Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed

American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present

by Lisa Duggan

Ayn Rand’s complicated notoriety as popular writer, leader of a political and philosophical cult, reviled intellectual, and ostentatious public figure endured beyond her death in 1982. In the twenty-first century, she has been resurrected as a serious reference point for mainstream figures, especially those on the political right from Paul Ryan to Donald Trump. Mean Girl follows Rand’s trail through the twentieth century from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War and traces her posthumous appeal and the influence of her novels via her cruel, surly, sexy heroes. Outlining the impact of Rand’s philosophy of selfishness, Mean Girl illuminates the Randian shape of our neoliberal, contemporary culture of greed and the dilemmas we face in our political present.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy, History, Biography, Economics, Biography Memoir

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Duggan was president of the American Studies Association from 2014 to 2015, presiding over the annual conference on the theme of "The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century."

Duggan earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Duggan is also one of the editors of queer commentary website, Bully Bloggers, developed with José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, and Tavia Nyong’o. Duggan has described herself as a "commie pinko queer feminist". She was written on topics including feminist responses to pornography and homonormativity.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather schematic survey of the life, work and continuing influence of the ultimate pro-capitalist ‘mean girl’ Ayn Rand. Rand’s vision for the future, primarily popularised via her fiction, has been variously dubbed cultish, pseudo-religious or legitimised as popular ‘philosophy’. Beloved of Silicon Valley oligarchs, right to far-right politicians and pundits, Donald Trump and many of his followers, Rand believed in the primacy of the individual – or at least a certain brand of individual - over the collective or society. She detested socialism, communism and mixed economies that supported nationalisation and/or elements of a welfare state and any type of social safety net – according to Rand nobody has a right to education or even to food. For Rand illness or extremes of poverty were not emergencies to be addressed but simply facts of life. Support for the able and gifted, for example, should be prioritised over those with disabilities of any kind. There should be no taxes, no government aid programmes, nothing that might benefit a stranger over the self-interests of the superior Randian ideal. Instead, Rand envisaged a world in which government would be reduced to courts to defend individual interests; police to defend against criminals; and a military to defend against outside invaders. For Rand an evolved country should be a place in which the gifted Randian should be given free rein to triumph/trample over the weak and deluded masses; government could be ignored, by force if necessary if it stifled the creativity of those she viewed as the capable.

Rand’s notion of the capable was effectively an entrepreneurial, free-market capitalist, a hyper-rational, "Aryan" man sometimes in partnership with a strong "Aryan" woman – whose simmering passions might need to be unleashed via ‘willing’ rape. These Randian heroes, exemplified by John Galt in her 1957 Atlas Shrugged, and Howard Roark in her 1943 The Fountainhead, were by default white, heterosexual men – despite the homoeroticism pervading her narratives Rand despised gay men and thought lesbians had no right to exist. America was her hope for a future in which real-life equivalents of these Randian men might ultimately be free to flourish. An America founded not on genocide but on what Rand considered the worthy conquest of weaker, indigenous peoples – a demonstration of American exceptionalism albeit in its infancy.

Rand’s belief system known as ‘objectivism’ was represented via organisations founded to spread the word, some based solely on her writings, others opening them up to revision. Echoes of Rand’s beliefs are easily detectable in the activities of Musk and DOGE awkwardly mashed-up with other right-wing thought systems such as the so-called dark enlightenment; and in the perspectives of Trump followers who characterise welfare and medical assistance provisions in contemporary America as indicators of rampant socialism! How did these ideas spread and take hold? This is something Duggan grapples with but never satisfactorily addresses. There's no mention, for example, of the hundreds of thousands of copies of Rand’s novels provided free to American schoolteachers every year. Although Duggan does describe the ways in which Rand exploited word-of-mouth and popular media of her era from talk shows to Playboy to communicate her theories. Although, interestingly, certain of Rand’s views such as her pro-abortion stance and her atheism have been downplayed of late – presumably to enable the comfortable espousal of core views by pockets of the conservative American Christian right.

Academic and queer cultural theorist, Lisa Duggan’s overview is decent enough for someone unfamiliar with Rand but it tends to skate over the details when it comes to objectivism’s core tenets and its unusual malleability: the overlap with right-wing libertarianism; the links to the rise of neoliberalism; nor does it fully address how Rand fits with a broadly neo-feudal form of capitalism. I agree with Duggan that Rand was a loathsome individual, who peddled destructive concepts via her decidedly turgid fiction. But, there was very little here I didn’t already know, partly because Duggan dedicates too much space to biographical details and not enough to Rand’s legacy and her complex cultural/political afterlives. So, for me, a little basic and often frustratingly vague.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is an influential book for a certain subset of American politicians, so I've been thinking for a while that I should read it. I also know someone who considers The Fountainhead one of her favorite books, so I've wondered if I should read that one. But what I most wanted, more than anything, was not to read either of them. I mean, right? Those books are huge, and they seem terrible. In every way. So I was quite pleased to learn about Mean Girl, a short (100 pages!) exploration of Ayn Rand's books, her philosophies, and how they came to influence American politics.

At least, that's what this book purports to be. Whether it's completely successful is debatable. The book is mostly a short bio of Ayn Rand's life and work, informative for a novice like me, but the timeline jumps around so much as it explicates her views that it was more confusing than it needed to be. Duggan's main thesis is that when Rand was a child, her family's home and business were seized by the Bolsheviks, setting the stage for her lifelong hatred of communism/socialism and her shockingly narrow and unsympathetic view of humanity. Makes sense as a thesis, but I was turned off by Duggan's constant mention of Rand's sense of "outraged entitlement." It's not hard to believe that someone would be outraged at their family's life being overturned, and there's nothing particularly "entitled" about that outrage either. It's true that this event's ultimate result was the tunnel vision that caused Rand to unleash her damaging viewpoints on the world, but it also felt like Duggan was facilely using catchphrases from the Occupy movement (which I support!) rather than doing any deeper sort of analysis.

