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Sanford's essay on Ayn Rand reveals as much about him as her

November 6, 2009 —

Ayn Rand is hot. An intellectual heroine of the teabaggers, her novels, “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” are selling briskly again, while her life is the subject of a couple of recent biographies. One of these, “Ayn Rand and the World She Made,” by Anne C. Heller, got front-page treatment in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, while two books about John Maynard Keynes – whose economic ideas, although not the subject of cult enthusiasm, remain as relevant as the latest stimulus package – were relegated to page 13.

By far the most striking evidence of Rand’s resurgence, however, is an essay in this week’s Newsweek magazine by one of her better-known contemporary admirers: South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

How a governor in disgrace, separated from his wife and on the brink of impeachment, could find the time to write an essay about the philosopher who eschewed what she tidily described as “altruism” in favor of unfettered selfishness, personal ambition and unshackled capitalism is a good question. But the question may be its own best answer.

Whether it was the best use of Sanford’s time or not, “Atlas Hugged” – as the essay is titled – provides us with a fascinating glimpse into the contradictions both of Sanford’s own personality and the philosophy which shaped it.

Straight away, in the first paragraph, Sanford makes a more earnest effort to face up to these contradictions than more liberal reviewers of Heller’s biography have attempted. In his youth he was “blown away” by the power of Rand’s ideas about “the power of the free individual,” he writes. But with the bitter wisdom of experience – that isn’t how he puts it, but the facts speak for themselves – Sanford writes that he has become more critical of her philosophy, “because it doesn't include the human needs we have for grace, love, faith, or any form of social compact.” Adulterer though he may be, Sanford shows more moral intelligence in these words than the religious conservatives who have put “Atlas Shrugged” beside the Bible on their bookshelves.

Sanford is clear-eyed enough to note that this putative enemy of totalitarianism allowed Nathaniel Branden, her principle disciple and lover, to circulate a list of rules for her followers that held up “Atlas Shrugged” as “the greatest human achievement in the history of the world” and Rand herself as the “supreme arbiter” of moral questions.

There is an distant echo in this essay of the wounded George Wallace, reconsidering his racial views, but Sanford can’t take his self examination quite that far. He avoids altogether the question of how much these ideas may have perverted his own personal life, focusing instead on the public arena. Rand’s “essential truth,” he writes, is that “government doesn’t know best.” And in that sense, he concludes, she is “more relevant than ever.”

For my money, the essential truth that has kept Rand’s books in print since her death in 1982 was best expressed by another South Carolinian, the soul singer James Brown, when he said, “They don’t want you to be Einstein in an ABC world.”

That he was able to express so succinctly what Rand strained to say in thousands of pages of wooden prose is no accident. James Brown was, with all his imperfections, a true innovator, and he understood toadyism and the squelching of the creative drive better than Rand, for all that she railed against it, ever could.

Her visionary architects and captains of industry have none of the idiosyncrasies of a real Frank Gehry or Bill Gates. They are instead square-jawed stick figures, wandering through her novels from one long-winded polemic to the next. Businessmen, from Alan Greenspan to Ted Turner to Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, have expressed admiration for her books, but it’s not because they’re really like her idealized characters. It’s because they’d like to be.

Rand came by her hatred of collectivism honestly, as the daughter of a Jewish pharmacist in Saint Petersburg oppressed by the Bolsheviks. But in its essence, her philosophy is less economic than personal, and very much of the Hugh Hefner variety. Selfishness, good and bad, of necessity plays a role in economic life, but in a manner far more complex than anything Rand attempted to describe. (If there are no Bill Gates in her narratives, there are no Bernie Madoff, either.) In the end, Rand's ideas come down to the glorification of selfishness at a much more juvenile level, the sort that comes with the avoidance of personal responsibility.

What really gives her overstuffed philosophy its lasting allure is all the stuff Sanford avoids talking much about, but surely absorbed in his youthful zeal for her works: The purple-prose passion which stretches between the diatribes about collectivism, and her own personal life, which made a virtue of unfaithfulness. She was a high-minded tramp, with the persuasive power to lead many -- like the governor -- down the same path.