Atlas is Shrugging: how Ayn Rand provided the modern language of politics.

Our heroine: Ayn Rand is still venerated by an increasingly right-wing Republican party

WHEN I was in my early teens I had a habit of checking the shelves in whatever bookshop I might be in to see who would be my neighbour should I eventually fulfil my destiny and become the world’s greatest novelist. That was my rather naïve (in more ways than one) introduction to Ayn Rand, the Russian-émigré American novelist, philosopher, and inventor of Objectivism. Her philosophy now, no less, is the cornerstone of the ideologies for the US Republican Party. She was, in essence, everything I would come to stand against.

Rand, although never a truly popular novelist this side of the Atlantic, has a peculiar hold over certain right wing politicos in the US (Paul Ryan and Rand Paul most notably most recently). She has her own Institute that promotes her ideologies, and is often cited in conversations discussing political influences.

For those unfamiliar with her work, she was the great progenitor of the idea of the “undeserving poor” in the minds of post-war, post-Depression America. Her works have titles such as The Virtue of Selfishness, she regarded homosexuality as “disgusting”, advocated the terms and conditions of European colonialism, and termed the working classes “parasites”, “moochers” and “looters”. Of course, Republicans cite her Objectivism as the core of the American Dream – where anyone can become a millionaire if they are willing to put in the hard graft. But the truth is there is something deeper in the figure of Rand that Republicans can allude to, like a secret handshake. Ayn Rand was a racist, a snob, a homophobe and a hypocrite. Wink wink.

It is interesting that Rand has undergone almost nothing in the way of a revisionist make-over, such as, say, Ronald Reagan has in recent years. Reagan, of course, has been reinvented as the right search for an icon in the toxic shadow of Bushism. The exploitative nature of Reagan’s “greed-is-good” economic policy has been rebranded as a call-to-arms for dynamic entrepreneurialism. Forgotten is the Iran-Contra criminalities, the Central American genocides, the back-slapping economic policies that (just as Thatcherism did in the UK) has filtered down a generation and left us in this god-awful mess. But, it seems, The Republicans are not yet done with the myth-making of Hollywood. Reagan, no fool but neither was he in any way remarkable (apart from his ability to sell – he was, after all, a B-movie actor turned 50s TV commercial stalwart), is currently an Augustinian figurehead for the thinly-veiled cruelties of American Republican politics. So good is the right at creating father-figure myths that even many Democrats find themselves nodding in agreement when Reagan is lauded.

Rand, it seems, has undergone no such process of rebranding; her ideals, abhorrent as so many of them are, seem good enough at face value. There is no shame in a Congressman lecturing a room full of bankers on the “undeserving poor”.

Capitalists, of course, have a long tradition of lying to themselves (as well as others) in order to try and mask the ugliness of their own motives. At least with Reagan the adoration is based largely on a carefully arranged (if paper thin) myth.

The resurgence of Rand’s lexicon in public discourse, as well as the reinvention of how Reagan is remembered, is not only a telling behavioural pattern of the right in the post-Bush era. But the lack of challenge, it seems, is telling of the left. The right is becoming confident with its own eccentricities – slowly – which means that the likes of Sarah Palin have to be taken seriously for the time being. The right, it seems, is desperate for a role model.

Earlier this year Donald Trump (of the Trumps – it’s okay to laugh at a man filled with such wind who walks about in a skyscraper he has named The Trump Tower), the epitome of the smoke-and-mirrors billionaire, announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. Trump is and always has been a rather unpalatable joke to anyone who doesn’t see their own ambitions embodied in his lack of talent. Born into enormous wealth he has sunk project after project with family money. He has filed for bankruptcy more times than would rightly be deemed possibly by a moral society. And yet Trump would have met with Rand’s approval according to her advocacy of a society where the rich pay no taxes, where government’s only role is to use force to perpetuate hegemony and ensure civil obedience.

What the GOP almost had in Trump was a true face of their Objectivism, for where Trump is a billionaire with no money, an entrepreneur with no obvious skills in business, the Kitsch ideal, lacking in all modesty, irony, and wit, the American Dream in all its garish absurdity, so Rand made her name as a figurehead of individualism, a guru of the triumph of the will, an anti-statist standard, whilst at the same time she claimed social welfare under her married name of Ann O’Connor.

This is where the basic hypocrisies and deceptions of the right become complex contradictions forced upon them by reality. Just as the (almost) great hope Trump is a broke billionaire, so is the matriarch Rand the state sponger.