This superficial treatment extends to the final chapter, which purports to explain Rand's influence on neoliberals/Tea Party politicians. Beyond the detailing of Alan Greenspan's direct role in the situation, the connections she makes are sketchy. She even admits that these politicians diverge from Rand in a significant way: Rand is against all government intervention in individuals' lives, whereas neoliberals are highly in favor of government intervention that helps them. This was the section of the book I'd been looking forward to the most, but it ended up being the most cursory and least satisfying.

Still, I would recommend this book for two groups of people: Rand novices who are looking for a brief overview of her life and ideas, and Rand fans who believe you can be a Rand fan in some sort of apolitical way. The refusal to consider Rand separately from the damage her beliefs have caused is one of the most valuable and thought-provoking parts of Mean Girl, and it's more than enough to justify this book's existence.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is mostly a superficial retelling of what is probably familiar to almost all who pick up this book (it’s more of an essay than a book, because it really doesn’t cohere as a whole except for when the author connects Rand to neo-liberalism within and between each of the short chapters).

The author somewhat dances around Rand’s (non)philosophy and dwells mostly on her two most famous novels and doesn’t really get into the depth of Rand’s vacuous objectivist philosophy except in passing. Regardless of Rand lacking philosophical substance, she still is relevant today because of her two influential novels not her incoherently laid out objectivist philosophy.

Whenever I read Nietzsche I always see him as a proto-fascist and I see Rand dripping out of him. At least Nietzsche was a philosopher (not exactly true, I should say a wanna be philosopher because he was a philologist, what today we would call a linguist) and he at least has a semblance of a philosophy weaved within his body of work. This book pointed out to me that Rand had originally had Nietzsche aphorisms at the beginning of each chapter in the ‘Fountainhead’ until she finally realized that Nietzsche was a ‘mystic’. I find that telling. Rand could not digest Nietzsche except at a superficial level and at one time she did realize how much they do have in common.

This book told me something else I wasn’t aware of. Rand found homosexuality immoral and disgusting. In her comic book novels love is always about the man dominating a barely submitting woman or a Gail Wyndard heterosexually loving Howard Roark as the archetypal man, but only platonically. From her books both philosophical and fictional it never dawned on me that she would think it mattered that a person just might maybe express their love in the non binary non-conforming way and Rand’s ‘pure objectivity’ would lead to any other conclusion. C’est l’amour.

This book mentioned that Rand wanted an elimination of all ethnicity and identity and wanted the individual to identify with the nation as supreme (that reeks of fascism, just read Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and get what he means by his brand of ‘socialism’). Her fictional characters (e.g. Roark, Galt, Reardon) are always Übermensch and are the embodiment of the exemplar that define the nation or more precisely the imaginary ideal nation that only resides in her mind. Rand is first and foremost anti-Marxist (and therefore anti-equality) and as this book mentions that she believed the people within the poor class are poor because of their choices and should be blamed for their own poverty. All politics, has a variation of that statement as its first principal. That’s why I don’t talk politics since that is what all the arguments derive from, but the wing nut never realizes it.

Those from Rand’s right wing side, blame the poor for their own poverty, those on the left wing side blame the circumstances not the victim. I want to give some illustrations that involve Elizabeth Warren, an anti-Randian. She would say that bankruptcies are caused by circumstances and not because the people are deadbeats, and that we need to help the people and suppress the power of the banks; re the opioid epidemic: she would say it was caused by doctors, pharmacies, and the greed of the Sackler family and we need to help the victims and punish the perpetrators; and my final example: she would say the financial crisis of 2008 was caused by greedy bankers taking advantage of regular people by issuing shabby ARMs without properly vetting the customers and that we should go after the banker crooks and help the victims. In each of these cases, Rand would blame the victim and be done with it, or as quoted in this book by one of her sycophants, Alan Greenspan, ‘I’m shocked, I don’t believe it, bankers were not acting in their own best interest’ as if greed will solve itself with an invisible hand of the marketplace and aid the powerless from the powerful with magic fairy dust.

Rand is relevant to today. She needs to be understood in order to understand the madness that is transpiring in today’s politics. In order to defeat the proto-fascist of today who are clearly influenced by Rand we need to understand their foundations even if they are vacuous.

[Beck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mean Girl is a short primer on Ayn Rand, in particular her influence on policy (and policymakers) in America. I've never read any of Rand's books and I've never quite understood what the deal was with her. That is, I knew the books had a reputation for being torturous and ponderous paeans to the free market, but I didn't get why certain people extol their virtues at every turn or why Rand was so revered. This book does a good job explaining her appeal (and also why she's the worst). A work of cultural studies, it gives some biographical details about Rand (her life in Bolshevik Russia, her work in Hollywood, testifying for the House Un-American Activities Committee) and short summaries of her works, and then puts it all in context. Duggan explains Rand's (literal, at times) cult of personality, and its impact on Alan Greenspan, who then of course went about de-regulating our financial system. She also talks about Rand in the time of the Kochs, Tea Party, and Trump in the last chapter. I wish that this part had been longer; I'd have liked a more thorough analysis. (Her insights into the love of Rand in Silicon Valley were especially interesting.) Duggan talks about neoliberalism, as well as Rand's love of capitalism and hatred for anyone she didn't consider elite in a really clear way. Definitely a good overview for anyone trying to understand Rand's continued influence.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy!

[Irene · Rating 1 out of 5]

Learned a few things...kinda boring though. I don't have time for boring. I want to learn a few things and have it be interesting as well. I'm spoiled.Maybe.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Deep reactions of some kind were widely reported."

"Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare?"

"Reject Ayn Rand; after all, she rejects you."

[Colleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slim book at 107 pages, that even though it is a lively read despite the subject matter, still manages to pack a lot of information into those pages.

And I think the premise of the author is correct--what connects the top business and financial community with evangelical Christianity and racist nationalism is Rand. "The unifying threads are meanness and greed, and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand."

It's frightening just how influential one monstrous woman has been with a Library of Congress survey putting Atlas Shrugged just behind the Bible in terms of influence. She was pro-choice and an atheist but that's been conveniently overlooked. Guess the free market will take care of itself. Also, how on the nose was Gore Vidal in 1961?

Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all. Ayn Rand's philosophy is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and systematic as we enter a cruious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like the seven other entries in UC Press’s American Studies Now series, this is a short book - 107 small pages — I read it in less than two and a half hours on the train between Albany and NYC. As someone who encountered Ayn Rand several times in my adolescence — I had to perform The Night of January 16th in my 8th grade drama class, and my first girlfriend convinced me to read Atlas Shrugged when I was 16 — I was interested to read Lisa Duggan’s meditation on Rand. Although Duggan takes great pains to ensure the reader that this is neither a work of archival recovery nor a close reading of Rand’s work, Mean Girl strikes me as nonetheless careful in its argument, eschewing bombast for precision. As a scholar in gender and sexuality studies, Duggan is uniquely positioned to offer a deft reading of the fraught gender and sexual politics at the center of Rand’s oeuvre, and does not disappoint. But I was also struck by the deft account here of Rand’s fraught relationship to Jewishness and class, the way antisemitism appears in and structures much of her anticommunism. I found this to be a really useful dissection of Rand’s work and life with a great deal of new things to say.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

To call a grown up woman "girl" can't be excused in the 21st century. I guess feminism if reserved only for "our" women. Reminds me of Germaine Greer, who wants equality, but only for the Christian women.

[mia]

read for class Damn she lame as hell

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a brief but informative survey of Ayn Rand's work and influence for people like myself who don't know much beyond the basis of her libertarian ideas. What I hadn't realized before reading this book was that Rand was really a fiction writer. She wrote screenplays and novels that became popular not so much for the storytelling but for their moralistic sentiment that opposed the egalitarianism of the 1960s. It was only later that I guess she became known as a philosopher.

Duggan's description of Rand's novels is consistent with what I've read elsewhere. Rand created fictional worlds that valorized ambition, beauty, talent, wealth, and individuality. Applied to the worlds and people Rand created in her own mind, Rand's application of these values may have been righteous and even just. Applied to the real world, however, Rand's obsession with superiority equated to an apologia for inequality, discrimination, domination, and cruelty. Out of her novels and plays based on fake people and made up plots emerged a political and cultural movement that opposed efforts in the mid-20th Century to reform institutions in order to remedy historic economic and political inequality.

I can see why Ayn Rand became popular in certain circles as a contrarian thinker who was skeptical of the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. I find her appeal beyond that to be kind of strange. Rand was not a social scientist, nor an expert in anything as far as I can tell. She was a foreign born fiction writer with very strong views about culture and society. It may be that her valorization of empire, money and success spoke to people who were already predisposed to admire those things. Perhaps in Rand's dramatic prose, the hoarding of capital felt more justifiable to people who otherwise felt pressure from society to share.

The end of the book acknowledges that Ayn Rand's libertarianism is not the same thing as the neoliberal ideology that took hold in the West during the 1980s. At the same time, Duggan shows that key architects of neoliberalism such as Alan Greenspan were heavily influenced by her thinking. Like many others, I love a good novel but people who want to learn about the world and their fellow humans have to be willing to interact with real people and not learn about the world through reading about fake ones.

[Marsha Altman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really brief but good look at Ayn Rand's life and works and how they came to shape neoliberal and Libertarian thought in American life. She's hard to summarize, and Duggan does a great job of it, focusing on how her writing (not just the major works but her plays and non-fiction as well) was influenced by events in her life and how it influenced politics around her. There are some interesting points about how poorly she at times understood the American political system, thinking she could shed her Judaism and her feminism by taking a new, agender name, and how she was so anti-Communist that she was turned away after a day of testimony at the HUAC hearings for just being too ridiculous - even for them.

[Zoltan Pogatsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect deconstruction of all the internal contradicition of a woman with a deeply troubled psyche, who made an ideology out of selfishness, but could not live up to her own standards. Especially amusing, but often disturbing, are the analyses of the sexual subtext of her work. Highly recommended.

[George Mihailidis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lisa Duggan is a "commie" as she admits herself in her Twitter account. This is a hitpiece of a book. If someone wants to know about Ayn Rand's ideas, I suggest you read her own books, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, etc., instead of this cheap hitpiece by a nobody

[gnarlyhiker · Rating 3 out of 5]

a quick read and a good summary of Ayn's objectivism and how it all tallies today's corporate and religious greed/domination. 3.5

good luck

[Wendy Liu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting concept but I wish it had gone deeper.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Succinct primer on one of the 20th centuries most notable freaks. Length means it doesn’t really go all that in depth but definitely drives home ideas about Ayn’s main inspirations and peccadillos. Would have liked more of an exploration of Greenspan’s career, another notable freak. Made me want to re-read “Democracy In Chains.”

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

"One for one and none for all...Ayn Rand's philosophy is near perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and systematic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night."

Author Lisa Duggan dredged up this prescient Gore Vidal review of Rand's For the New Intellectual from 1961. A bit chilling to read now!

