Conservative History Journal

To be quite precise, the question should be what is it about Ayn Rand’s followers? Supposedly libertarian, freedom loving, objectivist individuals they tend to be the angriest, most intolerant branch of the right or the conservative movement both in Britain and in America (and probably everywhere else, if they exist).

I was a little stunned by the reaction some Randroids (oops, one mustn’t call them that as they get really upset) displayed at Bill Buckley’s death. There was gloating and rejoicing around because the “evil genius” of the right had finally gone. Why? Because as editor of National Review, he published Whittaker Chambers’s rather negative review of Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”.

The story is that Rand had not bothered to read the review but proclaimed a kind of furious fatwa on it and on Chambers, one that her followers have faithfully adhered to ever since. What annoyed her more than anything, or would have done, if she had bothered to read the review, was Chambers’s conclusion that over the whole novel there hangs the miasma of fascistic intolerance and one hears a voice cry “Into the gas chamber, go”.

As a matter of fact, this is not inaccurate and Chambers had very finely tuned antennae for this sort of thing. Rand is intolerant of anyone who is too weak to enter her particular brand of utopia. What will happen to those? Chambers’s conclusion is not wrong.

The hatred for Chambers and Buckley has persisted to the point when Libertarians of the Randian persuasion were seen dancing metaphorically on the latter’s grave. Weird.

Now I have picked up traces of another bitter row. There has been a certain amount of unexplained movement around the conservative film site Libertas. The man, who under the moniker Dirty Harry has been the main blogger on it for a couple of years, has gone and set up his own extremely lively conservative film blog, Dirty Harry’s Place. (Highly recommended, incidentally, for anyone interested in film and shenanigans around it.)

Libertas, meanwhile, is being reclaimed by the founders Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, also founders of the conservative Liberty film festival. So far, the result of that has been twofold. One is that the blog is not updated as regularly as it was under Dirty Harry (and how I understand that problem) and the other is a mega-row on the subject of Libertas and its two founders, now main authors, on its readers’ forum.

I shall pass over the apparent dislike Apuzzo and Murty have engendered in their readers and viewers of the film festival because I know nothing about the truth of it. What was extraordinary is the venom brought out by Apuzzo’s casually critical reference to Rand, “Atlas Shrugged” and Randroids. The posting was about yet another delay in the filming of that book but Apuzzo was less than complimentary about novel and author.

That was enough to invoke howls of rage and cries of betrayal both on Libertas and on Dirty Harry’s Place. If they could, they would boil Jason Apuzzo in oil. But why?

Why cannot one criticize Ayn Rand exactly the same way as one criticizes other authors one agrees with in general terms but not in every way?

For what it is worth, here are my views on the subject: I have never managed to get through her novels, which are turgid and verbose. I know other people find them wonderfully inspiring but there is no accounting for tastes. The idea that they are among the greatest in modern literature with Mikhail Bulgakov, Anthony Powell or Robert Musil out there, strikes me as ludicrous.

I have, however, read a number of Rand’s essays and agreed with almost everything she said. In fact, let me go further. I agree with all the main ideas but find some of the details worrisome. In particular, I find the intolerance, clear in her writings and even clearer in her followers, deeply unpleasant and frightening. But much of her analysis of socialism and hypocritical corporatism is absolutely accurate and it would do our politicians a good deal of good to read those essays.

The point is that her ideas are very simple and straightforward. This makes her very popular and turns her followers into fanatics; it also makes her essays, after a while, uninteresting. When you read the fifth one and find that the same half a dozen ideas are being churned out in exactly the same way, you find yourself putting the book aside with qualified admiration.

Does that make me a traitor to the cause?