Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan

Lisa Duggan's book (University of California Press, 2019) is a fairly incisive review of Rand's life and work.  I read Atlas Shrugged (1957) when I was twelve years old and its anti-authoritarian stance made quite an impression on me, who grew up in a small town with authoritarian parents and teachers.  There were very few books in my house and no public library (there was an elementary school library, consisting of mostly white-washed histories of famous Americans) so when I got a paper route at twelve I spent much of the money on the paperbacks on the racks in the local store; Atlas Shrugged was one of my first purchases.  Of course I had never heard of it but I was instantly enthralled by its combination of melodrama and didacticism that suggested it was okay to think for oneself.

Of course I have since grown up -- something Alan Greenspan and other Rand acolytes never did -- and realize it is a nice adolescent fantasy to think it possible to always "objectively" act in one's own self interest -- as Marx, Freud and many others have demonstrated -- something Rand couldn't always successfully do for herself.  And I was misled to think Rand supported the idea of thinking for oneself; it was only allowed if one agreed with Rand.  When I read Atlas Shrugged it did, however, strike a clear note about the absurdity of religion, something I was feeling myself at the time and which kept Rand always at odds with religious conservatives such as Bill Buckley.

Duggan does go a bit askew when she relates Rand to what she refers to as "neoliberalism," which she ascribes to both Reagan and Margaret Thatcher;.  I wonder if terms such as neoliberalism and populism are at all useful in the current political climate.  Duggan does point our correctly that Rand has had a big influence on tech gurus, many of whom are fans of Rand, for better and, more often, for worse (the idea that the rich deserve to be rich and it is their own fault that the poor are poor). And I do have a quibble with Duggan's oversimplification of the film industry (where Rand worked for a time):  "a major economic powerhouse by selling glittering prosperity and glamour, of heroic white American conquest and industry."  There have been a number of filmmakers who have shown a more complex view of America, even after the Hays code was enforced, with portrayals of working class women and men (John M. Stahl, William Wellman) and Native Americans (John Ford, George B. Seitz), as well as King Vidor (the director of The Fountainhead, 1949), who is not mentioned by Duggan.