarians substitute for sexual intercourse.) I wasn’t born until a few
decades after that was published, and didn’t start working at National Review for several decades more
(William F. Buckley Jr. inexplicably did not take me up on my offer to come
work for him when I was a teenager), but the fine art of bearing a grudge has
not been lost. Not on the Randians.
Bring up your undying love of Atlas Shrugged at the typical conservative gathering and people
will smile at you and try very hard not to roll their eyes. Some people think
of her novels as a kind of guilty adolescent enthusiasm now grown out-of-date,
an intellectual mullet, a stage one goes through between the ages of 14 and 20.
Some people use Atlas Shrugged as a
totem — it had a moment at the cresting of the Tea Party phenomenon. But it is
rare to meet actual adult human beings who organize their politics views (or,
for pity’s sake, their lives) around Ayn Rand and her views. I don’t think National Review has a single Randian in
the house; I’d be surprised if the Weekly
Standard did, and if one showed up at Commentary
then John Podhoretz would simply mock him out of existence.
Strangely, our progressive friends insist that the Right
is entirely in thrall to the ideas of Ayn Rand. Left-leaning writers in places
such as New York and Washington tend to be culturally insular — parochial, even
— and many of them do not know very many conservatives. I cannot tell you how
many times I have met some well-meaning lefty who tells me (thinking it is a
compliment!) that I do not seem like one of those
people. A young woman once insisted that, as a conservative, I simply must hate
homosexuals. At the time, I was living in TriBeCa and working as a theater
critic, which is not a very good gay-evasion strategy. People know what they
know.
But I don’t think that Jonathan Chait insists that
conservatives are intellectual hostages to Ayn Rand because he doesn’t know
better; he’s just intellectually dishonest.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who once said that
reading Rand is what got him into politics, is usually trotted out as Exhibit A
in the case of the closet Randian. But Paul Ryan is not a Randian. Paul Ryan is
a Roman Catholic Crossfit bro. (He has been officially categorized as a
non-believer by the Ayn Rand Institute.) There isn’t anything particularly
Randian about his politics. And, contrary to the cartoon version, he and his
allies are not anti-government as such. They believe that our current government
is too large, too expensive, and too intrusive. There are many people who
believe that, and they are not Rand cultists. They are ordinary people who pay
taxes and stand in line at the driver’s-license office.
The Left tries to create a false dilemma that opposes
progressivism to Rand-ism — or what they imagine to be Rand-ism, a blend of
authentically Randian moralizing about moochers and takers with a kind of
Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, an atomistic society that denies community and
despises the philanthropic impulse. Actual conservatives are more likely to be
found in church, where, among other things, they exercise the philanthropic
impulse in community.
Chait is worried that Rex Tillerson, President-elect
Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, once named Atlas Shrugged his favorite book. He says so under the headline
“How Ayn Rand’s theories destroyed ‘Never Trump’ conservatism,” and the essay
is a work of truly acrobatic stupidity. I don’t think that the worrisome thing
about Rex Tillerson is that he doesn’t have better taste in literature than Rob
Lowe.
Strange that a Randian cabal would take Donald Trump as
its mascot. Trump, an incompetent casino operator and hotelier who boasted of
buying political favors, is practically a Rand villain. He even has the name
for it.
Perhaps that is not what is happening.
I myself am not much of a Rand admirer. I think Atlas Shrugged is a better novel than The Grapes of Wrath, but The Grapes of Wrath is a terrible novel.
Say this for the old bat, though: It is difficult to imagine a modern writer in
the English-speaking world having a cultural footprint so large that an entire
stream of American politics might be (wrongly and stupidly) attributed to his
thinking.
People just don’t take books that seriously anymore. I
think The Bell Curve might have been
our last genuinely controversial book. If you were not around in the 1990s, it
is hard to imagine how all-encompassing that controversy was: Everybody was
reading The Bell Curve, or at least
opening it up and turning immediately to the naughty bits. (Or at least
pretending to have read it.) You could not not have an opinion on The Bell Curve if you were the sort of
person who read books. My impression from the career of Michel Houellebecq is
that the French-speaking world is still up for a literary controversy. I envy
that a little. I’ve always liked the story about the riot following the first
performance of Rite of Spring, not
because I like riots but because I want to live in a world in which people take
Igor Stravinsky seriously enough to fight over him. The idea of a novelist — a
mediocre one at that — occupying as much cultural real estate as Ayn Rand seems
like a relic from another time. Which I suppose it is.
I happen to be in New York City while writing this,
surrounded by a who’s-who of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. I don’t expect to
meet any Randians. But I’ll let you know if I do.
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