Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (45 page)

Looking at another new movement of the 1970s, feminism, Rand was similarly critical. Like feminists Rand had always emphasized the importance of paid, professional work for both men and women, and her proto-feminist heroines rejected traditional female roles. She was also fiercely against any legal restrictions on abortion, calling it “a moral right which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved.” When New York State considered liberalizing its abortion laws, Rand broke from her typical position of detached analysis and urged
Objectivist
readers to write letters in support of the proposed change. Watching the pro-life movement take shape, Rand was aghast. “An embryo
has no rights,
” she insisted. The principle was basic: restrictions on abortion were immoral because they elevated a potential life over an actual life. It was essential that women be able to choose when, and whether, to become mothers.
⁴⁹

Despite this common political ground, Rand regarded the feminist movement as utterly without legitimacy. In a 1971 article, “The Age of Envy,” she declared, “Every other pressure group has some semi-plausible complaint or pretense at a complaint, as an excuse for existing. Women’s Lib has none.” To Rand, feminism was simply another form of collectivism, a variation on Marxism that replaced the proletariat with women, a newly invented oppressed class.
⁵⁰
The proof was in feminist
calls for government to redress discrimination, when it was not government itself that had created the problem. She wrote, “The notion that a woman’s place is in the home . . . is an ancient, primitive evil, supported and perpetuated by women as much as, or more than, by men.” What infuriated Rand the most was that feminism, as she saw it, was a claim based on weakness, a rebellion “against strength as such, by those who neither attempt nor intend to develop it.” Feminists elevated their gender above their individuality and intelligence and then expected unearned success, to be enforced by government quotas and regulations. Rand was also withering in her personal scorn for feminists, “sloppy, bedraggled, unfocused females stomping down the streets.”
⁵¹
Feminists reminded her of Comrade Sonja, a brash, masculine Communist from
We the Living
.

In turn, Susan Brownmiller attacked Rand as “a traitor to her sex” in her feminist classic
Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape
. Brownmiller considered Rand alongside the psychologists Helene Deutsch and Karen Horney as women who contributed to “the male ideology of rape.” She argued
The Fountainhead
’s infamous rape scene “romanticized” the rape victim through its depiction of Dominique, who reveled in Roark’s sexual attack on her. By portraying rape as “grand passion,” Rand cast an unrealistic patina over sexual violence and furthered the dangerous idea that women desired to be raped. The worst of it was that Rand could even convince other women that rape was romantic. Brownmiller remembered, “
The Fountainhead
heated my virgin blood more than 20 years ago and may still be performing that service for schoolgirls today.”
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When she visited the library to check out Rand’s novel Brownmiller was discouraged to find its pages fell open to the rape scene, effectively indexed by other readers. Like the conservatives of
National Review
, Brownmiller recognized Rand’s work was both appealing and ideologically dangerous.

Similarly, a writer for
Ms
. magazine warned women against Rand’s influence, calling her work “fun-bad.”
Ms
. noted that Rand’s call to selfishness and independence might justifiably appeal to women, who had been taught to always place others before themselves. In reality, though, her work offered a seductive, destructive fantasy: “a strong dominant women who is subdued by an even stronger, more dominant male . . . the independent woman who must, to preserve her integrity, capitulate to a
more powerful man.”
⁵³
There was a puzzling duality to Rand. Her characters were iconic strong women, and in her personal life Rand lived many feminist tenets. All of this was contradicted, however, by her theory of “man worship” and her consistent depiction of women sexually submitting to men. What made the messages particularly confusing was Rand’s insistence that her views on men and women were rational conclusions rather than emotional responses. In truth, Rand’s fiction was part projection, part identification, part fantasy, and accurately reflected the tangled sexuality of her life. Setting these contradictions aside, other women focused simply on the positive messages in her fiction. Former Objectivists became active in several organizations dedicated to “individualist feminism,” and Rand’s work, particularly the character of Dagny Taggart, was lauded as inspirational by the pioneering tennis greats Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, and Chris Evert.
⁵⁴

