The Ayn Rand Factor Revisited

COMMENTARY

By Robert Tracinski

The biggest under-appreciated cultural/political story of this year is the astonishing surge in the sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Yesterday, I linked to the ranking page which shows the top sellers among all of the books offered through Amazon.com. As of Thursday night, Atlas Shrugged is still at #19, though TIA Daily reader Michael Ryan sent me a note to say that it climbed as high as #16 yesterday. He added: "But that understates the position, maybe by 1 or 2, because there are three separate editions, each with its own ranking."

Looking at Amazon bestseller lists in narrower categories, Atlas is currently at #6 in Literature & Fiction, and at #2 in Classics, though it was at #1 there when I checked yesterday.

As an aside, anyone who is feeling pessimistic about recent political events—and who wouldn't be?—should take some reassurance by perusing Amazon's list of the 25 top sellers in "Classics." Number 1 is Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine; #2 is Atlas Shrugged; #3 is The Federalist Papers; #4 is another edition of Atlas Shrugged; #5 is another edition of Atlas Shrugged; #8 is The Fountainhead; #10 is yet another edition of Atlas Shrugged; #13 is George Orwell's 1984; #17 is a complement to The Federalist Papers: The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates; #18 is the Cliff's Notes to Atlas Shrugged; #19 is a different edition (with a different typography) of Nineteen Eighty-Four; #20 is the collected writing of Thomas Paine; #21 is Orwell's Animal Farm.

So the defense of liberty and opposition to tyranny is the theme of about half of the top-selling classics at Amazon. In looking at the other titles on this "classics" list, I recognize many of them as commonly assigned reading for high school and college courses—which is even better, since this reminds us that The Fountainhead is now widely assigned in high schools, and that Thomas Paine and The Federalist Papers are still a common part of the curriculum. If this is the case, then the cause of American liberty is still alive and still has enormous reserves of strength.

Why are people turning to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged? As I have pointed out, a large part of the reason is that they see the events from Ayn Rand's novel acted out in today's news.

A businessman who reads TIA Daily forwarded to me a comment he just received from his attorney:

This new plan of the administration to preemptively seize and reorganize businesses that "pose a risk to the stability of the system" is just surreal. So they want regulations that allow private property to be seized by the government by decree? These guys are sounding like the villains from an Ayn Rand novel.
Similarly, TIA Daily reader Ed Mazlish sent me a link to a blog post in which the writer describes meeting an old friend who is shutting down his successful independent law practice because of all the extra taxes and regulations he expects to get hit with by the Obama administration. He concludes:

This is the grand fault of the Obama Plan—the assumption that people will work just as hard and produce just as much even when they are effectively penalized for it. And this is where John Galt was right—that the loss of the men of the mind, the loss of businessmen, is the most fatal blow an economy can suffer….
Who is John Galt?

Why, it looks as if we all are.

What is happening is that Ayn Rand's novels have already penetrated the culture to a wide enough extent that many people have at least a passing familiarity with them—and the current crisis is stirring all of those memories and associations, causing them to re-read Ayn Rand and to recommend her to others.

How far has this gone? TIA Daily reader Sev Attarian tells me that Ayn Rand and her books featured in a skit on Jimmy Fallon's late night talk show. Apparently, Fallon is the successor to Conan O'Brien as the host of one of those late night shows that appeals to "hip" young viewers. Though Sev reports that the skit wasn't very good, he draws the right conclusion from it:

Ayn Rand and Atlas have now so permeated our culture that blatant references to her and her philosophy are beginning to trickle down to the pop culture level. To say that I'm ecstatic about this would be an understatement.
All of this is really going to upset the calculations being made at the top levels of American politics.

In particular, it ought to give the Obama administration a sense that the ground underneath them is not as firm as they thought. Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress clearly believe that the financial crisis discredited capitalism in the eyes of the public, leaving the American people open to some form of socialism as the answer. But the sales of Ayn Rand's books tell an opposite story. In the midst of this crisis, hundreds of thousands of people are turning to a book that glorifies capitalism.

Meanwhile, where are all of the socialist books on the bestseller lists?

