Six Myths About Ayn Rand and Her Uneasy Place in the Conservative Movement

Ask a journalist to name the philosopher of the American right and there is a good chance you will hear the name of a Russian-born novelist who thought God was a fiction, selfishness a virtue and conservatives a nuisance. It is a strange thing to say about a movement that goes to church. It is a stranger thing for the movement to say about itself.

So let us do what conservatives are supposed to do with any popular story: check it against the record. Ayn Rand deserves both fair credit and a fair reading, and she gets neither from the people who love her uncritically or from the people who sneer. Here are six claims, each tested, with a verdict.

Who she was, in brief

Alisa Rosenbaum was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. She lived through the Bolshevik Revolution, saw her family's business seized, left for the United States in 1926 and took the name Ayn Rand. She wrote the novel The Fountainhead (1943), which sold slowly and then enormously, and Atlas Shrugged (1957), a long novel about the producers of the world going on strike. She called her philosophy Objectivism: reality exists independently of anyone's mind, reason is the only way to know it, the proper moral purpose of life is one's own happiness, and the only social system consistent with those principles is laissez-faire capitalism. She set out the ethics in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), and she died in 1982.

Two terms must be pinned down, since both myths and arguments depend on them.

• Conservatism in the American sense draws on the Declaration, the Constitution, the Western moral tradition and, for most of its adherents, religious faith.
• Libertarianism is the political view that the state should be limited to protecting individual rights, with the widest possible private sphere. It is a family of positions, not one system.

Rand's views overlap with both and are identical to neither.

Myth one: Rand called herself a conservative

Verdict: false. She said the opposite, publicly and often. In the 1960s she wrote and spoke against the conservative label, and in her essay "Conservatism: An Obituary," published in her collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), she argued that conservatism lacked an intellectual base and leaned on religion and tradition rather than on reason. She described herself as a defender of capitalism and of reason, and she is on record as preferring the word "radical" for her role, since in her view the right had no consistent theory to conserve.

You can disagree with her about that. A large part of this site is a rebuttal of it. But the fact is that Rand wanted no membership card in the conservative movement and she refused it more than once.

Myth two: National Review embraced her

Verdict: false, and the opposite is nearer the truth. William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review in 1955 to give the postwar American right a serious magazine and to hold its factions together. Rand's Atlas Shrugged appeared in 1957 and the magazine reviewed it in its issue of December 28, 1957. The reviewer was Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist spy who had become one of the right's most formidable writers.

Chambers's review was devastating. He argued that the novel's tone was dictatorial, that its materialism made it a cousin of the very philosophy it opposed, and that from its pages came a voice commanding dissenters to the gas chamber. He did not deny that the book had passion. He said that its philosophy of reason without transcendence led, if you followed it, to a human being reduced to a producing machine, a view he saw as the mirror of what he had left behind in Communism. I recommend reading Whittaker Chambers Told Americans the Cold War Was a Contest of Faiths to see what he meant by the two faiths.

The review became a landmark of the right's argument with itself. Over the following years National Review published other critiques of Rand and of Objectivism, and the project of "fusionism," the effort, associated with Frank Meyer and championed in Buckley's magazine, to join libertarian-minded and traditionalist conservatives, set the movement on a path of its own. Look at the sequence in Buckley Policed the Fringe, and the Right Grew Stronger for It and Frank Meyer, the Ex-Communist Who Married Liberty to Virtue. Rand's circle in turn rejected the magazine. She was no member of that family, and she knew it.

Myth three: Objectivism is the same as libertarianism

Verdict: false. Rand drew the line herself, forcefully. She rejected the libertarian movement that grew in the late 1960s and 1970s, and she said she did not want to be associated with it, partly because she thought many of its adherents borrowed her ideas without her philosophy's foundations, partly because she opposed anarchism. She held that government has a proper, limited role: police, courts and a military, funded voluntarily. An Objectivist who agreed with every particular of her system would still not be a libertarian in the movement's usual sense, because Objectivism is a complete philosophy, covering metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and libertarianism is a political position that can rest on many foundations.

The distinction matters for conservatives. Plenty of libertarians have allied with the right on taxes, regulation and spending, and conservatives who value that alliance should not confuse it with a shared worldview. A cousin can vote with you without being at your table.

Myth four: she backed every Republican

Verdict: false, and the pattern was more complicated. Rand was active in politics at moments in her life. She volunteered for Wendell Willkie's presidential campaign in 1940, a fact her biographers record, and she spoke and wrote about elections afterwards. But she was no party loyalist. She criticised politicians of both parties, and in her last public lecture, in 1981, she attacked the religious right's push to write its moral views into law. She also took positions that most conservatives reject. She supported the legal availability of abortion, and she was an outspoken atheist.

I will not try to give you a complete scorecard of her votes, because I do not have a record I can state with certainty and I would rather not invent one. The relevant point is simpler: someone who rejected the party's religion, its social positions and its moral foundations cannot fairly be described as its devoted supporter. She was an ally on economics and an opponent on much else.

Myth five: her atheism and her ethics were minor disagreements

Verdict: false, and this is the one conservatives should take most seriously. Rand's rejection of altruism was not a quibble. She held that the moral ideal of self-sacrifice was destructive, and she contrasted it with what she called rational self-interest. Conservatives, whether religious or not, tend to hold that a decent society depends on duties to others: to family, to neighbours, to the poor, to the country. The Judeo-Christian tradition asks for charity, humility and sacrifice, and most conservatives hold that a society without those virtues does not long survive.