Rand’s excoriation of feminism was reflective of her general distemper throughout the 1970s, a mood that began to alienate even her most loyal fans. At the end of 1971 she terminated publication of
The Objectivist,
announcing a new fortnightly,
The Ayn Rand Letter
. The
Letter
was a shorter publication, written exclusively by Rand with occasional guest appearances by Leonard Peikoff. Again Rand had trouble sticking to the ambitious publication cycle she set for herself, and the magazine’s appearance was erratic. As the volume of her new writing decreased, her annual speeches to the Ford Hall Forum became an increasingly important conduit between her and the many readers who continued to track her every move. The question-and-answer sessions she held after each lecture were a particular flashpoint.

Prompted by her fans, Rand offered a number of controversial stances that particularly outraged libertarians. Her statements after the “Age of Envy” speech in 1972 were particularly disturbing. Asked about amnesty for draft dodgers, Rand told her audience that “bums” who didn’t want to fight in Vietnam “deserve to be sent permanently to Russia or South Vietnam at the public’s expense.” She praised labor unions and Congressman Henry “Scoop” Jackson, an ardent militarist. Her praise for Jackson was based on his aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union. Previously Rand tended to downplay the Russian threat, believing its command economy could never match the military prowess of the United States. Now she became implacably opposed to disarmament or
arms control, for she believed the USSR could never be trusted. In other appearances she attacked Native Americans as savages, arguing that European colonists had a right to seize their land because native tribes did not recognize individual rights. She extended this reasoning to the Israel-Palestine conflict, arguing that Palestinians had no rights and that it was moral to support Israel, the sole outpost of civilization in a region ruled by barbarism. Rand revealed that Israel was the first public cause to which she had donated money. And she continued to flay anarchists and libertarians as “worse than anything the New Left has proposed.”
⁵⁵
Without NBI or significant new publications, Rand had nothing positive to offer that could offset her negativity or support her sweeping judgments on current events.

By the end of 1972, even SIL had had enough. On the front page of
SIL News
the directors announced, “We are not in sympathy with or identified with all of the political applications that Ayn Rand cares to make based on her philosophy of Objectivism,” citing her positions on draft resistance, the Vietnam War, the space program, civil liberties, amnesty for draft evaders, and support for collectivist politicians. “The basic works of Rand continue to be the most powerful influence on our membership,” the directors admitted. “However, moral men cannot stand quiet.”
⁵⁶
Only a year earlier SIL had published an article defending Rand against the “anti-Rand mentality.” Now they too wished to draw a distinction between Rand’s beliefs and their own. As Rand became ever more jingoistic, libertarians remained deeply suspicious of all state action. They were also sympathetic to the cultural changes sweeping the nation that Rand found so alarming. The political spectrum was shifting, and Rand was moving to the conservative side of the right.

The real rift between Rand and the libertarians came with the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1971. The party’s founder, David Nolan, was an MIT graduate and Rand fan. He was galvanized to action by Nixon’s announcement of wage and price controls, intended to curb inflation. (By contrast Rand endorsed Nixon twice, regarding him as the lesser of two evils.) Nolan and a few friends announced plans for a libertarian national convention, held in Denver the following year. At the convention libertarians organized themselves into a loose network
of state parties, coordinated by an elected central committee. They adopted organizational bylaws and a platform calling for withdrawal from Vietnam, draft amnesty, and abolition of victimless crimes and the Federal Communications Commission. The Party’s statement of principles declared, in hyperbolic language, “We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual.”
⁵⁷
By libertarian standards the Party was a smashing success. At the June convention the Party claimed one thousand members and doubled its numbers by election day. By the end of 1973 it had three thousand members, with organizations in thirty-two states.

