Me and Ayn Rand

Define irony: an stamp issued by the federal government bearing the likeness of Ayn Rand

One of the most interesting things for me personally in seeing the resurgence on the right of the parts of libertarian ideology that oppose government spending for the purposes of saving the economy and increasing access to health care (the libertarian influence on matters involving limiting the security state and reining in defense spending being curiously MIA) is Ayn Rand's return to semi-relevance in the national conversation. For the uninitiated, Ayn Rand is a Russian emigre who rose to prominence as a novelist and philosopher in the 1950s and 60s. Her topic du jour was the persecution of the individual by society, mostly by government and religion, which she believed needed to be fought by celebrating the moral importance of self-interest and by implementing an unrestricted economic system of lassiez-faire capitalism.

Rand's return to scrutiny was probably inevitable given the circumstances; she's by far the most accessible anti-regulation thinker around, and her apocalyptic streak fits well with the prevailing emotional tone of modern conservative populism, making her a natural avatar for the right on economic issues. For the left, Rand's relevance is more tied up with the contribution of her acolyte Alan Greenspan's deregulatory reforms during his lengthy tenure as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, which contributed substantially to the current economic crash. As such, the default attitude toward Ayn Rand among in-the-know liberals tends to involve eye-rolling and sneering, which isn't really a new development, but more pronounced these days. So it's in a bit of a strange position that I admit that Ayn Rand was a major influence on my intellectual development.

Hear me out - I'm not the type that'll be at the next Tea Party rally. I never exactly was. In fact, what drew me to Rand initally was her strident atheism. It's mentioned fairly infrequently in the present day, but Rand's contempt for the religious makes Richard Dawkins sound like Thomas Aquinas, and I first read her pretty shortly after I realized that religious faith held no meaning to me. This was in 1999, around the time of Bill Clinton's impeachment, and it felt to me like half the nation was suddenly stewing in moralistic outrage and pious theatrics. When I read Ayn Rand, I felt very acutely that she was the sort of thinker that would go blow for blow against the Jerry Falwells and Bob Barrs and match or exceed them in fury. The initial appeal of reading Ayn Rand (dissected brilliantly in this recent GQ article) comes from the sheer force of her stridency over all other factors, which spoke to me because I began reading her during a strident period of history and at the time in the lifespan (late adolescence) when force of passion seems most like a legitimate form of argument.

My attraction to Rand's social ideas made me more interested in her economic ones, which is actually fairly hard to avoid given her insistence that her philosophy is an irreducible whole. Now, this is where things got challenging, because I was raised in a solid Democratic household devoted to 1950s and 60s-vintage mainstream liberalism. By no means was it a radical milieu - in point of fact, my namesake is Robert F. Kennedy, famed for his efforts in elbowing out Eugene McCarthy - but enough to the left that Rand's jaundiced eye toward progressive social doctrine and unabashed championing of selfishness and capitalism were a fair shock to the system. Since the whole package was framed in terms that I found quite attractive -the importance of individuality and independence, the rewards that come from developing one's talents and capacities - I engaged with it in a serious way. In fact, in the span of about a year, I read both of Rand's major novels, the lengthy The Fountainhead and the gargantuan Atlas Shrugged, and probably four book-length collections of her essays. (I haven't actually picked up a Rand book since that time, and I probably never will again - thematically speaking, the sheer amount of internal redundancy built into her writings more or less obviates the benefits of revisitation, and only a masochist would read her for the prose.)


At this time, I hadn't ever really immersed myself in a topic intellectually the way that I did with Ayn Rand's philosophy, which was a formative experience in and of itself. I'd never felt the sense of immediacy and relevance that can accompany the act of thinking deeply about something (public high school is extraordinarily ill-suited to facilitate this kind of experience) and this was my first hint of how fulfilling and rewarding that can be. That's really more of a developmental milestone than something that can be attributed to Rand specifically - I'm sure I would have had it even if I had never read her. What Rand added to the mix was the insight that intellectual engagement is particularly valuable and important when ideas are being challenged.


The knee-jerk liberal critique of Rand's work is that it essentially carries the water for conservative establishment ideas, and post-Reagan and Greenspan, this isn't totally inaccurate, although it probably reverses the direction of influence. What this leaves out, though, is that Rand was essentially a pugilist and a contrarian rather than a supporter of one political establishment or popular line of argument. My favorite Rand essay is probably "Racism," written in 1963, which combines one of the brutally frank excoriations of the practice of racial prejudice that I've ever read with a pre-emptive strike against the Civil Rights Act of 1964; although I don't agree with her about the legislative aspects, it's impossible for me not to be impressed with someone who composed this paragraph while George Wallace was busily amassing a large national following and four-plus years before the notion of the Republican "Southern Strategy":

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called "conservatives" (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.

Above everything else, I came away from Rand convinced of the value of considering things from a rational and independent viewpoint. It's not remotely a stretch to say that the time I spent with her works taught me how to think critically. I think I learned this lesson in a far better way than I would have just relying on my university education (which was excellent) alone - liberal arts curricula seem to have a way of explicitly encouraging students to "think and analyze material critically" while implicitly adding as long as you reach the conclusion I want you to or, more insidiously, as long as you don't "offend" anyone in the process.



It's practically a law of nature that reading Ayn Rand in late adolescence tends to turn one into an insufferable asshole. In fairness, that could be said of practically anyone getting into politically-oriented thought in that time of life - try and hold a conversation with a college sophomore who's read Naomi Klein - but I was certainly no exception to the rule. In retrospect, I was extremely fortunate that I didn't fall in with a crowd of Rand devotees during my college years, which would have worsened things considerably; one of the odder things surrounding Ayn Rand - which is really saying something - is the manner in which she ju-jitsued her philosophy of bold independent thought into a rigidly enforced cult of personality which is sadly still very much in existence. 

As I got deeper into college, I became a lot less attached to what Rand thought, but I never really lost my appreciation for how she thought. This is a distinction that is too often obliterated by our discourse's relentless focus on categorizing people and their ideas into columns marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable." I've found that developing and maintaining a critical focus and a distrust of consensus to be extremely valuable in every area of my life. I should note that Rand isn't the only route to this conclusion (and very probably not the best); I recently read through Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian, which is a far more compact volume that anything Rand ever put together, yet concludes with a beautiful summary of exactly the type of mentality I've been attempting to describe:

"So I have no peroration or clarion note on which to close. Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the "transcendent" and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant and selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."  

Since it's rather impossible at this stage in time to admit of any affection for Ayn Rand and not discuss politics, I can say that I remain a self-identified liberal, and a registered Democrat, but I don't consider myself overly identified with party affiliation to the point where I would feel pressured to refrain from criticizing, say, Obama's shameful continuation of indefinite detention policies or his implementation of targeted assassination programs. I will admit to some sympathy and interest in libertarian thinking, which can and does promote things like a genuine respect for data (check out Megan McArdle's analysis of whether or not Toyota's cars were actually accelerating due to mechanical defects) or a commitment to challenging the long-held ideas of ideological allies (David Boaz's takedown of the myth that America "used to be more free" is truly praiseworthy). I'm very interested in the appearance of libertarian thinkers like Will Wilkinson who are advocating for replacing the longstanding conservative-libertarian alliance (the existence of which never made any sense to me) with a liberal-libertarian one, as elaborated in this essay by Cato's Brink Lindsey.

All of which is to say, I find these to be interesting times, for more reasons than the sport of speculating on whether or not the Tea Party is racist.