Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (44 page)

SIL was supported in its mission by hundreds of libertarian magazines that mushroomed in the early 1970s, many of them Objectivist in orientation. During the early years libertarian periodicals essentially
were
the movement. Grassroots magazines and newsletters helped create a dense, thriving network out of far-flung local groups, fledgling business enterprises, and scattered efforts at political activism. As essential as magazines were, however, they were far from glamorous. Most were little more than mimeographed leaflets started by college students. The
A Is A Directory,
an annual libertarian index named for Rand’s favorite Aristotelian principle, warned readers of the magazines it listed “to be prepared for inconsistency” and admitted, “Writing, editing, and printing are apt to be poor.”
³⁰
Many magazines took their cue from Rand’s publications, including political commentary, cultural analysis, and romantic fiction in their offerings. Of the 128 magazines listed in the 1972
A Is A Directory,
more than thirty had an explicit Objectivist or Objectivist-friendly orientation. Objectivism was by far the most popular affiliation, with generic anarcho-capitalism running a distant second with nine periodicals.
³¹

Rand had little appreciation for her new fan base. During her annual public appearances she called libertarians “scum,” “intellectual cranks,” and “plagiarists.” Because she defined Objectivism as her personal property, she viewed libertarian use of her ideas as theft. What others would see as tribute or recognition of her work, Rand defined as “cashing in” or plagiarism. “If such hippies hope to make me their Marcuse, it will not work,” she wrote sourly.
³²
Her comment was not far off the mark, for Rand’s writings were a sort of ur-text for the libertarian movement. They could be challenged, interpreted, reinterpreted, adopted, celebrated— but never ignored. Whether she liked it or not, libertarians would always consider Rand a vital part of their intellectual heritage.

The source of Rand’s appeal to the new libertarian movement was multifold. On the most basic level, her ideas and fictional characters served as an easy shorthand and a way to cement bonds between likeminded individuals. No matter their current political allegiance, Objectivist, anarchist, minarchist, or somewhere in between, reading Rand had been
a rite of passage for most libertarians. Trading jokes about John Galt, fondly reminiscing over one’s first encounter with
Atlas Shrugged,
and employing specialized Rand references such as “second-hander,” “stolen concept,” and “package deal” created a sense of group cohesion and identity. This feeling of togetherness and unity was particularly important in a movement that claimed individualism as its mantra and was phobic of conformity. As the joke went, “If you put half a dozen libertarians into a room together, you will eventually end up with four factions, 2 conspiracies, 3 newsletters, 2 splinter groups and 4 withdrawals of sanction!”
³³
Or, as the editors of
New Libertarian Notes
warned, “Everyone in this publication is in disagreement!”
³⁴
Rand helped libertarians create a cohesive subculture without sacrificing autonomy or independence.

Rand’s emphasis on capitalism also helped libertarians remain distinct from the New Left. To outsiders, libertarian symmetry with the counterculture was among the movement’s most salient characteristics, but careful observers understood that similarities between libertarians and the left were only skin deep. A writer for the gentleman’s magazine
Swank
stumbled across a Greenwich Village coffee house identified only by a dollar sign on the door, where waiters handed out a petition endorsing Rand for president. Here he found not beatniks but “buckniks,” a species of disenchanted youth who “hates everything about our society . . . but who believes in free enterprise on the individual level and wants to ‘make good’ in a business sense as deeply as any Horatio Alger hero.”
³⁵
It was true that Objectivists did have a tendency toward sartorial experimentation, but their rebellion was always in the service of capitalism. Some NBI students liked to dress like Rand, sporting dollar-sign insignia, flowing capes, and elongated cigarette holders. At the Radical Libertarian Alliance conference a “Randian superhero” appeared, with a gold cape, “black stretch suit with an enormous gold dollar sign embroidered on his chest and a gold lame belt cinching his waist.”
³⁶
There were even beaded and bearded Randian “heads,” lovers of both LSD and logic. However long their hair and outlandish their dress, however, few libertarians were interested in a durable alliance with the New Left.

