What we on the left can learn from “Atlas Shrugged”
To begin with, let me dispense with the notion that I am suggesting we learn economics, or politics, or philosophy, or anything liberating about gender roles, or anything like that from Ayn Rand or her weighty novel.
Furthermore, I am not even suggesting that “Atlas Shrugged” tells us anything about how the right wing actually thinks, particularly the politicians and businesspeople who boast of having read “Atlas Shrugged.”
(To digress “briefly” on this last point: one of the features of the work is that the capitalist heroes in the book are nothing like real capitalists. Rand would have thought of this as a feature and not a bug; she was deliberately writing romantic fiction and boasted of depicting people as they ought to be, not as they actually were. But among her villains was a stratum of unprincipled looter-capitalists who thought not of providing value for value, but only of using the state as an implement of kleptocracy. Rand writes with contempt of these people and brings them to bad ends. All those looter-capitalists are now seen to have been accurately portrayed, as their real-life doppelgangers appear among the Trump administration and its hangers-on, including those who boast about having read “Atlas Shrugged” but who now are perfectly happy with the “aristocracy of pull” since they have gotten to be in it!)
(Anyway, if there were any real objectivists out there — real-life philosophical followers of Rand — they would all be waving the Randian banner and organizing against the Trumpian hordes — separately from the left of course, but you would notice them! Maybe a few of them are around among the #NeverTrump Republican forces, but you don’t hear them quoting Rand as a philosophical weapon either, or at least I don’t.)
And surely I am not suggesting that we learn the fine points of high literary style from her either. “Atlas Shrugged” is not exactly a subtle character study. It is not “full of layers”. It is not really “literature” at all. It does not come up to the standards of her literary hero, Victor Hugo, or even other pop-culture writers she favors, like Mickey Spillane or Ian Fleming.
Thus it’s understandable that the lit-crit left treats “Atlas Shrugged” with a great deal of haughty snobbery, occasionally bemoaning the fact that anyone is fool enough to read it. At this point, though, we are missing the opportunity to learn what we can learn from the example of this work. The fact is that many people DO read it, and have kept it in print for decades. I have read it myself. I have read it several times. Just considered as a piece of pulp fiction which can be read without much mental effort, I find it much more engaging than a whole host of more worthy works which I nevertheless have not yet been able to force myself to get into. In many ways it is a good deal more refreshing then works in which the politics and philosophy are hidden in the stage setting.
We can mock “Atlas Shrugged”’s heavy-handed plot devices and silly super-science and a host of other things as much as we like, but when we are done, it stands there as a great success for her side — a widely read political novel, a novel of heroic white capitalists who bring down the looter state and create a libertarian world where men and women can be free. It is a memorable story. It has been a very influential story — I don’t step back from saying that it hasn’t made Paul Ryan think like Ayn Rand, but I also contend that it has helped to shape the attitudes of some three or four generations now — attitudes toward the poor, the rich, toward business, toward government, toward life in general. When Reagan said “the most frightening words are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you’” — when people said they were going to vote for Romney because “he’s a business man and he has a business plan” — when people elected Trump because he had money, and therefore, like Mr. Rearden, he must be able to “think of something” — they were all responding to the Rand heroes and villains whose images and attitudes had been reflected and refracted throughout our culture.
And we can make fun of John Galt’s interminable speech — over 100 pages if I remember right — but put that against the fact that millions of people were carried along enough by the story to read that speech, or try to. Are we not motivated at least in part by envy when we mock this speech? Wouldn’t we like to get as many people to sit still for some pages of our own theories?
“Atlas Shrugged” portrays a small group who successfully bring down the evil state. Right-wing literature and cinema are full of such things. Taylor Caldwell’s “The Devil’s Advocate” is a Christian-right version, for example, and there are viler ones. The right is not shy about writing fiction about how they are going to win some great counterrevolution. The U.S. left doesn’t do that as far as I have seen. (I don’t have the expertise to speculate on what progressive forces in other cultures or countries are doing. If there are counterexamples elsewhere I’d very much like to hear about them.) The void we have left has been filled by fantasy/sci-fi epics of revolution and victorious resistance, much of it stigmatized as “Young-Adult”, with the “Harry Potter” books being a notable example, but there are many others.
