US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5475

The “expulsion” of Viereck from what Buckley called “our movement”6
was easily accomplished; after all, the two sides had never been close. Far
more serious was the controversy which raged in the late 1950s over the
status of Ayn Rand. Born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Rand had emigrated to
the United States in the 1920s from the bleak totalitarian world of
Communist Russia. Gradually she established herself as an author of
strenuously anticollectivist novels, such as We the Living and The
Fountainhead; indefatigably she labored to develop a comprehensive
philosophy. One product of her effort—a gargantuan novel called Atlas
Shrugged7—appeared in 1957 and introduced the world to Rand's
philosophy of objectivism in its most fully developed form.
Rand's system of values held “that man exists for his own sake, that the
pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not
sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.”8 Anything that
denigrated man's rationality, total self-reliance, and freedom was deemed
evil. Hence religion, collectivism, even altruism, were condemned, while
the cross of Christianity was denounced as “the symbol of the sacrifice of
the ideal to the nonideal.”9 In place of the cross and its ethic she offered
rational self-interest and the dollar sign, the symbol of “free trade and,
therefore, of a free mind.”10 To Rand the only economic system compatible
with human freedom was unmitigated laissez-faire capitalism.
Aggressiveness, egoism, energy, rationality, self-respect, the “virtue of
selfishness”—these were some of the values she enthroned. With the
aplomb of the self-made woman, Rand calmly declared, “I am challenging
the cultural tradition of two-and-a-half-thousand years.”11

Rand's forceful and Nietzschean novel quickly became enormously
popular; within a few years it had sold well over a million copies.12 For
many conservatives, especially the young, it was a powerful treatise.
Certainly some of its themes—the wickedness and irrationality of the
welfare state, collectivism, and all sorts of government intervention; the
virtues of capitalism; the celebration of individual self-assertion—were
(in somewhat less extravagant form) themes of the libertarian Right. But
not all conservatives were pleased by Atlas Shrugged, and in a devastating
review late in 1957, Whittaker Chambers declared war on Ayn Rand. To
Chambers the book was a literary and philosophical nightmare. Its plot
was “preposterous,” its characterization “primitive” and caricatured, and
much of its effect “sophomoric.” It was not, in fact, a novel at all, but a
“Message": the antireligious gospel of “philosophic materialism,” in
which “ . . . Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a
godless world.” Moreover, for all her opposition to the State, Rand,
according to Chambers, really wanted a society controlled by a
“technocratic elite” similar to the absurd heroes of her novel. Indeed,
permeating her novel was a “dictatorial tone":

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding
arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is
without appeal. . . . It consistently mistakes raw force for strength . . . . It supposes itself to
be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be
tolerated. . . . From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful
necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber—go!”

Chambers's review was appropriately entitled “Big Sister Is Watching
You.”13
Not all conservative intellectuals agreed with Chambers's verdict. E.
Merrill Root, a professor at Earlham College and author of Collectivism on
the Campus, proclaimed the novel a literary and philosophical tour de
force. While Rand did reject God and preach atheism, Root argued that
this aberration was only superficial. She was still “an artistic and
philosophical Atlas” whose metaphysical roots tended toward religion in
spite of her denials.14 John Chamberlain, a free-market conservative as
well as an experienced book reviewer, also found merit in the novel.
Although repelled by Rand's “dogmatic ethical hardness” and materialism,
he insisted that the book deserved the attention of conservatives. Rand's
grasp of economics was “magnificent,” and she demonstrated the
“indissoluble” links between capitalism and freedom.15 Other libertarians,
including the Misesian economist Murray Rothbard, also rose to defend
Atlas Shrugged.16

Yet Chambers had his defenders, too, among them Russell Kirk, who
praised the controversial review.17 A few years later Kirk again discussed
Rand; her objectivism, he held, was a false and detestable “inverted
religion.” While Kirk supported free enterprise and agreed with Rand's
criticism of collectivism, the amassing of wealth was simply not “the
whole aim of existence.”18 Frank Meyer was even more sharp: Ayn Rand
was guilty of “calculated cruelties” and the presentation of an “arid
subhuman image of man.”19 Perhaps the most telling rebuke to Rand and
her defenders came from a young classical scholar, Garry Wills. In a
rejoinder to E. Merrill Root, Wills denied that Rand—a “fanatic” with
“narrow fixations”—was a conservative at all.
When . . . John Galt [the hero of Atlas Shrugged] repudiates all obligations to other men,
he denies history, that link with one's ancestors and with all human experience which is the
first principle of conservatism. When Galt asserts the immediate perfectibility of man (an
achieved perfection in his own case), he is working from the first principle of historical
Liberalism. . . . Ayn Rand's superman comes from the same source as the Liberal's perfect
society. Her muscular and Malthusian heroes . . . are all expressions of Liberalism—the
attempt to attain beatitude with a politico-economic program.
Wills emphasized that conservatism and capitalism were not identical. It
was the worst of errors to allow the doctrinaire, laissez-faire, utopian
Objectivists to reside within the conservative fold.20

When the furor over Ayn Rand eventually subsided, it became clear that
Chambers and Wills had won: Objectivism did not take conservatives by
storm.21 As William F. Buckley Jr. reflected in the early 1960s, Rand's
“desiccated philosophy” was inconsistent with “the conservative's
emphasis on transcendence,” while her harsh ideological fervor was
profoundly distasteful.22 Rand herself was similarly aware of the
unbridgeable gap. National Review, she declared in 1964, was “the worst
and most dangerous magazine in America”; its mixture of religion and
capitalism represented a sullying of the rationally defensible (freedom and
capitalism) with mystical, unconvincing obscurantism.23