The Nastiness of Ayn Rand

Author of Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand is one if the weirder apparitions to arise on the American Right. Imagine Anton laVey birthing Donald Trump's child, and something very much like Ayn Rand would arise like Rosemary's Baby.

London Review of Books has the nitty-gritty:

...Rand’s nastiness has an earnestness to it, a desire to transform naughty frisson into iron principle. And as for sex, so for politics. Popular stories of the 1940s and 1950s are full of people being rapacious and unkind, but for Rand, noir has to become a system of world history. Her ethics are doggedly, insistently supremacist, the line between sheep and goats cut in black marker pen. You’re either a producer or a looter, on the side of ‘greatness’, ‘the individual will’ and so on, or one of the ‘parasites’, the ‘mediocrity’, the ‘second-handers’ who feed off their energy; all the heroes are gaunt, angular, square-jawed, all the looters the opposite. Good guys recognise other good guys immediately: the novels are full of heart-warming chats between a hero and a noble tramp or plumber. Bad guys stammer, and bluster, and let their weak chins wobble as their dull eyes look down at the floor.

‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding – To the gas chambers, go!’ Whittaker Chambers wrote in a notorious 1957 review. It was a crude thing to say, but you can see why he said it. The careening bipolar lurches in both novels grow more extreme as they go on – words such as ‘lice’ and ‘maggots’ are used, and there are moments of horrible abjection. Long after their endings have faded, the novels leave the reader trying to shake off their after- images, sometimes comic, sometimes not: the Objectivist tea party, with all the heroes grabbing at the sandwiches; the world’s poor and weak and hungry, in rags on marble steps"

As Astonishing as Elvis


...And here is the Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged, as published by the National Review. He plucks Rand...skewers her, and then proceeds to roast her to a delightful shade of Red. (He actually suggests that she is a kind of a crypto-Marxist... necessity of unrestrained Capitalism sweeping away all vestiges of the Old Order.)

How often does an erst-while Progressive blog link to Whittaker Chambers, much less the National Review? Just one more distinction that makes this blog so fascinatingly different. I look forward to the day it actually elicits a comment.