Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Read online

  The legacy just kept getting stronger as the years rolled on past Reagan. Corporate barons and congressmen kept handing one another copies of Rand’s novels: “I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has had a significant effect on their business decisions,” the chief executive of one of America’s largest regional banks said. “It offers something other books don’t: the principles that apply to business and life in general. I would call it complete.”5 Rand’s influence crosses oceans: the “intellectual architect of Brexit” keeps a photo of her on his desk.6 Paul Ryan told the Atlas Society, a Rand fan club, that her books were “the reason I got involved in public service,” and that he had required all his interns to read them. “I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case for capitalism,” he explained in a series of videos posted to Facebook.7 Rand was the inspiration for his “Path to Prosperity” budget, which called for ending Medicare. Yet Ryan also demonstrated the one problem with Rand for Republican politicians—she was, as one would expect from her views, vehemently opposed to Christianity, calling the Gospels “the best kindergarten of Communism possible.” So, when Mitt Romney named Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate in 2012, the ever-courageous Ryan announced that he had long since “rejected” Randianism as “antithetical to my worldview.”8

  But he was almost alone in his apostasy. Clarence Thomas, before he was a Supreme Court justice, insisted that his staff at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission watch the film adaptation of The Fountainhead over lunch; one aide called it a “sort of training film.” In fact, when the White House was reviewing possible candidates for the federal bench, Thomas was recommended by the right-wing Institute for Justice precisely because of “his devotion to the philosophy of Ayn Rand.”9 Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, says Atlas Shrugged is his “favorite book.” Ditto his successor, Mike Pompeo. Indeed, the billionaire Ray Dalio, one of those confidants Donald Trump calls late at night when he can’t sleep, said, “Her books pretty well capture the mind-set” of the president and his men. “This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies and it admires strong, can-do profit-makers.”10 Andrew Puzder, Trump’s first nominee for secretary of labor, named his private equity fund after Howard Roark, one of Rand’s fictional heroes.

  And what of the great man himself? Donald Trump has called The Fountainhead his favorite book. “It relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions,” he told USA Today. “That book relates to … everything.”11

  The cult of Ayn Rand extends far beyond the richest and most powerful. When the Modern Library asked readers in 1998 to catalogue the greatest books of the twentieth century, forget Hemingway and Joyce and Bellow: Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were ranked one and two. Plenty of readers might have agreed with Barack Obama, who described Rand’s work as “one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up.”12 But plenty of others have never put her down. One biographer described her as “the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right.”13

  * * *

  When powerful people tell you, over and over, that these are the most important books they’ve ever read, that they shaped their thinking and bent their lives in a particular direction, when they love something so much that they name their hedge funds or their yachts in tribute, the rest of us should pay attention. So, why does Rand strike so many so hard?

  Let’s begin with what she got right. One way to think about her, and about right-wing laissez-faire neoliberalism in general, is as the toxic overshoot of a natural and appropriate reaction to the totalitarian threats of the blood-soaked twentieth century. The journalist Thomas Ricks recently published a fascinating joint biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, two very different men who, by the end of their lives, were united in agreement that the chief task facing humans was to “preserve a space for the individual in modern life” against the threat of the all-powerful state.14 On the day that Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, Churchill said, “This is no war for domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain.… It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.”15 Though he fought the Second World War alongside Stalin, Churchill feared totalitarian communism at least as much as Nazism, just as Orwell, who had gone to Spain to fight fascism, ended up writing his greatest novels against a lightly disguised Soviet Union. As Orwell wrote toward the war’s end, “This is the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and probably cannot allow the individual any freedom whatever. When one mentions totalitarianism, one thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy, but I think one must face the risk that this phenomenon is going to be world-wide.”16

  Ayn Rand was working the same vein, and in her own case it was even more deeply imprinted—she didn’t have to imagine what that totalitarian state might feel like. Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in 1905, she grew up in a Jewish middle-class household in Saint Petersburg. (Her best friend was Vladimir Nabokov’s younger sister Olga.) In 1918, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, members of the Red Guard pounded on the door of her father’s successful pharmacy and told him it had been seized “in the name of the people.” In the words of Rand’s biographer Jennifer Burns, Alisa, “twelve at the time, burned with indignation. The shop was her father’s; he had worked for it, studied long hours at university, dispensed valued advice and medicines to his customers. Now in an instant it was gone, taken to benefit nameless, faceless peasants.” The soldiers had come carrying guns, threatening to kill her father, yet “they had spoken the language of fairness and equality, their goal to build a better society for all. Watching, listening, absorbing, Alisa knew one thing for certain: those who invoked such lofty ideals were not to be trusted. Talk about helping others was only a thin cover for force and power.”17

