History News Network

Departments

Jack Ross. Review of Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)

[Jack Ross is author of a forthcoming book on American Jewish anti-Zionism]

If the conservative and libertarian intellectual communities are to be believed, we are presently experiencing an Ayn Rand renaissance. The radical socialist (or corporatist, depending on who you ask) agenda of Barack Obama, symbolized by bank bailouts and stimulus bills, has aroused a great populist upsurge in defense of the creative individual – Atlas Shrugged, they say, has finally come to pass. Indeed, it has not been uncommon to see placards at Tea Party protests asking “Who is John Galt?” and other slogans lifted from Rand’s novels. So is the Rand Revolution now coming to pass?

At the very least, it makes extremely timely the new biography of Rand by University of Virginia associate professor Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market. Historically speaking, Professor Burns does a remarkable service by shedding light on Ayn Rand’s long-neglected early career, where under the tutelage of the anti-New Deal columnist Isabel Paterson she became an active booster for Wendell Willkie and aspired to be nothing less than the laissez-faire answer to John Steinbeck. This sets the scene for an Ayn Rand much closer to the political mainstream than her reputation has suggested. She moved on to be equally enthusiastic for Barry Goldwater and, according to Burns, securing the place of modern libertarianism on the American right, as opposed to the radical fringes of left or right.

This thesis of Burns has vast implications for the recent history of American politics, which she only begins to grapple with. Just prior to the rise of the Tea Party movement, libertarianism as an ideology was given its most visible platform yet in the phenomenal presidential campaign of Ron Paul. Yet many self-described libertarians were disquieted by the dramatic rise of Ron Paul, whom they considered a throwback to the retrograde libertarianism of Murray Rothbard, who invariably sought alliances with the new left and with the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan. Paul, for his part, makes no secret of his strong preference for Rothbard over Rand.

Burns convincingly argues that, historically speaking, Rand’s influence far outweighed that of Rothbard. Even when, to Rothbard’s profound delight, the libertarians of Young Americans for Freedom walked out of the organization over the question of the draft in 1969, they roundly rejected his call to enter the antiwar movement full force and instead looked to Rand, who remained an unbowed Cold War hawk and counseled that the destiny of libertarianism was still tied to the destiny of the Republican Party. Moreover, Burns brings the weight of archival evidence to bear in demonstrating that Rothbard was never considered a serious figure by most other libertarians, and that most references to him were in the form of attacking his views.

This teaches us much about the present political fortunes of libertarianism. The Ron Paul phenomenon was almost entirely attributable to the issue of war and peace, specifically the widespread feeling in the second half of 2007 that the new Democratic congress had betrayed the antiwar sentiment which swept them into office. Since the election of Obama, Rand, not Rothbard, has been the guiding light of right-libertarian protest, and Randian hawkishness has been only too compatible with the feeling of Glenn Beck’s followers that the Muslims are boring from within. If Ron Paul was the Gene McCarthy of the right, then the Tea Parties have been the Days of Rage that followed.

In the promotion of her book, Burns has even said on more than one occasion that the sharp decline of the Christian right in the last five years has augured well for the enduring legacy of Ayn Rand on the American right, with economic arguments now becoming its modus vivendi. But Burns makes no attempt at all to assess the potential pitfalls of this reality. The analogy to the era of the new left is instructive, as the Tea Party movement, if the reputation of its titular leader Sarah Palin is any indication, could prove no less politically toxic to the center of American politics. Writers ranging from Michael Lind to Walter Russell Mead have argued the striking similarities between our own time and the first Nixon Administration, with Lind very plainly declaring that “the teabaggers are the Yippies of the right.”

Conservative boosters in the early weeks of 2010 will no doubt have a simple two-word answer to this warning – Scott Brown. But Brown’s election might well prove to be the most dramatic indicator yet of the analogy between the two eras and the two movements. In 1969, the upset re-election of John Lindsay, who was closely identified with the new left, as Mayor of New York, was seen by liberals as the ultimate repudiation of the notion that Nixon had ushered in a new majority. But this betrayed a gross misreading of the returns: Lindsay had only been elected with a 43% plurality against two conservative Italian Catholics, and moreover was able to keep the increasingly rightward-drifting Jewish vote by running on the Liberal Party line.

In a similar vein, Scott Brown was only able to pull off his upset against a candidate who was both exceptionally hapless and had a remarkably extreme position on abortion in 50% Catholic Massachusetts. But like the Lindsay liberals of 1969, the Republicans give no sign whatsoever that they will learn the right lessons of this victory, convinced that the country is truly in a great popular uproar over health care legislation. Indeed, the Republicans have made the fateful turn of believing their own propaganda in their embrace of the Tea Party movement. In ultimately fooling itself most of all, the American right has been ably assisted by Ayn Rand.