Historian, professor and activist Duggan's short academic treatise is a path to understanding Ayn Rand's life and work, mercifully shorter than reading one of her novels, and covers the sometimes extreme reactions her controversial "objectivist" ideas continue to engender. Her fan base includes notable meanies Charles Koch, Ronald Reagan, Jeff Bezos, and former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, although the latter eventually admitted to a flaw in her ideology. Unfortunately for us, he realized his error too late to head off the 2008 crisis attributed to banking deregulation, an idea consistent with Randian philosophy. Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, another prize, once told an audience of Rand's Atlas Society members that her books were required reading for his interns and staff members and attributed his decision to go into public service to her. Thanks, Ayn!

This book highlights for me the unhinged, sociopathic qualities of Rand's selfish ideology, the damage done to our social systems and the far-reaching implications for our country's domestic and foreign policy wrought by these extremist right-wing ideologues exemplified by the antics of the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus Republicans. Maybe this is the TRUE "deep state" we keep hearing about?

[Evie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ - Hell may freeze over... I'm actually recommending you read about Ayn Rand. Stick with me here.

TL;DR:
‎‏‏‎ ‎ ‎• A good starting point for learning about Ayn Rand's life, ideology, and controversy.
‎‏‏‎ ‎ ‎• Not completely unbiased-- but somewhat even-handed given how Rand's philosophy of Objectivism views any non-straight/white/male person.
‎‏‏‎ ‎ ‎• Covers a lot of ground in a short read but doesn't quite stick the landing in the final chapter.

Thoughts

"Rand’s contrasting sense of life applies to those whose fantasies of success and domination include no doubt or guilt. The feelings of aspiration and glee that enliven Rand’s novels combine with contempt for and indifference to others. The resulting Randian sense of life might be called “optimistic cruelty.” Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed."

‏‏‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ Ayn was a human of contradictions-- a Jewish woman born into a financially-privileged family who ultimately preached a worldview that is antisemitic, sexist, and blind to structural inequality. A multi-decade amphetamine user and lifelong smoker who denied the connection between her smoking habit and her terminal lung cancer until the end. An anti-marriage adulterer who went into a severe depression when she found out her affair partner.. was also having an affair with another woman. A militant atheist who likely would still revile a plurality of those who idolize her screeds.

‏‏‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ She changed her name from Alisa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, obfuscating her Jewish heritage, and the heroes within her novels follow the template for the Aryan ideal. The villains, of course, are the opposite-- cartoonishly ugly and inept, 'ethnic' in some way, and always trying to keep the Good Rich White Cis Man down because their Weak Character is the cause behind their lack of money and influence.

‏‏

"It is difficult to resist rather crudely psychoanalyzing or otherwise diagnosing her, explaining her body of work as the compensatory fantasy life of a tortured soul who was perhaps a sociopath, but at least a malignant narcissist. It is nearly inevitable that those who do not become fans are appalled by Rand’s celebration of cruelty and inequality."

‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ Her philosophy, like her novels, is insultingly reductive and juvenile. She outwardly blames society's ills on the the disabled, the non-straights/non-cis, those valuing collective solidarity over individual selfishness-- her ideology is sociopathic, cruelty, lack of guilt. She never seemed to realize that she was trumpeting a philosophy that would revel in her own subjugation if she hadn't fell into the exact life circumstances that she did.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ Objectivism's rallying cry might as well be, "F*ck you, I got mine."

"The aspirations and achievements of Ayn Rand’s heroes and heroines, combined with contempt and indifference for social inferiors, formed the structure of feeling she endlessly circulated for decades to come."

‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ Ayn Rand is not an easy person to empathize with-- we all, to a certain extent, are a product of our experiences, but this cannot negate the virtue and responsibility of personal growth and development. Humans reached our status on the food chain for many reasons, among them the fact that humans have worked together to survive in situations/environs where more solitary animals would be at a significant advantage. Selfishness, while understandable in limited contexts, is just not an admirable way to live your entire life.

And then, of course, there's Ayn Rand.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed provides a condensed but still extensive overview of Rand's life/career alongside a primer on her ideology of Objectivism-- and its overarching goals/impacts. This includes her formative years, and the reader's exasperation with Rand may start with realizing that her philosophy on life and how to live it did not significantly change after age 12.

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ She just kept leaning further into glorifying cruelty, discrimination, and narcissism. While this is bad enough as a personal ethos, a society based off of it will be an absolute hell on earth for the majority of humans. How anyone can view this view as a positive one is genuinely alarming and achingly depressing.

"This belief in the inherent moral as well as technological inferiority of “primitive” societies shaped her response to the concern of a Native American cadet at West Point in 1974. The cadet asked her how she squared her beliefs with the historical record of dispossession and extermination of American Indians. She replied that the Indians had had the land for five thousand years and had done nothing with it."

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ This book-- part biography, part literary critique, part sociological analysis-- covers her upbringing, career, novels, and other writings, but it ends with an incomplete summary of her impact, directly or indirectly, on the current political landscape. A bit more on her ideology's impact on the 2008 financial crisis, etc., would be helpful. However, I think it did a decent job of laying groundwork for an understanding of her life/impact historically, and it's a good starting point for anyone who wants to understand Ayn Rand's impact but can't bring themselves to read her juvenile fiction or Rand cultist literature.

"Rand’s complicated notoriety as popular writer, leader of a political/philosophical cult, reviled intellectual, and kitschy public figure (often posed in photos with a cape and huge dollar-sign pin as well as cigarette holder) followed her past her death in 1982."

‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎
Review In-a-Gif:


Bonus Quote- Note that Rand is talking about a convicted kidnapper/multiple-murderer:

"[Ayn Rand] confessed her “involuntary, irresistible sympathy for him, which I cannot help feeling . . . in spite of everything.” About the slogan he announced at trial, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” Rand wrote, “Even if he wasn’t big enough to live by that attitude, he deserves credit for saying it so brilliantly.”"