So: why haven’t we produced our own “Atlas Shrugged”? Why haven’t we gotten millions of people to read some novel that reflects our own hopes for victory, inspires people with our own fictional role models, and imbues them with our own attitudes? A novel which demonstrates along the way how ordinary people can be reached without either disrespect or dissolving one’s own line, how white supremacy, patriarchy, and other ideologies of oppression can be fought, political issues can be addressed, coalitions and alliances made, mass actions organized without mythical Soros gold, and elites dethroned? If there is a counterpart in English from ANY school of liberation politics — feminism, the nationalism of the oppressed, socialism, anarchism, or even progressive climate science — I don’t know what it is. (To anticipate, the best candidate I can think of as an inspirational counterpart is “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, but that’s not a novel. It is a story, though.) Instead we have many novels where the best the heroes can hope for is to rescue themselves and their loved ones, and many more where they can’t even manage that.
I think this is a weakness on our part. I think this comes partly from our failure to understand the importance of stories and fictions in our own cultural life. It also comes from our fear that in fact there is no escape, no way out — that the politics of hope are illusory — that revolutions inevitably lead to dystopias, and that liberal measures are helpless against our present dystopias.
People Think in Stories
I am not going to actually cite scholarly studies in this section, but I assert that they are out there, and what they say is that it is not natural for people to think in the kind of logical terms that you find in most of our economic and political writing.
When I say that it is not “natural” I mean that in a very specific way. I don’t mean that people shouldn’t think logically, or that we can’t learn logical thinking, or that we shouldn’t write logical arguments. I only mean that our internal mental wiring wasn’t designed by the forces of evolution over the last few million years for this. It was designed for looking at the environment and seeing what was happening and passing on the essence of what was happening to other people. There are deer over there. A stranger has come. The flood ruined our crops. A thing happened.
A bias toward narrative, rather than data analysis, fills all our oral traditions and our earliest writings as a literate species. We learn about the parts and periods of the world that we have not seen ourselves through stories — myths, travelers’ tales, biographies, narratives of “great events”.
Logical thought is an invention. It has to be relearned by each generation and continually reinforced. It is a very praiseworthy and necessary invention, and we need to think logically to properly and correctly analyze what is going on around us, and to avoid the errors which our natural minds are always trying to lead us into. The extra effort that it takes is necessary. But in the meantime, all around us people are sharing narratives that don’t require this effort, many for good, many for ill, and connecting with people on a natural level where facts and figures don’t go.
A lot of these narratives are weaponized anecdotes or “fake news”. I think everyone has seen by now how this works in news coverage and in political propaganda. One person kills another, one person saves another, one person does something exemplary or reprehensible, and immediately this is taken as the key to understanding the world, the explanation for how “those people” are and how they think. (Just today, for example, a mattress dealer in Houston was compassionate to displaced people, and immediately it appeared in my Twitter feed as “This is Capitalism.”) It isn’t for nothing that, at the State of the Union addresses and other such ceremonies, presidents have learned to bring out their favorite heroes or victims as proof of their policy assertions. There is a saying that “data is the plural of anecdote”, but political propaganda doesn’t need data, it only needs a few very compelling anecdotes. The anecdotes don’t have to be true, either.
But I’m not suggesting that we come forth with a leftist wave of fake newsbots to combat the rightist fake newsbots. I’m suggesting that a robust and non-deceptive way to present the narratives we need is through fiction. “Yes, this novel is a work of fiction, but it will tell you in the course of things what kind of people we think we are, and why we are doing the things we are doing, and why we think those things are good.”
Political Fiction
Contemporary high culture considers it as pretty much of a sin to write “didactic” fiction and to import philosophy and politics into one’s writing. There are three problems with that. First, as we all know, politics and philosophy and prejudice, even of the most reactionary kinds, get into all of literature and art inescapably, even or especially where everyone is claiming to avoid it. Second, programmatic fiction of earlier ages is highly readable and very durable (“Pilgrim’s Progress” comes to mind).
And third, most ordinary people don’t mind these things at all. In fact I assert that the average reader finds it refreshing, rather than off-putting, when the political, philosophical, and religious motives of the characters are spelled out and taken as important matters. It is a virtue, not a flaw, in Rand’s work that she makes it clear whose side she is on and that her protagonists do too. It is a virtue that she and her characters believe politics and philosophy to be important. It is a flaw in the work of so many other more “mainstream” authors that politics and philosophy are ignored, taken as annoyances, and disprivileged in relation to some personal romance or other.