Rand, in an interview, once called altruism a ‘basic evil’. This is the pose of a Republican role-model that even Reagan could not live up to. Rand was also virulently anti-science, her whole life claiming that the “danger of tobacco” was a left-wing hoax. The Republicans have learned a great deal from this hypocritical, egomaniacal, fantasist who would let nothing as inconvenient as “facts” get in the way of her distorted sense of morality.

It is important to note that fellow ideologues in the same vein of libertarianism, such as Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson, in later life refused to reclaim their social security contributions when they needed them, on principle. The right, it seems, rather than following the example of those with such a principled approach to their own philosophies, have instead followed the lessons of the dualist Rand. The truth is that Ayn Rand is not worshipped by capitalists because of her philosophies of self-interest, or Objectivism, (where is the Lane Institute? or the Paterson Institute?), but rather her life amounted to an ideology of “getting-away-with-it”.

To Rand morality and spirituality were mutually exclusive; hence the trend of many of her greatest fans being individualists as well as members of the collective unity of Judaeo Christian culture. Self-interest, after all, is diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus. But, as usual, this seems of little interest to her Republican apostles. And such proud apostles they are; such as Catholic Congressman Paul Ryan, Republican presidential “hopeful” for 2012 and regarded as one of the GOPs leading-lights, despite his ludicrous economics plan of 2010. In 2012, Ryan drafted a bill that would have abolished the State Children’s Health Insurance Programme, a body that provided 6.6 million children with healthcare in 2006 they would have otherwise gone without. Ayn Rand would have been extremely proud.

All the Republicans understand is the loudest shout of the American Dream; that anyone can become successful. What they cannot hear is the whisper that underlies it; that not everyone is successful. Individualism depends upon the failure of others, and in society failure rarely comes without a domino effect.

Rand said in an interview with Playboy in 1964 that the role of government had only one real function: “the protection of individual rights”. This is the essence of the modern Republican Party, and the eternal essence of capitalism; to protect the individual’s rights to live, to make money, the right to exploit and the right to be exploited. The right to claw oneself to the top of the pile regardless of strategy; profit being the only motive.

To our credit, here in Britain we have a much stronger tradition of literary appreciation which would never have allowed Rand’s schlock to be treated with the reverence it has received in the US. But her ideals are now very much the content of the modern language of Westminster. There is a new debate centring on the “reason of self-interest”; the recent reintroduction of the “undeserving poor” to the political vocabulary; attempts at privatisation; an acceptance that strong markets, rather than social responsibility, make for better lives. All of this is Rand, pure and simple; in its soulnessness, its hypocrisy, and the wilful blindness to the idiocy of it all. Far from being the stuff of the gospel for a get-up-and-go generation, her philosophies, where and when practicable, have proven time and time again to be destructive to all levels of society; the latest financial crisis being just one example, the London riots being another.

And yet Cameron, with his characteristic lack of foresight, is setting us all up for a Randian future, and a large portion of society are obligingly walling themselves into her destructive, inhumane mindset.

John Polk, briefly the director of a new film version of Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, said that he hoped the film would “inspire people to read more Rand.” But surely Rand has her place already. If the economics and socio-politics of western states equate to little more than the philosophy of self-interest, then her place could be no more embedded than it already is. But perhaps, inadvertently, he has a point; people should read Ayn Rand if only to see what we’re up against.

This article is an extract from a longer piece “An American Saga” to be published in the newly launched The Raconteur, published by Parthian Books on November 5. The Raconteur is a literary magazine founded in 2009 by writers Dylan Moore, from Cardiff, and Gary Raymond, from Newport. The pair wanted to provide a platform for a new generation of writers to appear alongside their literary heroes.

So far they have published five successful quarterly issues featuring leading Welsh writers like Owen Sheers, Niall Griffiths and Rachel Trezise alongside internationally renowned poets, translators and thinkers like George Szirtes, Norman Thomas di Giovanni and Alain de Botton, who said of The Raconteur: ”it is full of insights and valuable perspectives on the literary world”.

Now the magazine is to be published biannually by Parthian Books, Wales’ most dynamic publishing house. Moore and Raymond have expanded the team to include writer and journalist Susie Wild, who has been making her name as one of Parthian’s Bright Young Things.

The magazine will be published in large paperback book format and the forthcoming issue, titled simply ‘America’ features a stellar list of contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, including Allegra Goodman, author of The Cookbook Collector, journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson and short story writer Russell Celyn Jones.

There will be a series of events in November to coincide with the launch of the magazine. For more information on the new format literary magazine, visit www.theraconteur.info