[Dylan]

I heard about this book from this article.

Up to this point, I only knew of Ayn Rand through her reputation as a controversial conservative thinker & author, but not much beyond that because I had not picked up her books which, as I understood it, were (a) long and (b) full of trash ideas. Part of me felt that I should check them out, because they were so influential, but I really didn't want to (see points a & b above).

Luckily, this book exists. It is a very short and easy read and it briefly covers her life story, her major works, her ideas, and her influence on the modern political landscape. I wish that the section on her influence had been longer, but I still learned a lot and feel I can now happily live my life without feeling the need to read one of Rand's trash novels.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, condensed synthesis of the history of Rand and her influence on libertarian politics and connection to neoliberalism more broadly. The book brings together most of the main existing sources on Rand and her circle and adds a couple of new conceptual frames for understanding Rand as a mean girl: her work's similarity to imperialist adventure fiction she read as a youth and a play on Lauren Berlant's "cruel optimism" as Rand's "optimistic cruelty." Well worth reading.

[Michael Webb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Concise overview of Rand's works and the context in which she was writing them. Not a suitable replacement for a full biographical text (or a broader treatment of how her thought has impacted the modern western world), but functions well in highlighting the central themes of her works and how they tie back to her own historical context.

[Thenewar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Would give it 0 stars if I could. Mean Girl is a lame attempt to demonize one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent rundown of a compassionless woman preoccupied with her own delusions of grandeur.

[Emma Ratshin · Rating 4 out of 5]

the most fun i’ve ever had reading about one of the worst people in modern history!

[Evan Crane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, pretty good.

The attested Foucaultian ubiquity of neoliberalism strains credulity. Obama, Reagan, Clinton, Trump, communist China, going to the gym; nothing can avoid the stain of neoliberalism.

'A theory that explains everything, explains nothing'

[Reid tries to read · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ayn Rand, like all of us, was built through her circumstances. Like a chemical reaction, her petty-bourgeois and imperialist mentality created literature that perfectly mixed into the toxic concoction that was the coming conservative and neoliberal revolt in America. Just like how Milton Friedman and others were able to wage ideological warfare by making market fundamentalism seem ‘rational’, Rand’s writings struck a chord with American middle and professional managerial classes by making capitalism “sexy” and by making greed appear to be a socially beneficial act. Her seminal works The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged influenced people ranging from billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Bill Gates, to Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan (arguably the most powerful man in the world during his time in control of the Fed), to millions of young highschoolers susceptible to Rand’s childlike philosophical defense of greed, cruelty, and capitalism.

Rand was born in the USSR and was the daughter of a small business owning pharmacist. As a teenager she was obsessed with the arts, and her favorite artworks were brimming with imperialist apologia and propaganda. Her favorite film of her youth was The Indian Tomb, a movie where all the Indian roles are played by Germans in blackface. Her first romantic fixation crush was Cyrus Paltons, a heroic British naval captain who galavanted across India (and doing a little imperialism along the way) in the serialized novel The Mysterious Valley. This domineering, callus, and towering man would be an archetype with which she would mold both her literary characters as well as real life romantic fixations into. In fact, she based many of her traits of what the supposed ‘ideal man’ should look like off of a child-murderer named William Hickman. In her own words, Rand liked that Hickman “looks like a bad boy with a very winning grin, that he makes you like him the whole time you’re in his presence.” In her journal she confessed to having “involuntary, irresistible sympathy for him, which I cannot help feeling . . . in spite of everything”. To Rand, an ideal man should have contempt for lesser beings and feel no guilt toward their suffering or even acknowledge their very existence. The ideal man is sexually magnetic, and his sexual draw is directly tied to his cruelty. He is also special and better than those around him, which leads to him alienating himself from others. These characteristics of an ideal man, the perfect individual, are not traits of a good person but of an anti-social sociopath.

When the Bolsheviks seized her family’s business Rand was repulsed and horrified by the fact that the lowly masses could strip her family of their entitled right to exploit the labor power of the classes below them. After this, many of the various Randian philosophical strands that had been gestating in her mind would come together: her romanticism of imperial domination, her infatuation with anti-social and domineering men, and her disdain and pure disgust for the lower classes or ‘the mob’ as she calls them. These traits all make for the bedrock of any good neoliberal subject: they need to be someone who is historically illiterate and views the current capitalist mode of production as the height of civilization; they need to be someone with the antisocial worldview that ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals’; and above all they need to fear and be repulsed by any type of lower-class mass movement or action. Rand’s writings bludgeoned its readers over the head with these ideas.

In his book The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin perfectly elucidated conservatives like Rand’s disdain for the masses: “the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated (by the lower classes) will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse” (Robin, 39). Compare this to Rand’s first novel We The Living where she describes a communist woman as “short, husky legs and flat, masculine oxfords; a red kerchief tied carelessly over short, straight hair; eyes wide apart in a round, freckled face; thin lips drawn together with so obvious and fierce a discrimination that they seemed weak; dandruff on the black leather of her shoulders”. All other members of the lower classes are described with similar levels of ugliness, deformity, and crudeness, while her upper class heroes are described as both physically and intellectually towering and attractive. The message is obvious: the lower classes are inherently physically and mentally inferior to the upper classes, which is why they are beneath them in the hierarchy in the first place. The world produced by this lower class would therefore reflect their ugly, dull, brutishness.

