Ayn Rand's Continued Influence Adds a Bizarre Twist to Conservative Politics

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/ayn-rands-continued-influence-adds-bizarre-twist-conservative-politics


On Last Week Tonight, perhaps to balance out his less-than-friendly main segment on Obama’s drone policies, John Oliver asked a question that has bothered people about Ayn Rand since she first emerged in the middle of the twentieth century: why are people into this dreck?

Rand was the founder of Objectivism, a sub-Nietzschean philosophy that glorified selfishness and denigrated altruism, aggressively detailed in two novels bearing both the weight and prose style of a cement brick. Not surprisingly, this organized atavism never gained serious purchase: during her lifetime she was rejected by everyone from literary critics to philosophy professors to Frank Lloyd Wright, who didn’t appreciate her cribbing protagonist Howard Roark from his biography.

But her views achieved both outsider chic during the rise of the Great Society and some establishment cred when Alan Greenspan smuggled them into economic policy. Her tomes were bestsellers. And, in a vulgarized form Rand would almost certainly reject, they have spread even further since her death in 1982. Lawmakers cite her; celebrities namedrop her; fringe movements style themselves her heirs; scores of Twitter users swipe her visage as their avatar. A film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged lasted three installments (and outlasted its budget). There’s even going to be an off-Broadway musical this fall.

Rand’s political and pop cultural cache has risen even as her ideas fail basic empirical challenges. The 2008 financial collapse, an historic repudiation of rational self-interest on a systemic level, forced even Greenspan, a former friend of Rand and lifetime devotee of her philosophy, to admit a foundational flaw in his free market ideology. Yet Atlas Shrugged continues to sell. Oliver’s question deserves to be taken seriously: what’s to account for Rand’s unlikely and long-lasting cultural influence?

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Perhaps a failed education system and general stupidity.

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. What's to account for it?

That's simple. The resonance of it with the American myth of the self-made man, of the heroic pioneer carving civilisation out of wilderness, of self-reliance and individualism. It only serves to amplify in specific ways things that are in a large sense already part of the American national myth. (Which is possibly also why Rand's philosophy hasn't been embraced outside the USA.)

[Buddha2B]

3. The myth seems to ignore the British Empire

I think the war of independence is what did this. It created a kind of psychic disconnect to the actions of the British Empire and a new place called America/USA. So a myth can be started.

Meanwhile all the actions of (at the time) the world's largest Empire can be ignored. It never existed to the new "American".

America was created out of 'nothing', by sheer grit. blah blah blah.

[bvf]

4. "What’s to account for Rand’s unlikely and long-lasting cultural influence?"

Greed and lack of humanity, pure and simple.

You know--modern Republican values.

[Kablooie]

5. Her books are all about exceptionalism. The exceptional deserve to lead with honored privilege and rewards.

Conservatives believe that America is exceptional and requires extraordinary respect and subservience from everyone else in the world.
Her books confirm this self centered view.

Most of them think that conservatism itself is exceptional as well.

[Bigmack]

6. Sociopathology....

Call it lack of empathy or whatever you want, but that's what it boils down to.

Lots of sociopaths in the world, but this country's history - and the media hype of sociopathology - have put them in charge.