Indeed, hippie styles only created trouble by luring lefties to the cause under false pretenses, as libertarian writers noted uneasily. Writing in
Protos
Don Franzen identified a key sticking point: “It is not exaggeration to say that in selling libertarianism to Leftists, many libertarians
are slightly embarrassed or hesitant to openly advocate capitalism. ‘Freedom’ is the bill of goods we try to sell to the flower children and the leftists.” Continuing in a Randian vein, he noted, “If we wish to advocate capitalism, we must advocate it from a moral stand—we must assert that production is right for man, that rational self-interest is right for man, that aside from (and in addition to) the fact that man should be free, he should also be selfish and productive.”
³⁷
Here the restrictions that Rand put on libertarianism were clear. Rand had made capitalism a sacrosanct ideal for most libertarians, an allegiance that rapidly marginalized leaders like Karl Hess who hoped to draw libertarians to the left.

Rand’s insistence on capitalism lay at the core of her appeal to libertarians, for it was part of a larger morality that many libertarians asserted was essential to their movement. By itself libertarianism spoke only of freedom, of minding your own business, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. As
SIL News
asked in one of its first issues, “The essence of the philosophy is the radical advocacy of freedom. . . . At this point a very serious question must be raised. After freedom . . . what?”
³⁸
It was this philosophic hole at the center that made libertarianism such an excellent partner to conservatism. Tradition and religion filled in where libertarianism was silent. When libertarians rejected conservatism, they needed something to take its place.

For many this role was filled by Objectivism. Rand’s moralism grounded and bounded libertarian freedoms by emphasizing rationality, self-interest, individual rights, and capitalism.
SIL News
asserted, “Certain values are right for man, and certain values are wrong. Certain actions benefit him, and certain destroy him. Turning man loose to follow his own whims . . . a ‘do your own thing’ approach . . . will not by itself achieve human well-being.”
³⁹
Echoing the magazine’s stance, the budding journalist Robert Bidinotto electrified the second annual East Coast Libertarian Think-In with an inflammatory speech attacking hippies and drug use. Bidinotto, then an anarchist, nonetheless argued that Rand’s rationalist morality was the proper basis for libertarianism. Objectivism helped him cast stones at others on moral grounds, even while he advocated complete political freedom.
⁴⁰

This is not to say that Objectivism and Rand were without controversy in libertarian circles. Rand’s ubiquity made her a convenient target for disgruntled and sarcastic libertarians. In a disapproving article
SIL News
noted a new phenomenon, “the Anti-Randian Mentality,” or the growing practice of libertarians “gaining apparent psychological enjoyment and esteem from making publicly a disparaging snide or comical innuendo about Ayn Rand or certain Objectivist jargon.” Although there indeed might be “humorous aspects” to Objectivism, the newsletter declared that it was harmful to single out Rand for ridicule since she remained “the fountainhead” of libertarianism.

More substantively Rand’s patriotism and her reverence for the Founding Fathers were controversial in a movement that considered the Constitution a coercive document (because it claimed jurisdiction over even those who had not signed).
⁴¹
Rand’s account of the Apollo 11 launch crystallized this difference for many. In the
Objectivist
she described how she had been invited to a VIP viewing of the rocket launch. Shepherded past the masses to within three miles of the take-off, Rand was awe-struck. Apollo 11 was “the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness,” and as she saw the rocket rise she had “a feeling that was not triumph: but more: the feeling that that white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe.”
⁴²
It was a masterful piece of writing that became one of Rand’s personal favorites.

