In her depiction, Rand is an orc and so are her fans.ĭuggan is a careful and honest scholar, and everything she says about Rand is true. But she is selling a different version of the same Manichean narrative. Duggan capably shows how Rand’s story rationalizes plutocracy and cruelty. And so does Lisa Duggan’s new book Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed.

The other, of course, involves orcs.Īctually they both involve orcs-inherently demonic creatures, irretrievably evil. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. The blogger John Rogers famously observed: This is the narrative offered by Ayn Rand, whose mid-twentieth century work still commands a huge audience. She advocates, as the only politics decent people can embrace, an extreme and harsh libertarianism. Those who fail to perceive the moral necessity of unregulated capitalism are evil or stupid, probably both. All social insurance and regulation, from Social Security to the prohibition of pollution, is a step toward Stalinist tyranny. Our adversaries are irredeemably evil. They are animated by malice and greed. They want to enslave us, to make us mere instruments of their unworthy desires. We have nothing to discuss with them. The task of clear-eyed writers is not to engage sympathetically with their ideas, but to expose them for what they are so that the people can unite to defeat them.

Oakland: University of California Press, 2019 Review of Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan

Ayn rand's novels