Stop blaming Ayn Rand

It has become a commonplace lately to link Donald Trump’s incompetence, conniving, dishonesty and corruption to the fulfillment of the ideals of Any Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Apparently, as William F. Buckley, Jr., freely admitted in his geriatric years, though he had trashed her for years, a lot of people have never actually read her books.

Atlas Shrugged imagines a world where the industrialists have gone on strike. Yes, they are obscenely wealthy, one and all — but they earned it by the honorable provision of products and services that people actually want. Trump is a living, breathing exemplar for the parasitic, dishonorable, and underhanded operators that Rand’s heroes — Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, and Francisco d’AnConia — fought against, Wesley Mouch and Ellsworth Toohey. You can think what you like of Rand’s ideas, but Donald Trump is exactly the person she spent her life attacking; she should not be linked to the ambulatory obscenity who now poses such a danger to us.

There is one criticism of Rand which might have merit — her treatment of sex, which in her books almost invariably borders on rape fantasies. The problem here is that anybody acquainted with the romance genre is aware that a huge number of American women are apparently spunky li’l things that Gary Cooper-like cowboys find nettlesome, and with whom they forcefully entertain themselves before stalking off to shoot some bad guys and feed the horses.

So it may be that Ayn Rand just had little skill, or a lot of discomfort, setting-up and portraying sex scenes; I don’t know, but think that’s a real possibility. There should be no confusion about her attitude toward such as The Donald, however: Rand loathed them.

This entry was posted in General. Bookmark the permalink.