Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophical novels’ are supposed to have had a great influence on the American Right, with their glorification of free enterprise and heroic male industrialists. With America now being ruled (once again) by a millionaire property developer, supported by the country’s three leading tech billionaires, and along capitalist lines (The Art of the Deal), I thought I ought to read at least one of them. I’ve tried once before with The Fountainhead, but gave up; it’s a very long and pedestrian book, and bored me stiff. I’m now fifty pages into Atlas Shrugged, and finding the same. I’ll persevere; but I may not finish it.
I imagine you’ll know about Rand: originally Alisa Zinovjevna Rosenbaum; an immigrant from Soviet Russia, whose ‘philosophy’ seems to be to be a marriage between Adam Smith and Friedrich Nietzsche.
(PS. Here’s an article on the modern-day equivalents of Rand’s fictional heroes: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/jan/29/silicon-valley-rightwing-technofascism.)
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It’s being reported that Trump has agreed with Musk that USAID should be completely shut down.
Some may be cynical about a supposed instrument of “soft power”. Personally, I think that, just as with the deportations, a lot of vulnerable and innocent people will suffer. Disgusting politics.
And sad to say, there are people in the UK ready to lead the same attack, such as Matt Goodwin of Reform.
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I forgot the Gary Morson link:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/02/13/with-liberals-like-these-russian-liberalism-paul-robinson/
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There’s an interesting programme featuring Ayn Rand in the first episode of Adam Curtis’s documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. Curtis seems to be a bit of a Marmite figure to commentators: his elucidation of hidden intellectual connections is revelatory to some and arbitrary and eccentric to others. But he’s undeniably a talented and thought-provoking documentary maker, and this particular episode has an odd synchronicity, for it highlights the links between Rand and the young tech Randian heroes (their self-perception) of Silicon Valley.
Right now, at the dawn of the Trump-Musk duumvirate, we are seeing a rash of articles about technofascism/technocaesarism/technoelitism focusing on the strange mixture of libertarianism and undemocratic elitism of such figures as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin and their possible influence on JD Vance.
Now, by another coincidental connection (I may be starting to channel Adam Curtis here), the New York Review of Books (free accounts available) has just published an article by Gary Morson on the peculiarities of Russian liberalism. In brief, he highlights (Barrington Moore-style) the lack of a middle-class base for liberalism, the distaste of many Russians for the inhumanity of Western capitalism (with references to Herzen and Dostoevsky) and finally the willingness to impose the market in a top-down authoritarian style in the Yeltsin era. The picture which he paints is of an aberrant (by Western standards) form of liberalism which mixes libertarianism with elitism or even authoritarianism. This description is sometimes applied to the ideas of Ayn Rand, who migrated to the United States in the 1920s from… Russia. And as I posted a while back, some of the greatest devotees of Musk’s brand of technoelitism can be found in Russia.
Although Morson discusses Russophobia I can’t help feeling there is a whiff of unconscious Russophobia in his own writing. I don’t believe that pro-Western Russians are all inescapably inclined to authoritarianism, though they are weak and isolated. A point made by the historian Nicolas Ledesma about Spain is relevant here: Spain’s transition from democracy, for all its limitations, was a success. That success stems to a large degree to the increasing openness of the regime to external influences prior to the death of Franco (outward migration, inward tourism), as well as to the internal engines of social change such as urbanisation. Worst of all, Morson ignores the well-documented complicity of Western advisers in the disastrous shock therapy of the early 90s in Russia. The consequences of that have been well-documented by none other than Adam Curtis, in a series called TraumaZone.
Some links:
A recent article on “technofascism”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/jan/29/silicon-valley-rightwing-technofascism
Adam Curtis on Ayn Rand (part one of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2pqw7a
Adam Curtis’s TraumaZone part one (there are seven episodes in all, all on YouTube)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wf5lT7zR50&list=PL9eKQjNu1CogsfzC8DvZM0SgpujW2hVUD
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Thanks! Terrific.
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