  The family fled toward Crimea, then under the control of the White Russians, but the Bolsheviks followed, and before long, the Rosenbaums’ property was seized again, and they were reduced to selling off the family jewels to survive. Alisa made it to the university in what was now called Petrograd, surviving yet another purge of bourgeois students, and fell in love with Nietzsche and, especially, Aristotle. “Consistency was the principle that grabbed her attention,” said Burns, “not surprisingly, given her unpredictable and frightening life.”18 She was living with her parents, but home was now a slum, and food was in short supply. Five million Russians starved to death in the famine of 1921–22, and city dwellers subsisted on ration cards. It is unsurprising that Alisa took the first opportunity to escape: she traveled to America on a short-term visa, ostensibly to visit family members in the Midwest, but even as she left, traveling under her new pen name, she knew she wasn’t coming back.

  Arriving in Chicago, she spent every possible moment in the movie theater. According to her journal, she watched (and meticulously ranked) 138 movies between February and August of 1926; her favorites were Cecil B. DeMille extravaganzas. She traveled to Hollywood, and in what sounds like a scene from a film, she saw the director behind the wheel of his idling car while he was speaking with someone. In Burns’s recounting, Rand “stared and stared. DeMille, though used to adulation, was struck by the intensity of her gaze and called out to her from his open roadster. Rand stammered back in her guttural accent, telling him she had just arrived from Russia. DeMille knew a good story when he heard it and impulsively invited Rand into his car. He drove her through the streets of Hollywood, dropped famous names,” and asked her to the set of King of Kings the next day. She parlayed the meeting into a job as a junior writer at his studio, summarizing properties that DeMille owned and suggesting how the scripts could be improved. And she went to work on her own screenplay, modeled on the sensational case of a teenage murderer named William Hickman, who had mutilated his victim and “boasted maniacally of his deed when caught.”
Rand was nonetheless sympathetic, even enraptured—to her, Hickman embodied “the strong individual breaking free from the ordinary run of humanity.”19 She quoted him in her journal: “What is good for me is right,” adding her own response: “This is the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology that I have heard.”

  And so, from the very beginning, we have the Rand who will eventually become famous. Here’s what she wrote in a brief autobiographical sketch at the age of thirty: “If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism.”20 Given her early life, it made complete sense. Anyone of any spirit, watching at age twelve as his or her father is robbed at gunpoint, would hate the robbers; anyone with a spirited mind would be able to draw the broader conclusion about the system that perpetrated the robbery. But Rand, unlike an actual great thinker, could see no experience but her own, and her emotional need for consistency pushed her constantly to generalize from that experience. Had she devoted herself then to essays and manifestos, she would have been a minor and forgotten example of that twentieth-century type, a crank.

  Instead, she wrote stories. And that made all the difference, because, of course, stories are how we understand the world. The fact that they were melodramas, the kind of writing that appeals to teenagers, or to those who don’t read many books, would have been a wise tactical decision, though in the event, it seems to have simply reflected how Rand thought.

  The Fountainhead tells the story of an architect, Howard Roark. He is the greatest architect on Earth, though of course no one recognizes this because everyone else is a bunch of collectivist “second-handers” who merely mimic the work of others from the past. The buildings Roark designed, by contrast, “were not Classical, they were not Gothic, they were not Renaissance. They were only Howard Roark.”21 Consider Roark’s inner thoughts during a visit to a rock quarry:

  He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky. These rocks, he thought, are here for me: waiting for the drill, the dynamite, and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.22

  Do you understand why Donald Trump identifies so dearly with him, this mighty Roark, who “had not made or sought a single friend on the campus”? Oh, and Roark’s also more or less a rapist—the “love story” that runs through the book involves him dominating the beautiful Dominique, a “brutal portrayal of a conquest, an episode that left Dominique bruised, battered, and wanting more.”23 Rand offered “conflicting explanations for the sadomasochistic scene” that is “one of the most popular and controversial parts of the book,” Burns notes. It isn’t real rape, Rand once explained to a fan; it is “rape by engraved invitation.”24

  The book reaches its climax, however, not in the bedroom but in the courtroom, where Roark has to defend himself after he has blown up a housing project. Why? Because it wasn’t built exactly the way he’d designed it. That’s an insult to individualism, to the idea, as he explains to the jury, that the “creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men.” Roark goes on to explain that “the creator’s concern is the conquest of nature,” while “the parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.” While the former is exercising his complete independence, which “cannot be curbed, sacrificed, or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever,” the latter is sucking up to “secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism.”25

  Altruism was perhaps the dirtiest word in Rand’s lexicon. It’s a “weapon of exploitation,” Roark sneers, one that “reverses the base of mankind’s moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue.” The jury acquits Roark, who goes on to build a really giant skyscraper, and book buyers rewarded Rand, who went on to write one more massive novel.

