Ayn Rand’s Legacy of Unifying Social Cruelty

It is my belief that it is of great importance for us to seek to explore and understand the many layers of what has brought us to this place of great peril. One significant piece is awareness of Ayn Rand and the impact of her influence over so many of the most powerful... and the most dangerous among us. There are many who believe that we simply need to get rid of Trump for things to be better, not realizing that he is but a symptom. The roots of what we are seeing today — the normalization of cruelty and violence, greed and grandiosity, narcissism and entitlement, dehumanization and disconnection, propaganda and polarization, endless war and drill baby drill, the denial of the ecological and climate crises, crushing poverty along side the vast redistribution of wealth upwards, apathy and addiction, and on and on — has not come about overnight. We need to understand this. Half the solution is first coming to see the problem. Let us all work together to dig deeper and deeper, empowering ourselves to meet the great challenges of these times with courage, consciousness, compassion, wisdom, and fierce caring, advocacy, and protection of life, all life. — Molly

Selection from the cover of Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed.

Many neoliberal thinkers and policy makers from Alan Greenspan to the Koch brothers were enthralled by Rand’s novels while in high school.

 By Daniel Falcone

Lisa Duggan is a journalist, activist and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. She has authored several books on gender and cultural politics. Her newest book, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, is part of a series she is co-editing with University of California Press called American Studies Now. She was president of the American Studies Association during 2014-15.

In this interview, Duggan discusses Mean Girl and the legacies of both Rand’s work and its connections to neoliberalism. In the book, Duggan goes beyond the more standard biographical accounts of Rand and gets to the bottom of her novels and how they set a disturbing tone for global capitalism. Further, Duggan explains the mischaracterizations of Rand in modern memory, and provides expert analysis of current affairs in helping readers to contextualize the actual historical Rand and her likely political endorsements as well as her most reactionary views.

Daniel Falcone: Could you tell readers first briefly about Ayn Rand, and how this book differs from others in regard to her? What do you argue in the book?

Lisa Duggan: Rand’s influence has shaped our political present, not primarily through her philosophical ideas of Objectivism, but through the feelings, fantasies, aspirations and desires she circulates in her two massively popular novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Drawing on deeply familiar cultural narratives derived from the fantasies of European empire, she outlines heroic characters and romance plots that appeal especially to white teenagers. Rand’s novels present “superior” characters and eroticize their contempt for and cruelty toward “inferior” others. She presents readers with her ideal capitalist: a haughty individualist with no need for the collectivism of government, unions or human solidarity.

The 2009 biographies of Rand by Jennifer Burns and Anne Heller provide solidly researched accounts of Rand’s life and work. These important independent critical studies add substantially to the large volume of work on Rand produced by her followers. In Mean Girl, I go beyond these personal and intellectual biographies to show how Rand’s values and ideals, conveyed primarily though fantasy and feeling, set the affective tone of the neoliberal phase of U.S. and global capitalism.

Since the 1980s, neoliberal policies have cut the social safety net, deregulated global corporations, and privatized public goods around the world — thereby increasing social, political and economic inequality to world historical levels. This [has] been done very much in the spirit of Rand. Indeed, many neoliberal thinkers and policy makers (from Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chair; to the Koch brothers’ Cato Institute circles; to Silicon Valley tech gurus) were enthralled by Rand’s novels while in high school.   

Please continue this interview here: https://truthout.org/articles/ayn-rands-legacy-of-unifying-social-cruelty/