I want to make clear that I am not talking about the effect of all of the newly purchased, newly-read copies of Atlas Shrugged. I'll get to that in a moment. For now, I am talking about the cause of the surge of interest in Ayn Rand. The fact that her books are being purchased indicates that the culture was already open to a defense of capitalism.

This was not obvious six months ago, and the left certainly had grounds to believe that the financial crisis—given the appropriate "spin"—could be exploited to give capitalism a bad name. But the sales of Ayn Rand's novels are by far the strongest indication that this didn't work—that many people were not convinced that the free market was to blame, and that they were more concerned with the massive government intrusion into the market and into their own personal finances that was presented as the answer to the crisis.

Karl Rove has an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal hinting at one of the cultural-political shifts that is driving the Ayn Rand Factor: the revival of the Old Left has revived big government versus small government as a central issue in the political debate.

Something powerful is stirring in the land, and it may not be good news for President Barack Obama, his agenda or the Democratic Party….
Suddenly…, it doesn't seem like a time of new politics and new concerns. Many Americans are anxious—and in some cases angry—about a set of old issues: deficits, taxes, and the national debt. Mr. Obama's radical budget, his administration's slapdash operating manner, and events such as the AIG bonuses have revived animosity over government's size and cost.

In response, tea parties are sprouting up, and opposition is growing to more bailouts, more spending, higher taxes and larger deficits, even among Congressional Democrats….

Mr. Obama has put front and center a set of issues—spending and taxation—that brought Republicans to power in the past and may bring them back again.

Rove casts this in terms that are too narrow, political, and partisan. The big picture is this: rather than rejecting capitalism, a significant minority of the American people have sought out a better defense of capitalism, and everyone from Rush Limbaugh on down told them where they could find it: Atlas Shrugged.

And boy howdy, are they gonna get it. That's the other shoe waiting to drop. What will happen when these hundred of thousands of new readers make their way through Atlas Shrugged? How many will be convinced to accept Ayn Rand's philosophy? How many will not accept her entire philosophy but be influenced by it? How many will be won over to the capitalist cause, or be re-confirmed and emboldened in their advocacy of free minds and free markets? Stay tuned, because we are all about to find out.

In response to the commentary I wrote on Sunday about the Ayn Rand Factor, TIA Daily reader Chad Etsell reminded me of a quote from Ayn Rand:

There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter.... That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters.
He adds: "Your 'extra' piece this weekend made me think of this quote, specifically, the point that some lose this conviction in their youth. Our education system is definitely doing it's best to precipitate that loss."

I replied: "But look also at the more positive aspect of this story. The surge in serious interest in Ayn Rand—and not just among young people (in fact, not primarily among young people, from what I can tell)—is evidence that there are a good number of people who are interested in and open to ideas well beyond their youth."

I should also note that this Ayn Rand Factor will upset a few political calculations on the right, as well. The awful National Review "symposium" on Atlas Shrugged was an attempt to once again expel Ayn Rand from the right. As Joseph Bottum—a spokesman for the religious right—put it: "William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review did the world a favor, all those years ago, by throwing the randy Randians overboard. Do we really have to let them climb back on the ship now?"

The presumptuous assumption in this analogy is that the religious right is steaming along under its own power, and we Objectivists are trying to hitch our pathetic little dinghies to their ocean liner.

But what is actually going on is the opposite. The "fusionism" championed by William F. Buckley was an attempt to take the real power behind the right—a patriotic love of liberty and of America's distinctive political institutions and attitude toward life—and to hitch onto that powerful ocean liner the dilapidated old galleons of religious traditionalism.

But when it comes time to defend American capitalism, does the rank and file of the right turn to Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell? Are they snapping up copies of 50-year-old books by William F. Buckley? No, because Buckley and the religious right never produced anything like Ayn Rand's defense of American individualism. So the rank and file is realizing that she is the thinker they need to help them cope with today's political crisis.

This is the other result we should stay tuned to see. If enough of the new readers of Atlas Shrugged take Ayn Rand's underlying philosophy seriously, that could deal a permanent blow to the "fusionists" and to the religious right's would-be monopoly on the moral foundations of Americanism.—RWT