Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right Book

Fourth supplemental to a multi-part review series.

The subtitle is key here: the text primarily focuses on Rand's relationship to other misanthropic rightwingers in the United States, though the normal trappings of biography are present.

Off to a bad start when describing Rand's father as a "self-made man" (9), which is of course a conceptual impossibility deployed only by capitalist numbnuts. Rand's mother "came from a wealthy and connected background" (id.). Rand "grew up with a cook, a governess, a nurse, and tutors" (10). She was disliked by other children, and wondered if they disliked her "because she was smarter" and were "penalizing her for her virtues" (13)'though the author here more reasonably concludes "her classmates simply found her abrasive"'i.e., she was an entitled prick as a kid and remained one her entire miserable life, taking that self-oriented moment of acute meconnaissance and making it the basis of her entire ideology. Definitely not a hagiography insofar as author concludes "for all her bluster, Rand's ethics were rather anodyne" (87).

Though she loathed the Bolsheviks, "they liberalized admission policies and made tuition free, creating a flood of new students, including women and Jews, whose entrance had previously been restricted" (15)'Rand was "among the first class of women" at university (15). She read Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer (16), but "in the movies [she] glimpsed America: an ideal world" (17)'i.e., her ideas formed in a filmic imaginary, influenced by misanthropic rightwing philosophy, which retrograde fantasia remained with her for her entire miserable life.

She obtained a visa to the United States by means of a "quick fib" about a sham marriage in the US (19), which is consistent with objectivism's normal principle of lying to people with whom its adherents disagree. (See our comments on Peikoff's summation, e.g..) The more bizarre item, however, is that Rand is the beneficiary of her three sisters' "round of fervent Communist activity intended to prove the family's loyalty" (18), i.e., which means that she received the unearned benefit of her family's purported 'sacrifice,' anathema to her ideology. Of course, all of the rich brat stuff, supra, is also unearned, but nevermind all that.

We see how motherfucking crazy she is in her response to the Hickman case, wherein "a teen murderer mutilated his victim and boasted maniacally of his deed"; "Rand was sympathetic rather than horrified"'the criminal "embodied the strong individual breaking free from the ordinary run of humanity" (24). She wrote: "It is an amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own" (25). Tabling the question of whether one can have a consciousness all one's own (I mean, really), this explains every single one of her hideous protagonists'lumpenized antisocial nihilists, all of them. Rand liked Nietzsche's ubermensch thesis, and "seems never to have doubted that she was one of the creators" (25)'she would have benefited from studying Malcolm Bull's 'Reading Nietzsche like a Loser.' Rand did not understand Nietzsche very well, and "translated by Rand into fiction, Nietzsche's transvaluation of values changed criminals into heroes and rape into love" (28).

She was not a liberal in the classical sense, and "gravitated first to writers who were deeply skeptical of democracy, such as H.L. Mencken, Oswald Spengler, Albert Jay Nock, and Jose Ortega y Gasset" (43). As I have elsewise argued, this is fascism for the United States. She even wondered at one point if "the white race is degenerating" (44). FFS. All'y'all objectivists need to grow right the fuck up on this.

Burns here summarizes Rand's writings in addition to her political interactions. We the Living is erroneously said to draw "liberally from her own experiences to describe the frustration and angst of living under Soviet Communism" (33); we know this is false because Rand's preface to the novel disclaims this exact thesis (cf. our comments thereupon). Comical that "among political conservatives" this text made her "an expert on Soviet Russia" (70), despite her disclaimer. The summation of Anthem as "extrapolation of Communist Russia far into the future" (50) is just asinine, considering the primitivism, dumb linguistics, and other idiocies in the novel'am not sure if it is Rand who thought that or author here. As for the The Fountainhead, "adolescents responded with particular fervor to her insistence that dreams, aspirations, and the voice of self be heeded" (91). She demanded that the rightwing use the text to "build me into a 'name'" (95) even while claiming that "a Pink-New Deal-Collectivist blockade" prevented her view from being heard'despite the book's sales and reviews (id.). Author notes that "Atlas Shrugged was a throwback to socialist realism, with its cardboard characters in the service of an overarching ideology" (179).