In the early years there was a distinctly Objectivist flavor to the Party. Nolan remembered that many early members were “fans, admirers, students of Ayn Rand . . . heavy Objectivist influence.” The
Colorado Libertarian Newsletter,
published by the founding chapter of the Party, was studded with Randian ideas and references. Authors and advertisers took for granted that readers would know what was meant by “the Randian sense-of-life” or that they would be interested in seminars held by Nathaniel Branden. A survey of Californian Libertarian Party members revealed that 75 percent of members had read
Atlas Shrugged,
more than any other book. The third most popular book was
The Virtue of Selfishness
. Party members were “required to sign a pledge against the initiation of physical force as a means of achieving social and political goals,” thus enshrining a principle Rand had articulated more than thirty years earlier in her “Textbook of Americanism.”
⁵⁸

Like Rand, the Libertarian Party was controversial within libertarian movement circles. Some libertarians worried about hypocrisy. How could a movement opposed to the state become part of the formal electoral system? Don Ernsberger, one of SIL’s founders, took the Randian line that the formation of a Libertarian Party was premature: “My negativism stems from the fact that social change never results from politics but rather politics stems from social change.”
⁵⁹
He also worried that libertarians would become morally tainted by their venture into the political world. The
Southern Libertarian Review
and the
Libertarian Forum,
among other publications, made similar arguments against the Party. Party supporters countered that their electoral campaigns were a form of education and an effective way to reach the masses.

This contention was borne out by the 1972 election, when the new party nominated candidates for both president and vice president. After an unsuccessful attempt to draft Murray Rothbard, the convention settled on Rand’s old friend John Hospers, a philosophy professor at the University of Southern California, and Tonie Nathan, a broadcast journalist and businesswoman based in Oregon. Hospers and Nathan were on the ballot in only two states, Colorado and Washington, and had a campaign budget under seven thousand dollars. Although the Party earned only 3,671 votes, it gained one electoral vote—and national media coverage—when a renegade Virginia elector, Roger MacBride, cast his vote for Hospers-Nathan.
⁶⁰
The nominally Republican MacBride had been tutored in the fundamentals of libertarianism by no less a luminory than Rose Wilder Lane, who considered him her adopted grandson and made him her literary heir. His rebellion made Nathan the first woman to receive an electoral college vote, an event that drew television news trucks to the normally staid Richmond Capitol Building where electors voted. The Party’s quixotic decision to run candidates had turned out to be a savvy move, garnering national news coverage far beyond what was warranted by the campaign. MacBride became an instant hero to Party members and sympathizers and would go on to be the Party’s next presidential candidate.

After the election the Party usurped Rand as a basic commonality among libertarians. Every libertarian had heard of the Party, and every libertarian had an opinion about it. The group even began to attract new members from the Democrats and Republicans, particularly after Watergate created widespread disillusion with politics-as-usual. One of these new converts was the future interior secretary Gale Norton, who found her way to the Party through an early interest in Rand.
⁶¹

Undaunted, Rand hammered away at the Libertarian Party in her yearly Boston speeches. The party was a “cheap attempt at publicity,” and libertarians were “a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people.” Her primary theme was that libertarians had plagiarized her ideas. “It’s a bad sign for an allegedly pro-capitalist party to start by stealing ideas.” Later, she expanded on this idea, telling a questioner that the party stole her ideas and then “mixes them with my exact opposite.”
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Besides their supposed plagiarism, what Rand objected to was libertarian laissez-faire in morals and the Party’s acceptance of anarchism. After contentious infighting anarchists and minarchists had established
a mutually agreeable party platform, so many members of the Party claimed to be working for the ultimate abolition of the state, a position Rand found irresponsible and absurd. Even worse was that libertarians had no guiding philosophy, and were proud of it. Rand supported abolition of the drug laws and the draft, but libertarians went beyond these positions, celebrating drug culture, draft dodging, and general rebellion against law and order. This tendency toward chaos had made Rand’s morality appealing to libertarians who sought boundaries and guides to their rebellion. Now the Libertarian Party offered the same kind of structure. Unlike Rand, the Party also offered a positive program for the future, even a promise of political influence. By opposing the Party so vehemently, Rand undermined her vaunted position among libertarians.