The Reason Why Ayn Rand Is Hated By Some Rightists

Defending Ayn Rand

By Edward Cline

An interesting and important cultural development -- in the way of two critical skirmishes in the conflict between Objectivism and its mainstream critics, left, right, and fringe -- was the Objectivist and general reader response to a “review” of Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made by noted conservative critic Anthony Daniels, who also writes under the name of Theodore Dalrymple, in The New Criterion, and to another “review,” ostensively of Atlas Shrugged, by a conservative-libertarian critic.

While Objectivist input was overwhelmed by the number of responses from doubters (of Rand and/or of Daniels and Young), pragmatists, certified and vitriolic enemies of Rand and her work, the genuinely curious, the clueless, the sarcastic, and the disgruntled, and by what one commentator called “seminar trolls,” Objectivists put in a strong showing, explicating the philosophy and exonerating Rand of the outrageous allegations about her by the critics.

In both reviews, the authors’ chief subjects were Rand herself, as a means of criticizing Rand and her underlying philosophy of egoism, and not the biography or the novel itself. Both reviewers misrepresented Rand and the novel, and both accused her of having concocted, among other things, a “totalitarian” political philosophy, while at the same time neglecting (or refusing) to examine, except in the most superficial and sarcastic manner, the tenets of Objectivism. Both based their perspectives on what other critics in the past have said about Rand, without demonstrating or exhibiting a first-hand acquaintance with her and her works. Daniels’ article was a review of the notoriously gossipy Heller biography, and not of the fractionally better but no less egregious Jennifer Burns biography, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. A review by Daniels of the Burns biography, however, would have produced the same contemptible litany of exegeses.

Reader responses to the Daniels review, “Ayn Rand: engineer of souls,” have totaled well over two hundred. Faced with the unusual volume of interest, the editor of The New Criterion, Roger Kimball, thought it wise to come to the critic’s defense by publishing an endorsement of Daniels on Pajamas Media, and, because it was of the same snickering, snorting, iconoclastic tone and character as the Daniels review, it, too, has generated over one hundred responses.

Cathy Young’s review has, to date, generated over one hundred. However, this was not her first assault on Rand. “A Rand Revival“ is a warmed-over iteration of her March 2005 “Ayn Rand at 100,” in Reason Magazine: Rand was wrong, and her philosophy is impractical; she had a totalitarian streak, and it shows in her uncompromising philosophy. Like her conservative counterparts, she frets over the “extremism” of Objectivism. After alternately praising and condemning Rand, Young concludes in her Reason “tribute”:

From yet another perspective, Rand can be seen as a great eccentric thinker and writer whose work is less about a practical guide to real life than about a unique, individual, stylized vision, a romantic vision that transforms and transcends real life.

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