When she worked on the Willkie campaign, contra FDR, she came to believe that "I was a marvelous propagandist" (55). We should keep this estimation in mind while assessing her other writings; it is likely that each and every of her writings is propaganda for capitalist interests. Her conceptual incoherences are always manifest, such as the silly belief that the "traditional American way of life" is "individualism" (57), contrasted against the fear of "a Totalitarian America, a world of slavery" (5)'as though traditionally the purported 'individualism' in the United States were not founded precisely on actual slavery of human persons. At the same time she deployed this incoherent individualist doctrine, she adhered to "pseudoscience" such as the thesis, from R. A. Cram, that "most people were not 'psychically' human" (74).

She interacted with many figures of the US rightwing, and unequivocally alienated every single one of them because she is such an entitled, miserable asshole (cf. Aaron James' Assholes). Standard asshole dunning-krugerism in the belief that "I have not adopted any philosophy. I have created my own" (127), which is patently false. Author is sufficiently aware to note that "Rand's discourse was in many ways aggressively anti-intellectual" (id.).

She hit it off early in her career, for instance, with Isabel Patterson, impressing the latter by responding to her query about parental altruism for children with the asinine "if the child has no one but the parent and the situation is such that the parent has to sacrifice himself and die, how long would the child survive thereafter?" (82). The implication that the 'sacrifice' must be total, that there would never be anyone else to care for the kid, creates a false dilemma and imputes it to all altruist doctrine'that total sacrifice is always required. That's unwarranted, of course'as is every one of her conclusions.

Even though Rand lifted a number of his ideas, she considered Hayek "pure poison" (104). She liked von Mises better (106), though still thought he was wrong on ethics. She picked needless quarrels with Milton Friedman (117). She fought with Buckley (140) and alienated Murray Rothbard (144). Worthless Whittaker Chambers savaged Atlas Shrugged in the National Review, and the general response to the novel caused her "a deep depression" (178). She repelled Sidney Hook (184), who regarded her as "substituting denunciation for analysis and mouthing slogans instead of considering problems" (193). She threw Goldwater under the bus (207 ff). Her brand of crazy was too much even for the HUAC, when she testified to smear a WWII film as pro-soviet: "Rand was slow to understand that Song of Russia was not Communist propaganda, but American propaganda about a wartime ally" (124). She even fell out with Paterson eventually (130 ff).

Because she couldn't get along with other independent 'individuals,' she needed a group of pliable followers who agreed with her no matter what, a group of dependent cultists: "They were receptive to her comprehensive view of the world, her unified field theory of existence" (145). Her cult included the Brandens, Greenspan, Peikoff'and "put Rand in a position of authority she had always craved" (151)'consistent with her illiberal, authoritarian ideas, surely'a "hierarchical, stratified society" (id.). The text follows a long process of abusive, controlling bullshit, wherein she humiliated and terrorized these people; I am not feeling too sorry for them'they read her horrible books and signed up for it; they knew exactly the quantum of toxicity that awaited them. (They did nevertheless obtain the benefit of being able to "reject traditional religion without feeling lost in a nihilistic, meaningless universe" (203), which is the interest subserved by far right populism, as identified in Griffin's Modernism and Fascism.) What is most atrocious is how her cult required counseling sessions with Natty Branden, who claimed to be a psychologist (he was not, really) and then reported all heretical beliefs to Rand, who then disciplined the cultists on the basis of his reports (238). FFS they even had show trials (180).

Just to hammer home how much of an asshole she was, be advised that she believed homosexuality to be a "disgusting aberration" (236); she regarded feminism as "utterly without legitimacy" (263); she thought that the Civil Rights Act sought "special race privileges" (206). It is noted that The Fountainhead "romanticized the rape victim" and represented "rape as grand passion" (264). She "attacked Native Americans as savages, arguing that European colonists had a right to seize their land because native tribes did not recognize individual rights" (266)'see how that works? Completely consistent with her juvenile ideas!

Suffice it to say that Isabel Paterson told Rand "stop taking benzedrine, you idiot" (126) because of her addiction. Let me repeat that: Rand was a drug addict. Her writings are narcotic-fueled trash'and this volume offers coverage of all the major publications. Not sure if the drugs are involved in the affair that she had with Branden or in his subsequent breaking it off, which caused her to excommunicate him, and thereafter the entire cult collapsed. She died of lung cancer, having smoked two packs per day for decades (274). By the end, she had driven away everyone in the cult with her cruelty'even those who nursed her through cancer surgery were driven away "after she harangued them endlessly about their altruistic tastes" (276)'i.e., in helping her during her illness, one assumes. In the end, there was no one left but Peikoff, and she died miserable and alone. Good fucking riddance.

Recommended for blinkered objectivists, drunkard libertarians, and other pointless illiberals.