  Atlas Shrugged was her magnum opus, set in a dystopian near-future when the government has managed to stifle business with too many regulations. As a result, the nation’s most capable industrialists, thinkers, and inventors have gone on a strike organized by a hero named John Galt. They disappear to a sheltered valley in the Colorado mountains, where they “re-create a nineteenth-century world.” The former head of an aircraft company is a hog farmer, and so on—the point is, these producers lead moral lives because they do not extract resources from others via taxes, but instead depend on their own talents and ingenuity to advance. As before, there is a woman. (“Her naked shoulder betrayed the fragility of the body under the black dress, and the pose made her most truly a woman. The proud strength became a challenge to someone’s superior strength.”) And as before, there is a long, tendentious speech, this time not to a courtroom but over a radio network that the industrialists have hacked in order to broadcast a seventy-page exaltation of the 1 percent. As Galt explains to a supposedly fascinated nation, “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him but receives the bonus of all their brains.… Such is the pattern of exploitation for which you have damned the strong.”26

  Also a best seller, Atlas Shrugged nonetheless seemed to be swimming against the prevailing tide. It came out in 1957: Within a few years, Rachel Carson would publish Silent Spring, to far greater acclaim, stripping some of the shine off modernity. In Rand’s Manhattan, the great urbanist Jane Jacobs was busy taking down Robert Moses, the Roark-like New York master-builder who listened to no one as he built highways where he pleased. As the writer Andrea Barnet pointed out recently, a whole cadre of remarkable women came to the fore in those years, from Carson and Jacobs to Betty Friedan and Jane Goodall, and what they shared was a reaction to the “strict hierarchies and separations” of the 1950s. What they saw, instead, were “entities and connections, the world as a holistic system. Instead of sweeping generalizations, they saw complexity and fine-grained detail. Instead of the world as an inert place, they saw movement and flow, evolution and process.”27 The 1960s were about to turn into a triumphant moment for those who believed that we weren’t just individuals: the civil rights movement, and especially Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, were way stations on what seemed the road to greater human solidarity. The culture wars were under way, and you wouldn’t have bet on Rand.

  Especially given that she herself was floundering. She’d written her final, endless novel high on Benzedrine, and it eventually left her close to a nervous breakdown. She’d retreated inside a small circle of acolytes (Greenspan included), who met in her apartment to listen each week so she could read them new prose. She carried on an affair with her chief disciple, a man named Nathaniel Branden (who had changed his surname from “Blumenthal” to ally himself more closely with her), but only after informing his wife, who was also part of Rand’s inner circle, about their plans. (When the wife nonetheless developed “persistent anxiety attacks,” Rand helpfully developed “a new theory of ‘emotionalism’” to “explain” the cuckolded woman’s feelings.)28 Meanwhile, deeply disturbed that John F. Kennedy had told Americans to “ask what you can do for your country,” she proposed a book called The Fascist New Frontier. The publisher balked at that title, so it became The Virtue of Selfishness, but without the melodramatic plot lines of her fiction, her philosophical essays were inert. Rand grew ill. She’d of course kept smoking, despite the medical warnings, lecturing audiences on the “unscientific and irrational nature of the statistical evidence” linking tobacco and disease.29 And when she contracte
d lung cancer, she of course refused to admit that she had been wrong. (After some initial balking on philosophical grounds, she did allow herself to be enrolled for Medicare and Social Security.) She died in 1982, with a six-foot-tall floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign standing by her grave.

  By that time, Ronald Reagan was running the United States, and Margaret Thatcher had Britain in her iron grip, and the two embodied Rand’s basic ideas with melodramatic power of their own. Reagan’s most famous line was “The government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Thatcher at her most strident sounded as if she were John Galt. “You know,” she once said, as if it were the most obvious thing on Earth, “there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”* Those radical anti-government ideas carried the day. Soon they seemed less radical, and eventually, they were mere conventional wisdom. They came with harsh attacks on labor unions and “entitlements” and anything else that reeked of human solidarity. At the moment of greatest leverage, they shaped America’s choices when it was the most important country on the planet.