Reading her account, Jerome Tuccille was incredulous. In
The Rational Individualist
he asked, “Has Ayn Rand been co-opted into the system by her new role as White House ‘parlor intellectual’?” To Tuccille NASA was a bunch of “bandits operating with billions of dollars stolen from the taxpayer—’rational’ bandits, perhaps, achieving a superlative technological feat—but bandits nevertheless.”
⁴³
Libertarians might make peace with Rand’s endorsement of limited government, but singing the praises of NASA made Rand’s antistatism seem superficial, a belief to be cast aside when convenient. Nor was the article an isolated incident. Apollo 11 became an encouraging sign of the times for Rand, who referred to the launch repeatedly in the years that followed.

What libertarian critics of the “moon jaunt” missed was how Rand’s appreciation of Apollo 11 was tied to her ever-present worry that the United States was going backward, regressing to Petrograd circa 1920. Her fears were stirred anew by the emergence of the environmental movement, which she viewed as a virulent atavism that would drag mankind back to primitive existence. In her 1970 lecture to the Ford Hall Forum she attacked environmentalism as “the Anti-Industrial
Revolution.” She imagined a grim future where a middle-class every-man made his morning coffee on a gas stove, electric percolators and ovens having been banned, and endured a two-and-a-half-hour commute on the city bus, cars now likewise forbidden. “His wife washes diapers for hours each day, by hand, as she washes all the family laundry, as she washes the dishes—by hand, as there are no self-indulgent luxuries such as washing machines or automatic dishwashers.” As usual Rand was unwilling to accept the claims of a political movement at face value, convinced that hidden agendas drove the environmental movement. “Clean air is not the issue nor the goal of the ecologists’ crusade. . . . it is
technology
and
progress
that the nature-lovers are out to destroy,” she told her listeners.
⁴⁴

Nature was not benevolent to Rand, but a force to be kept at bay by man’s reason. Petrograd under the Communists had fallen to nature, regressing from a citadel of European culture to a city stalked by starvation, where survival was a daily struggle. Now environmentalists seemed to be questioning the basic achievements of industrialization and commerce, the discoveries that had lifted man above the beasts. Collectivists, previously focused on inequality and injustice, were “now denouncing capitalism
for creating abundance
.” In this context Apollo 11 stood out for Rand as a bright sign of hope; it was not the powers of the state that she celebrated, but the wonders of technology and human achievement.
⁴⁵

Rand missed the fact that environmentalism was yet another arena of thought powered by selective appropriation of her work. She focused relentlessly on what historians call conservation environmentalism, which emphasized the dangers of technology and was resolutely anti-growth. But another strain of environmental thought had discovered Rand’s celebration of human creativity and the power of markets. Pragmatic or countercultural environmentalism focused on invention and innovation, rather than regulation, as solutions to the environmental crisis. The survivalist
Whole Earth Catalog,
a hippy-techno-geek bible, was an important node of this movement. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” the catalogue announced, striking a vaguely libertarian note with its intention to support “a realm of intimate, personal power” and “the power of the individual.” Not surprisingly the catalogue’s founder, Stewart Brand, thought Rand was an exciting thinker.
⁴⁶

In 1968 Brand noted in his diary, “I’m reading
Atlas Shrugged
these days, again, on quite a different level—keeping some watch on myself, but mostly letting the notions run on.” He returned to Rand during a period of deep thinking, aided by his near daily consumption of nitrous oxide. For more than a month his journal made occasional references to Rand and showed unmistakable traces of her thought. He wrote after a discussion of Arthur Koestler’s views on abstract and emotional thought, “Don’t sever ‘em, connect ‘em up better. Then your abstract advances will be accompanied by emotional joy, and so forth. Which sounds Ayn Randish.”
⁴⁷
In the
Last Whole Earth Catalog,
a countercultural classic that sold more than a million copies and won a National Book Award, Brand offered a cryptic one-line review of
Atlas Shrugged,
“This preposterous novel has some unusual gold in it,” followed by a short excerpt. Brand’s ability to freely mingle Rand’s ideas with futuristic themes like moon colonization foreshadowed the emerging culture of cyberspace, which was strikingly libertarian from the beginning.
⁴⁸