Here is the strongest form of Rand's case, so you cannot say I ducked it. She argued that the demand for sacrifice had been the favourite tool of tyrants: the party, the nation or the class always claimed the individual's life for the greater good. There is a great deal of historical weight behind that charge. Anyone who has read Solzhenitsyn's Line Through Every Human Heart Is Where Conservatism Starts knows how often "the greater good" has been the password to a prison.

The conservative reply is that the answer to coerced sacrifice is not the rejection of sacrifice but its freedom. A father who gives up his evenings for his child is not a victim of altruism; he is practising the oldest virtue there is. Charity that is chosen, in family, church and neighbourhood, is the opposite of the state's coerced version. Conservatives have been making that point ever since. A philosophy that cannot explain why a mother is not a sucker, and why a soldier is not a fool, has left something out. The tradition of voluntary giving is well treated in Gratitude Is a Conservative Virtue, and Ingratitude Fuels Every Revolution.

Myth six: she had no lasting influence on the movement

Verdict: false, and here the fairness the conservative movement owes her comes in. Whatever you think of her philosophy, she changed how millions of Americans thought about capitalism. Before her, the defence of the free market was usually offered as a matter of efficiency: it produces more stuff. Rand offered a moral defence: that the person who produces wealth by his own effort and exchanges it by consent is doing something good, and that the achiever deserves honour rather than apology. In a century when the intellectual class treated business as a necessary evil, that was a bracing, even revolutionary, claim.

Many Americans first met the case for freedom in her novels, at an age when they were deciding what to think. Some stayed with Objectivism, others moved on to conservatism or libertarianism or something else, and a number of them have testified, in print, that her books started their thinking. That counts for something. A movement should be grateful for anyone who sends it new readers.

Her particular contribution can be summarised in three points that conservatives can accept without accepting her system.

1. Production is a moral achievement. The person who builds something of value has done good, not merely acquired money. See Markets Reward Serving Strangers, and That Is a Moral Achievement.
2. Coercion is the enemy. The use of force to compel peaceful people is the mark of tyranny, in every form it takes.
3. Ideas matter. She treated philosophy as the thing that moves history, which is what a serious movement must believe.

But a conservative also notes what she missed. She underestimated the family, the community and the faith that make the free market possible. The economist Wilhelm Röpke argued that markets depend on moral foundations markets do not themselves produce; see Wilhelm Röpke Defended Markets and Warned They Need Something Beyond Them. And Friedrich Hayek wrote, in an essay titled "Why I Am Not a Conservative," about the separate challenge of defining where a free economy's friends stand. See Hayek Wrote Why I Am Not a Conservative, and He Had a Point Worth Facing.

Why the myths persist

There is a reason the first five claims keep circulating, and it is worth a minute, because the reasons are about us as much as about her.

The media like a simple map. A single philosopher of the right gives a reporter a tidy story: here is the thinker, here are the followers, here is the policy. The real map has more rooms in it. The right is a coalition of traditionalists who think the West's moral inheritance is the point, free-market economists who think prices are the point, national-security hawks who think the defence of the country is the point, and plain citizens who want to be left alone to raise their families. Each group has a favourite author and a favourite grievance. Treating any one author as the movement's oracle flattens all of that.

Rand's own admirers contribute to the confusion. A reader who finds Atlas Shrugged at nineteen and agrees with every page is tempted to believe that a movement he sympathises with must agree with the book. It does not, and the disagreement is not a betrayal. Coalitions are built from people who agree on enough to work together and disagree on enough to keep arguing. That is how a free movement behaves, and it is a good deal healthier than a movement with an official philosopher.

And some opponents find the myth useful. If the right's philosophy is Rand's, then the right is the party of selfishness, and the case against it makes itself. The record above answers that charge. The movement's mainstream has always insisted on duty, family, faith and charity, which is exactly what she rejected. The answer to a caricature is the fact, and the fact is that the movement and the novelist parted company in public, in print, in 1957.

What the Founders would make of it

A last test: the Declaration of Independence. It says that all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Rand liked the second and third of those and the principle of individual rights. She did not accept the first clause, the Creator. The Founders' view was that rights have a source higher than the state, and that the source is God. If that source is removed, one has to argue that rights come from nature or from reason, as she did, and the argument becomes harder to hold when a majority or a regime says otherwise.

That is not a small matter. It explains why many conservatives, even those sympathetic to her economics, have kept their distance. A free society that rests only on a theory is a free society waiting for a better theory to come along. The Founders thought it should rest on something that did not change.

The case in brief

1. Rand never called herself a conservative; she rejected the label and its dependence on religion and tradition.
2. National Review did not embrace her; its 1957 review by Whittaker Chambers was a famous rejection, and Buckley's project was to build a movement without her system.
3. Objectivism is a complete philosophy, not libertarianism, and she disowned the libertarian movement.
4. She was not a party loyalist, and her atheism, her rejection of altruism and her views on social questions set her against most of the movement.
5. Her moral defence of production changed how many Americans think about capitalism, and conservatives can honour that while holding that freedom needs the family, faith and virtue she undervalued.

What you can do: read the opening pages of The Fountainhead and then Chambers's 1957 review, and talk through where each is right with a friend who disagrees with you.