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Ayn Rand

Date of birth/death: 2 February 1905 – 6 March 1982

In a nutshell: Evangelist for the virtue of selfishness

Connected to: Donald Trump, Rex Tillerson, the Koch brothers, Boris Johnson

In 1917, when the novelist and political theorist Ayn Rand was twelve years old, she watched as Bolsheviks wrecked her family business in St Petersburg. She didn’t like that. In fact, she bore a grudge. She hated Communism so much she decided that only its direct opposite must be true. She proposed an upside-down Marxism. Instead of the workers being the people who produce the things of value in the world, Ayn Rand declared that the bosses and owners and wealthy were the real source of good.

More than that, Rand fed bosses the appealing notion that they deserved their money. In books like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead she told the rich that they aren’t parasites or exploiters or immoral. She celebrated individuals who put themselves first. She portrayed these fortunate souls as superhuman. She urged the rich to keep their money and refuse to help everyone else. In her ultimate counter-intuitive coup, she came up with the theories of the ‘virtue of selfishness’ and ‘enlightened self-interest’. Which are fancy ways of saying: feel free to do whatever the hell you like. Rand backed this up by characterising anyone who wasn’t rich as despicable – a ‘moocher’ class, who deserve contempt instead of help. ‘If a man is weak he does not deserve love,’ Rand once told an interviewer, with characteristic charm.

I guess you can see where all this is going?

Yes: Ayn Rand is a wanker-magnet. She’s tremendously popular with many of our current world leaders. Influential pro-Brexit campaigners Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell have produced a book based on Rand’s ideas. Boris Johnson has written Rand-inspired articles declaring the rich ‘an oppressed minority’. His fellow Tory cabinet minster Sajid Javid claims he once read a scene from The Fountainhead when wooing the woman who – remarkably – became his wife. He also told a political film society that the film of the book articulated just ‘what I felt’.

US politicians and commentators love Rand even more. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle from the 1950s to the 1980s. The libertarian Rand Paul has declared ‘I am a big fan.’ Meanwhile, Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives and leading Republican climate-change denier, once told an Ayn Rand fanclub: ‘The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.’ He also said: ‘It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.’

And so it goes on. And on. And on. A bit like her novels. Christopher Hitchens once accurately described these weighty tomes as ‘transcendentally awful’. But although the books are unusually bad, they do pull off one clever trick. Rand manages to flatter people like Carswell and Paul Ryan and Rand Paul by telling them that they are the brains and brawn of the world. She tells them they are ‘rational’ and that they are simply following an unbiased, straightforward truth: ‘objectivism’. And the killer blow is that the books are pitched low enough that these not-so-great great thinkers are able to understand them. They are written in basic English, and she keeps the busy plutocrats’ attention by leavening her blunt, simple ideas with emotion, sex, guns, explosions and absurd sci-fi-tinged adventure. Even Donald Trump is a fan.

That’s right. Donald Trump once claimed to have read a book. And according to Trump, this book – Rand’s novel The Fountainhead – ‘relates to everything’. He especially likes the novel’s hero, Howard Roark. Trump has expressed great affinity with this character, who spends 700 pages ranting about everything he doesn’t like in the world and then blows things up when he doesn’t get his way. Who can say what Trump sees in him?

Elsewhere, Rex Tillerson, Trump’s controversial Secretary of State and friend of Vladimir Putin, has said that his favourite book is Rand’s biggest novel, Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged starts with the famous question ‘Who is John Galt?’ – and then spends 1,200 long pages explaining.

This book is, as the critic Whittaker Chambers noted, a work of ‘shrillness without reprieve’. But it is also compelling. The denouement is particularly mad. It boasts, among other absurd delights, a particle destroyer, a kinky electric torture machine, gratuitous nudity, and a man who introduces himself in the heat of battle and in all earnest as ‘Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d’Anconia’. Such bonkers excitement, combined with the high-pitched urgency of Rand’s writing and her tempting message that it’s okay to be selfish, has appealed to millions of readers over the years. Many of them have gone on to shape our collective destiny.

Talking of destiny, meanwhile, Rand herself lived to the ripe old age of seventy-seven – although in her later years she suffered from lung cancer and set aside her principles so she could claim Medicaid and Social Security. At her funeral in 1982, she had a six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign. Alan Greenspan was there. Five years later, he took over the Federal Reserve. Soon after, the income of the top 1 per cent of households in America began to rise rapidly – while everyone else’s slowed.