Her first breakout success came with the publishing of her novel The Fountainhead. The book reflected her frustrations with her failure to ‘make it big’ in Hollywood in the 1930s, which she blamed on greedy corporations too hellbent on ‘Box Office chasing’ over creativity (ironic isn’t it you moron) and a secret communist plot to shut down her pro-capitalist ideas. The Fountainhead features a strong masculine character, Roark, written in the archetype of her other dominant male characters. He is an exceptional architect whose struggle mirrors Rand’s own: he fights to rise above his mediocre colleges (for Roark it's a collectivist “architecture by committee”, for Rand it was producers/directors) while battling a large corporation (much like Rand battled the Hollywood studios) while being under attack from collectivists. In this way The Fountainhead functions as Rand’s critique of capitalism from the right, which she viewed as becoming impure as the markets came under New Deal regulations, while society itself was rapidly becoming infested with communists/collectivists hiding under every bed and in every alleyway. Sold during the mid-1940s as the Cold War was ramping up, The Fountainhead fit right in to the red-scare anti-communist hysteria of the time and became a media sensation; it not only has sold up to 6 million copies up to today, but also produced movies, was serialized in a magazine, and has been updated with multiple editions.

In 1957 Rand published her most influential work, Atlas Shrugged, to equal amounts of disgust and admiration, revealing intense divides within America itself. The mainstream press (including conservatives themselves like William Buckley Jr.), literary critics, and leading academics abhorred the book, its writing style, and the values it espoused; yet the book became a word-of-mouth sensation, starting within the burgeoning libertarian movement before spreading out to millions of Americans who were allured by the book’s full-throated defense of unfettered capitalism. Amongst its biggest fans was rightwing economist and father of neoliberalism Ludwig Von Mises who proclaimed: “Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. . . . It is also a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled “intellectuals” and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by our governments and political parties. It is a devastating exposure of the “moral cannibals,” the “gigolos of science,” and of the “academic prattle” of the makers of the anti-industrial revolution.”. The book’s plot was a perverse inversion of class struggle, where the gorgeous and genius “producers” (creators/innovators in science, industry, and intellectual endeavors) who run industrial capitalism go on strike and escape from a society overburdened by nasty bureaucrats and the parasitic mob of looters, moochers, and thuggish dullards. The producers escape to a fantastical and romanticized version of the American West, one without indigenous Americans, very few women, and no reference to labor itself. This land, called the Gulch, is filled with extremely high-tech innovations yet, in keeping with the idealized theme of the American frontier, the producers living there all make their livings as small business owners (again Rand’s writing excludes any actual laborers and therefore class struggle itself). As the producers thrive in the Gulch society itself collapses without their guiding hands. This petty-bourgeois ideology undergirding Atlas Shrugged is what made the book such a hit amongst white, male, professional managerial class/small business owners throughout America from the 1950s to today.

Overall Rand and her works had 4 periods of mass popularity:
1. From the publication of The Fountainhead in 1943 to the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957
2. Among newly ascendant neoliberals during the 1980s;
3. Among the new tech tycoons of Silicon Valley during the 1990s and after
4. During and after the 2008 crash

Aforementioned Alan Greenspan links the first 2 periods. During the 1950s, well before Alan became the most powerful economist in the world, Greenspan and his wife were regulars amongst meetings held by Ayn Rand and her cult-like followers (it’s no stretch to call Rand a cult leader for much of her life). In his memoir Greenspan wrote “Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think... She introduced me to a vast realm from which I’d shut myself off”. When Greenspan was moved into Gerald Ford’s cabinet as an economic advisor in 1974 Rand accompanied him at his swearing in. As the neoliberal movement ascended throughout the 1980s, which can be exemplified by Reagan making Greenspan his chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987 (a post which he held until 2006), various neoliberal think-tanks and institutions like the Cato institute and Reason magazine were founded or run by Rand acolytes.
Throughout the 1980-1990s as the tech boom commenced, Silicon Valley ghouls looked to Rand’s works for inspiration. According to a 2016 issue of Vanity Fair, ”Atlas Shrugged was one of (Steve) Jobs’s “guides in life.” For a time, [Uber founder Travis] Kalanick’s Twitter avatar featured the cover of The Fountainhead. [Paypal founder] Peter Thiel . . . is also a self-described Rand devotee.”. This is unsurprising since the Randian ethos of the heroic individual entrepreneur, exemplified by the alpha white male genius, fits the self-mythologizing self-image of Silicon Valley tech startups to a tee. Finally, after the 2008 financial crash sales of Rand’s seminal works boomed again. Despite the fact her very ideology was at the core of the crash, Tea Partiers and their ilk viewed the crash as following the plot of Atlas Shrugged rather than a natural result of predatory finance capital.

The election of Trump is a repudiation of Rand’s view of capitalism being an inherent meritocracy that pushes the ideal man to the top. Trump is the quintessential Rand villain: a vulgar and imbecilic oaf who is simply a nepotistic crony. Yet even Trump sees the world through a Randian lens when he praises The Fountainhead because ”It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. The book relates to . . . everything.”. Unsurprisingly, this Rand villain also stocked his cabinet full of her adherents, much like every post-Reagan president.

[John Spiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

See Beck's review below. I could not have said it better.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

A line of one of Ayn’s early characters was, “I am like the state; what is good for me is right.” Her ideal man “showcases contempt for lesser beings and cool indifference to their suffering.” How sad that Ayn never found her own cool & indifferent man …like Ted Bundy, or even a guiltless but charming Aileen Wuornos with a strap-on who could make Ayn’s dream come true. Then, the author strangely states Ayn had “lowbrow aesthetic preferences” because she preferred Rachmaninoff to Beethoven. What nonsense. Musical idiots historically shout out Bach, Beethoven or Mozart’s name reflexively when asked for their favorite composers, because no one will blink if you put any of them first and everyone has heard their names. But if you are piano based, you could easily say you prefer Rachmaninoff to Beethoven. Me ranking Rachmaninoff’s exquisite Piano Concerto #2 higher than all of Beethoven’s Piano Concerti, doesn’t suddenly make me “lowbrow”.