Similarly message-heavy novels have been very popular over time. “In His Steps,” published in 1896, tells the story of a movement of people committed to following the example of Jesus. (In the novel, this largely means resisting the blandishments of the saloon trade.) It sold 30 million copies and largely popularized the phrase “What Would Jesus Do”? There have been plenty of successful Christian novels over the years — I think the “Left Behind” series of post-rapture thrillers is a recent successful example.
(If one wants a less overarching and more practically useful didactic novel, there is a whole genre of books in the management science field along the lines of Lencioni’s works, e.g. “The Five Temptations of a CEO” and many others, in which a shortlist of management rules or (one of my favorites) a two by two table matching commodities to the desirable personality traits of the sales force (sorry, I can’t remember the title or author of this one) is placed within a narrative structure about problem-solving managers, villainous competitors, loyal subordinates, mysterious mentors, and the like. They are not great literature, but they sell, and they sure have boosted the reputations of their authors!)
The right-wing is always putting out fictional works (and I’m not just talking about piles of alternative facts and conspiracy theory, I mean admitted fictions) in which communist liberal conspiracies are unmasked, shari’a law thrown back, and businesses liberated from unfair shackles. “Atlas Shrugged” is the king of them all, though.
We haven’t seen much in the way of centrist political fiction lately, but the 1950’s and 1960’s were a golden age for it, when, in works like “Advise and Consent”, “Seven Days in May”, “Night of Camp David”, “Convention”, and “The Best Man” liberal presidents, candidates, and lawmakers successfully defeated Soviet subversion, coup plotters, mentally unfit presidents (! see my 25th Amendment story), and ruthless, bad-for-the-country opponents. By the way, for those businesspeople who didn’t believe Galt’s-Gulchish extreme measures were necessary to defend productive capitalism, but only sound, courageous management policy, there was a spate of centrist romantic novels about embattled executives by Cameron Hawley, notably “Executive Suite” and “Cash McCall” (in which the title protagonist, a one-man Bain of his day, unveils the goodness and social value behind the unfair label of “corporate raider”).
As far as I know the farther left has nothing like this on any level (nor, these days, has the liberal left — the movie “American President” is the best recent example I can think of). We do have inspiring histories and biographies, but we don’t have imaginative accounts about how people can win the next organizing drive, the next political initiative, the next election, or state power. Why is this?
Romanticism and Naturalism
In very rough terms, naturalist art is about how the world is — thus, it is generally about how the rule of the bad — while romanticist art is about how you would like it to be — the triumph of the good. Within what might be called “leftist art” in the US, naturalism has been running the show for a century. Writers have been depicting the horrors of racism and sexism and imperialist war and impending dystopia without letup.
This is an important thing to do, but pure naturalism doesn’t emphasize role models for productive action, or a philosophic way forward, or the work and performance of hope. As a counterpart, there is romantic art, in which the good people win (or die in noble and tragic ways), the bad people are brought down, exemplars are produced and exemplary behavior is performed. Or there would be, except that we are awfully short on it. A Marxist of my acquaintance once said that leftists had the “duty of revolutionary optimism.” You see that kind of spirit occasionally in song, or bootlegged into sci-fi works or futuristic movies like “V for Vendetta”, but try to think of a novel that embodies this — in the US recently, or, for that matter, EVER — or for that matter in the western world! If something leaps to your attention instantly and you wonder why I haven’t thought of it, please DM me and let me know of it!
I can think of several hypotheses about why this is happening. First, it may be that our novelists are responding to their own sense of being crushed by the world, translating it onto paper and crying out in protest, but without any mental energy left over to hope or imagine. I could understand that. Second, it may be that some are activated by the (rather liberal) supposition that the “real problem” is that people don’t realize how bad things are, and “if people only knew they would fix it.” (Narrator: “But that was not the real problem.”)
