What is it about Atlas Shrugged that makes it so popular? Why has Ayn Rand’s dense, hard-to-read, and way-too-long novel sold over seven million copies and inspired such a loyal, even fanatical following?
I was asking myself these questions last week as I finished rereading the novel for the first time in 46 years. I wrote a retrospective review of Atlas Shrugged, which appears in Sunday’s edition of the webzine American Thinker, and I gave the book low marks, both as literature and philosophy. Such were not my views the first time I read it, and such obviously are not the views of most of those who have commented on my review.
What captivated me most about Atlas Shrugged the first time I read it was how different it was from what the culture was offering. Rand actually viewed businesspeople who were out to make a profit as the good guys! Up to that time, the only work of fiction I had read in which businessmen were treated sympathetically was Sloan Wilson’s novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which gives us a glimpse of the huge personal price that is often exacted from those who build great business enterprises. In Atlas Shrugged Rand does more than just treat businesspeople sympathetically: she exalts them as heroes and presents them as innovators who are as brilliant and creative as the writers, artists and intellectuals who despise them even while depending on them for their livelihoods.
Another thing I liked about Atlas Shrugged was the way Rand skewered those collectivist clichés I had been hearing all my life and that people seem to regard as almost self-evident. It was hard to take them seriously after they came out of the mouths of ridiculous people like James Taggart, Orren Boyle and Philip Rearden.
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A couple weeks ago Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, co-authored a Washington Post op-ed with John D. Podesta, president of the leftish Center for American Progress, in which they urged the courts to invalidate the will of Californians and residents of the 30 other states where voters have rejected same-sex marriage.
The involvement of Cato, a self-described libertarian think tank, on the side of those pushing for same-sex marriage is disturbing on two counts. First, Levy is urging judges to legislate from the bench, to overrule the citizenry, who have expressed their will in the clearest way possible: through direct referendum. Second, he argues for his position, both here and in an op-ed back in January in the New York Daily News, on the basis of equality rather than liberty.
Libertarians have a long history in the struggle for gay rights. In the early 1970s the Libertarian Party took a principled stand in support of repealing state sodomy statutes. These were the laws that were used to justify police persecution of gay people, such as the raid that resulted in the Stonewall riots in June 1969 — the event that marked the beginning of the gay rights movement. Read more »
I’m breaking a promise I made.
In an email to Walt Thiessen, the owner and webmaster of Nolan Chart, I said I would not contribute any more articles to this site as long as Billy Roper is in any way associated with it. Yet, here I am doing just that, and, moreover, doing it on a gorgeous Spring day on which I had planned to be outside planting my flower beds.
However, Walt left me little choice when he decided to respond publicly to my private communication. My intent was to give him a heads-up, to warn him that a neo-nazi is using his website to promote an ideology that he no doubt despises — and doing it under a “libertarian” label, no less. Rather than responding in an email, he chose to do so in the form of an article that was put out on Nolan Chart for all the world to see.
I did not give Walt “permission to repeat all this”, as he says. I told him he could do whatever he wanted with the information, not with the email. If my intention had been to express these views publicly, I would have done so in an article, and would have expressed them differently. Read more »