Author Lisa calls Ayn either a sociopath or a malignant narcissist; I’d agree. Most of us find those who publicly celebrate cruelty and inequality can nicely fit either category. Ayn’s real name was Alissa Rosenbaum; changing her name “obscured her nationality, gender, and religious origin.” She first worked as a junior script writer in Hollywood than came to New York in 1951. She fell in with Ludwig von Mies. Billie Jean King was a big fan of hers. Ayn’s philosophy is based on the conservative fantasy that real heroes are white, male, unconstrained capitalists who pick themselves up by their bootstraps while exhibiting rugged individualism. To this day, I’ve never seen anyone actually pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Ayn hated the New Deal; she preferred the old deal, when women like her were too disempowered to become writers. She actually told movie producers and executives to never “smear success or glorify the common man.” She denounced one movie simply because, in it, she saw Russians smiling. At West Point, she stated that the Indian had the U.S. for five thousand years and had done nothing with it and that “it is always going to transpire that when a superior technological culture meets up with an inferior one, the superior will prevail.”

It took Ayn two years to write John Galt’s radio script from Atlas Shrugged. When asked to edit part of it by Bennett Cerf, Ayn said, “Would you cut the Bible?” What a strange comment for an avowed atheist to make. Bill Clinton showed his Ayn Rand roots when he abolished welfare and Obama got on the Ayn bandwagon when he rushed to put Wall Street bankers back in charge. Ayn fought “solidarity economics and social cooperation.” She probably thought Jesus was a pussy who should have brought those money changers back into the temple.

Ayn wasn’t totally useless though, to her credit she did oppose the Vietnam War, the draft and the legal ban on abortion. Alan Greenspan’s deregulating and neoliberal policies were deeply influenced by Ayn. He probably had poster of Ayn on his bedroom ceiling of Ayn torturing a Spotted Owl while on a bed of money. Ayn Rand’s prepubescent butt-ugly haircut never became a trend, nor did the idea of spelling Ann as Ayn. But libertarians, followers of the Chicago School, and haters of: the New Deal, the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, Mr. Rodgers, Forrest Gump, MLK, and all Good Samaritans still love Ayn. Go figure.

I’m sorry to say that’s all I got from this marginal book, and most of the above is also said in the books below. I only read it because I knew Chris Hedges interviewed her. You’d learn a lot more if you instead read “100 Voices: An Oral history of Ayn Rand” by Scott McConnell, as well as “Ayn Rand and the World She Made” by Anne Conover Heller or even, “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right” by Jennifer Burns. I gave this Duggan book two stars because the author teaches you almost nothing about Ayn Rand and ignores one of the most important Ayn facts (included in the McConnell book): Ayn openly called government handouts “immoral” and then accepted Social Security payments in her later years. According to the book “An Oral History of Ayn Rand”, when Ayn was faced with lung cancer after a life spent smoking, and without the cash to treat that cancer, Rand adopted an assumed name to seek government funds for her treatment. Ayn Rand once wrote on this topic (more info not from this book): “A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.” So, hypocrisy can be a bitch, but in Ayn’s case, hypocrisy really was a bitch.

[gabs]

read this for class lol i’m gonna copy n paste my entire book review once i finish it get ready