Here’s a third hypothesis which possibly applies particularly to the novel form: I suspect (this is pure speculation on my part, and I am prepared to be shot down by facts here) that novelists are particularly likely to be debilitated by the desire for respectability and acceptance. After all, it takes a long time to write a novel. Getting paid for that time is not easy. If one is dependent for one’s livelihood and reputation on the actions of the publishing industry, Big Media, and Big Culture, then one is subject to a lot of censorship and possibly self-censorship. The left version of “Atlas Shrugged” is not necessarily exactly what Slate’s Culture Gabfest is looking for, no matter how valuable it would be for the world at large. (Slate has its own labor issues right now, of course. See my open letter to Slate.) I suspect that some writers have been put off by the futility of the task before touching a key. More optimistically, it may be that some of them have actually written serviceable novels which I don’t know about because they were never published or reviewed by Slate! I hope my ignorance is the real answer, and again, if there are counterexamples out there, published or as-yet-unpublished, please let me know.
But I’m not sure that all of those hypotheses together would account for what I see as a glaring gap in the spectrum of literature. This leads me to a fourth hypothesis: it may be that our novelists are accurately reflecting a large blind spot which affects the political left in the U.S. — a fear of focusing on what we really want, or figuring out what our path toward solutions really is.
On the one hand, there is the widespread belief that the socialist way forward has been proved to be a dead end, on account of the perceived shortcomings of the USSR and states in its camp, supported by the notion that the fall of the USSR has proved socialist victory to be forever impossible and the capitalist order to be the permanent future state of humanity. Thus, nobody writes optimistically about Marxist parties, socialist organizing, movements bringing together the workers and oppressed, and so on — the attitude is “been there, done that.” (Particularly among people who were never there and never did it.)
On the other hand, there is the recognition that unchecked capitalism is concentrating wealth and power on a historic scale; that resistance to it is very difficult at all levels; and that even the most fervent DSA-er will have a hard time explaining how it is going to be possible to vote our way out of this mess, given everything we know about how serious the billionaires are about NOT being voted out. (To slightly paraphrase Lenin, “Getting rid of the plutocracy via socialism is like climbing to the top of Mount Everest. Getting rid of the plutocracy by some other means is like flapping your wings and flying there.”)
Thus, as soon as one sits down to write a heroic novel about counterparts of BLM, or the DSA or Bernistas, or immigrants and their defenders, or feminist, gay, or trans activists, or Palestinians, or environmentalists, or unions, or anyone else you can think of, one runs into the question of how any of them, or all in concert, can possibly take on the plutocratic state and win any kind of lasting victory, and what it can possibly look like, once the socialist option has been locked away in the basement. Eventually one either gives up or finds that one has written a naturalistic novel of defeat after all, sort of like the historical novels of the early Howard Fast (“Freedom Road”, e.g.) in which the politics are spelled out but the heroes always lose.
To all this I have two things to say. First, if you really have proven to yourself that the human species is doomed because we can’t cooperate and we can’t survive without cooperation, I urge you to “check your premises.” But secondly, while you’re pondering all this, I think the final lesson that “Atlas Shrugged” teaches us is that for the purposes of didactic novel-writing all of this can be seen as largely a secondary issue as long as one remembers that the constraints of realism do not really have to apply to the genre of romance. Did Rand really think that a few dozen “men of the mind” could bring down the economic order by secluding themselves in a gulch (and then “jamming all the networks” and airing a speech on philosophy)? Was this Rand’s practical plan for revolution? Of course not. If you had asked that of her, she might have said that if people were the kind of people she was writing about, the people who “ought to exist”, then it would work. More importantly, did Rand’s many readers believe this was the path forward? Did they retreat from the world and look for ore-bearing real estate? Of course not! Did they think it was a realistic picture of the future? Of course not!! But they didn’t care. It didn’t keep the book from being popular and influential.
Even though in the real world elites are very powerful and entrenched, and the people are very divided and distrustful both of each other and of anyone who claims that things could be different, in our hypothetical left novel neither has to be AS true as it is in the real world. We can indulge in a certain amount of fantasy about our utopia and how we get there. Those details are not the real point of the book. So if one has a fantasy about how we beat the elites via a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, I say, write it down! If one’s dreams are about aroused socialist masses bringing down the bourgeoisie through a general strike, urban uprisings, winning over elements of the military, and so on, write that down too! The important part is to encourage people to look beyond the next obstacle in their lives, if possible, and think about a better world, with more hope and more happiness in it. The messy details will come in due course and can be discussed in other channels. IMHO.
