What would Ayn Rand think of her admirer Donald Trump?
The famously rigid thinker didn’t even like Reagan
Why has arch-capitalist Ayn Rand been so popular with populists, those champions of the common man, for nearly two decades now?
Donald Trump loves her, as does a cadre of conservatives who’ve played outsized roles in national politics for years, like Paul Ryan, Clarence Thomas, Alan Greenspan, and Michelle Bachman. That list is growing: Trump’s picks for labor secretary, secretary of state, and director of the CIA are all Randians.
The irony here is that Rand expressed nothing but contempt for workers — the very base credited with handing Trump key victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. As one Christian conservative writer succinctly describes her worldview: “the parasitic weak deserve to be trod upon by the capitalistic powerful.”
The distinction between takers and makers, explored in her 1957 tome Atlas Shrugged, is the key to Rand’s ideas. Donald Trump is a maker, and so is Exxon exec Rex Tillerson, and just about any other billionaire job creator. But Joe the Plumber — that Tea Party celebrity and everyman of yesteryear — he’s a taker. In Rand’s worldview, society would chug along just fine without Joe and the rest of us cogs in the machine, from tradespeople to middle management. We don’t invent much, so we don’t bring much to the table. But capitalism without the capitalists? The world would crumble if all of the Tillersons went on strike, as they do in the dystopic Atlas Shrugged.
Rand doubles down on her maker/taker dichotomy by insisting that the finest common people are grateful to the capitalist elite. This is how the Ayn Rand Institute, an organization devoted to promoting Rand’s ideas, describes Eddie Willard, the one man of “average intelligence” who graces the pages of the novel: “Through Eddie we see that those of greater productive ability do not exploit those with less ability, but benefit them by giving them the capacity to be even more productive.”
It’s doubtful that the common people currently so enthralled with Rand and her disciples view themselves this way.
Simple as it is, her philosophy has been profoundly misunderstood by organizations like the Tea Party Patriots. Like Rand, most Tea Partiers hate our welfare system (or what little remains of our welfare system) but that’s where their commonalities end. Tea Partiers love the biggest parts of big government, like the military, and don’t get riled up over privacy issues as long as they’re motivated by national security, like warrantless wiretaps.
Rand, ferociously opposed to both government and intrusion, supported abortion rights and thought religion was stupid — two values that cemented her opposition to Ronald Reagan and other neo-conservatives. “I urge you as emphatically as I can not to vote for Reagan,” she wrote in her newsletter during the Reagan’s first campaign for the presidency, adding “he is the worst kind of conservative.” She also had no love for libertarians, according to Rand biographer Jennifer Burns. All of which is to say that Rand — the real Rand — isn’t popular with populists.
Rand’s popularity reportedly surged in the financial crisis, a time when most proponents of unfettered capitalism were uncharacteristically chagrined. Even free market devotee, Rand acolyte, and compulsive deregulator Alan Greenspan admitted “a flaw” in his worldview in the face of furious questions like this one from Harry Waxman in Congressional hearings: “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?” Maybe, Greenspan ultimately and begrudgingly conceded.
Yet sales of Atlas Shrugged took off, according to the Ayn Rand Institute, which issued several press releases that were in turn eagerly picked up by major media outlets. The Institute said sales hovered around the half million mark in 2009 and 2011 — the height of the housing crisis and the year after the passage of health care reform. People turned to Atlas Shrugged because they were afraid not of the recently evidenced pitfalls of unfettered capitalism but of government intervention. “Whenever governments intervene in the market,” the Economist crowed, “readers rush to buy Rand’s book.”
As it turns out, Rand’s swell of sales may have been engineered, bolstered by the efforts of the Ayn Rand Institute, which gave away 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged in 2009 alone. “I am skeptical that the Ayn Rand craze is a naturally occurring phenomenon,” Pam Martens concluded in 2012 after digging into the Institute’s tax returns to document these giveaways.
Rand’s astro-turf popularity was also boosted by bank holding company BB&T, which backed a scheme to get Ayn Rand’s books into college classrooms and treated as serious texts, efforts that were pretty successful. Clemson University, for instance, accepted nearly $5 million from BB&T between 2005 and 2008. The average grant to universities was $1.1 million, Inside Higher Education reported, and came with requirements such as giving away copies of Atlas Shrugged, teaching the novel in classes, hiring professors who agree with Rand’s worldview, and creating Ayn Rand-inspired speakers series.
Big money has been involved, in other words, in building the illusion of a widespread enthusiasm for Rand’s vision of radical capitalism. “It’s really a battle of ideas,” former BB&T chairman John Allison told Bloomberg Markets Magazine in 2011. “If the ideas that made America great aren’t heard, then their influence will be destroyed.”
As for having an admitted admirer of Rand in the Oval Office, that seems to be more of a symptom of Trump’s ego than an embrace of Rand’s ultra-free market stance. He did gush about The Fountainhead in an interview with USA Today: “It relates to business (and) beauty (and) life and inner emotions,” he said. “That book relates to … everything.” It turns out, though, that all of Rand’s heroes are handsome ladies’ men, and it’s no surprise that Trump is drawn to the Rand-est of them all, the magnetic architect with serious consent issues. There’s a good chance he sees himself in the book.
Such projection may drive the conservative fascination with Ayn Rand more than a lockstep agreement with her views. After all, Rand disavowed anyone who disagreed with any part of her philosophy and probably would have liked our president-elect about as much as she liked Reagan.