update:
Alissa Rosenbaum was born into a Jewish bourgeois family in Russia in 1905, just twelve short years before the unprecedented 1917 Russian revolution in which the Bolsheviks forcibly came into state power. Her family’s home was seized and her father’s pharmacy nationalized, inspiring deep feelings of resentment for socialism within Rosenbaum, who saw the revolution as nothing but “theft, bullying, and the exercise of illegitimate power… in a stark clash between worthy individuals and the mob” (Duggan, 18). Despite gross misinterpretations due to a complete lack of access to Bolshevik motives for revolution, these ideas stuck with Rosenbaum for the rest of her life and pervaded her influential writings as Ayn Rand throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Author Lisa Duggan argues that Ayn Rand’s purveyed philosophical musings and ideologies of selfishness as a virtue and selflessness as a sin helped shape the increasingly prominent economic doctrine of neoliberalism in the United States and beyond.
Lisa Duggan is a professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University who focuses on topics of LGBT cultural politics, neoliberalism, and feminism. Her most recently published work, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, serves as a brief overview of Ayn Rand’s ideologies and rise to prominence in United States neoliberal policy-making. A self-described “pinko commie queer,” one might reasonably expect Duggan’s book to be a sharp critique of Rand as a delusional right-wing extremist and the poster child of virulent capitalist greed (Duggan, 2019). However, Duggan’s years-long “weird obsession with Ayn Rand” provides her writing with an added nuanced perspective of Rand’s work that go beyond what caricatures of her suggest (Duggan, 91). At just over one hundred pages, Mean Girl is packed full of information, citing a list of Rand’s most influential and relevant works and several interviews in which she explains her views. Duggan divides the book’s content into four chapters which follow Rand’s life chronologically from her upbringing in Russia and experience of the Bolshevik revolution to her posthumous status as a widespread cultural icon among right-wing politicians, wealthy CEOs, and tech moguls in the modern era.
Duggan begins by tracing the origins of Ayn Rand’s (then known by her birth name, Alissa Rosenbaum) fiercely anti-collectivist and pro-individualist philosophies to the Bolsheviks’ 1917 capture of her hometown of St. Petersburg and her idealization of European civilization and advancement. During her upbringing, Rand is said to have disidentified with her Jewishness and committed to atheism; this rejection of religion soon became a key theme to her writing and philosophies. Duggan goes on to cite early works of Rand’s, including We the Living (what Rand claims to be her most autobiographical work), The Individualist Manifesto, and Anthem. We the Living (1936), Rand’s first published novel, demonizes Soviet collectivism, which “prevents [the protagonists of the novel] from living fully the higher kind of life they lost, and that they deserve,” and directly parallels her experiences as a young girl during the Bolshevik revolution (Duggan 24).
Duggan goes on to explore the general themes of Rand’s most popular novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Rand’s protagonists are almost always “handsome or beautiful, by gender,” while antagonists, often communists or otherwise members of the opposing party, are usually “short, fat, or otherwise physically imperfect” figures that block the protagonists’ way, argues Duggan (Duggan, 28). Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, served as the most influential of Rand’s works for right-wing politicians and supporters of unfettered capitalism. Its overarching themes of civilizational regression under collectivist government regulation bolstered anti-communist sentiments during Cold War-era United States. Duggan summarizes the novel’s lessons as: “Egoism is a truer morality than altruism, and individualism leads upward and forward via capitalism, while collectivism leads down and back to social barbarism” (Duggan, 63). These selfish teachings inevitably impacted extreme capitalists, free market advocates, and right-wing policymakers alike, leading to the shaping of neoliberalism as an ideology centered on the “one for one and none for all” mentality at the expense of the working class and to the benefit of the wealthy upper class.
The overall conciseness of Mean Girl at times serves as a detriment and sacrifices important information. Notably, Duggan spends little time discussing Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, which she briefly defines as “[advocating] capitalism and [adhering] to a heroic view of striving individuals, dedicated to their own happiness, as the moral foundation for human life” (Duggan 108). Rand’s Objectivist philosophy arguably remains more relevant to modern neoliberalism than any of her other works mentioned due to its strong ties to the ideal nature of capitalism and the pulling-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality. Rand’s Objectivism is name-dropped a handful of times throughout the book and is given a definition in the glossary following the book’s content, but it is never adequately explored. I would have liked to see the philosophy explored further in the context of neoliberal policy rather than briefly mentioning the Nathaniel Branden Institute and the names of some particularly prominent figures that followed the philosophy, as the philosophy is central to Rand’s persona.
Another due criticism of Duggan’s Mean Girl is its lack of cohesion to the theme of neoliberal economic policy. The first three chapters, making up the majority of the book’s content, focus on building context for the fourth and final chapter, which could have easily stood alone as an essay rather than preceded by a short biography on Rand. For someone who is wholly unfamiliar with Rand’s work and philosophies (referred to her as “sense of life”), this extensive context is both relevant and original; for anyone else, it comes off as redundant, derivative, and without relevance to the central argument of the book. This primer often loses sight of neoliberalism as a whole and instead focuses on Rand’s life and the hyper-generalized forces that drove her work. The themes of neoliberalism are loosely referred to with Duggan’s “optimistic cruelty,” but the connection between this term and neoliberal ideology is not made clear until the final chapter. In fact, Duggan doesn’t formally define neoliberalism until the final chapter; this seems counterintuitive to her central argument, which relies upon neoliberalism as the product of Ayn Rand’s ideologies of capitalist greed and avoidance of altruism.
Regardless, Duggan articulates her argument seamlessly in the book’s final chapter, bringing the context of Rand’s life and work to the modern age of neoliberalism in the United States and the increasingly advanced technological development reminiscent of Rand’s aforementioned idea of European “civilization.” Briefly tracing the origins of neoliberalism and highlighting its core ideas, Duggan argues against the standard three pillars of neoliberalism as deregulation, privatization, and austerity, as posed by Naomi Klein (Morris, 2022). Rather, she states that corporate operations are “re-regulated,” allowing for the reconfiguration of state powers to redistribute wealth upwards and reinstate imperialism and colonial extraction in a modern, postcolonial context - exactly what Ayn Rand supported for the upwards progression of Western society (Duggan, 108). Duggan draws an inextricable connection between Rand and her student, Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve who oversaw the deregulation of the US financial system that eventually became responsible for the 2008 stock market crash. Rather than shunning neoliberalism as the cause of this crippling economic crisis, she posits that neoliberalism returned stronger as a “zombie,” including “more tax cuts, less regulation, and intensified theaters of cruelty” (Duggan, 85). Citing several prominent Western politicians from Barack Obama to Margaret Thatcher to Donald Trump (all who coincidentally claim to be fans of Ayn Rand and her work), Duggan proves that neoliberalism has only been bolstered in the modern era by Rand’s culture of selfishness. This is hard to disprove when thinking about recent political events like the near-abolition of the welfare system under the Clinton administration and Obama’s reliance upon Wall Street bankers to solve the 2008 economic crisis. Rand’s “every man for himself” mentality undoubtedly pervades neoliberal political thought in the United States today.
Lisa Duggan’s Mean Girl is an important work for understanding Ayn Rand’s important contributions to the modern neoliberalism that we as an American nation find ourselves entrenched in today. Duggan avoids overuse of pedantic language and opts for a simple yet compelling writing style to appeal to anyone interested in Rand’s highly influential work and its impacts on American politics. Following details of Rand’s pro-capitalist, anti-altruistic proclivities, she concludes the book by suggesting that the only way to undo Rand’s harmful pathos of greed and neoliberalism as a whole is to organize against it and build on the social solidarity that Rand worked hard to actively dismantle throughout her life. In times when neoliberalism only becomes more and more prominent each day as wealth inequality worsens and corporate exploitation and imperialism continues on, this analysis of Rand remains more relevant now than ever. Duggan emphasizes that we cannot let Ayn Rand’s toxic and antipathetic ways of thinking pervade society any more than it already has, and that a gross upheaval of her selfish school of thought is necessary to end the ongoing “season of mean” that she helped to inspire (Duggan, xiii).