Ayn Rand's Left-Libertarian Legacy

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Today is Ayn Rand’s birthday.

Last year, for her centenary, I wrote about Rand’s legacy for libertarians generally. This year I want to write about her legacy for left-libertarians in particular.

Rand’s legacy? For left-libertarians? Such a proposal might well engender skepticism. Sure, Rand’s critical attitude toward religion, tradition, and “family values” has sometimes led paleolibertarians to view her as a lefty; but on a broad range of other issues she is easily viewed as decidedly right-leaning. Consider:

• On issues of war and peace, Rand denied that the U.S. was an imperial power; dismissed the military-industrial complex as “a myth or worse”; advocated censoring antiwar activists; favoured entangling alliances with Israel, Taiwan, and other tripwire regions; and saw no moral problem with bombing innocent civilians. (In fact she wrote an unproduced screenplay celebrating the development of the atomic bomb.)



• On the domestic front, Rand cooperated with HUAC; sided with cops and bureaucrats against the 60s student movement; defended copyright censorship and patent protectionism; said she wished she could do for McCarthy what Zola did for Dreyfus; and – despite the corporate class’s secure hold on state power – called big business a “persecuted minority.”



• In cultural matters too, Rand could often be profoundly conservative: she attacked feminism and homosexuality; declared environmentalism per se to be anti-civilisation; denied value to nonwestern cultures (calling Arabs “savages,” for example); promoted male supremacy (e.g., declaring man the “metaphysically dominant sex,” insisting that only men were qualified for the Presidency, and glamorizing rape in her fiction); and even assailed abstract art.

Yes, alas, all that is true; but it’s not the whole story. There is another side to Rand’s legacy that should not be lost sight of.

• At a time when many libertarians tended to think of their movement as a sub-variety of conservatism, Rand’s insistence that she was not conservative but radical, her break with the Buckleyite right (five years before Rothbard’s), and her recognition that mainstream liberalism was fascist rather than socialist were important factors in laying the groundwork for libertarians’ ideological awakening and re-emergence as a movement separate from conservatism.



• On foreign policy: Rand was less hawkish than she sometimes sounds – and certainly less hawkish than the Institute that today bears her name – for she opposed U.S. involvement in World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam; and Rand’s analysis of the interconnection between militarism and interest-group politics (see Chris Sciabarra’s discussion) amounts to a quite keen understanding of the military-industrial complex, whatever she preferred to call it.



• Likewise, the popular image of Rand as an apologist for big business obscures the fact that the majority of businessmen in her novels are unimaginative conformists, arbitrary and tyrannical toward their subordinates, and eagerly running to government for favours; the Hank Reardens and Dagny Taggarts are decidedly portrayed as exceptions. And her discussions of the rise of neofascism in America show that she recognised the sins of the business class in reality as well.



• Rand understood and emphasised the interlocking, systemic connections between governmental and cultural factors (see Chris’s book on this), recognising, as left-libertarians traditionally have, that activism directed toward changing government is futile without a more broadly based cultural transformation; and her analysis of tribalism and the anti-conceptual mentality is invaluable in understanding how racism, sexism, and nationalism operate.



• On feminism, Rand’s attitudes appear conflicted; yes, she said some very anti-feminist things, but she also championed women’s choice of career over domesticity; firmly defended the right to abortion; created one of the strongest independent heroines in literature (particularly for 1957!); and endorsed one of the founding classics of second-wave feminism, Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. The 19th-century left-libertarians understood the role of the ethics of self-sacrifice in maintaining the subjection of women, and Rand deserves credit for reviving, however incompletely, that diagnosis.



• As for art: in an early draft of We the Living, Rand wrote admiringly of the infiltration of Western abstract imagery into Soviet Russia: “laughing, defiant broken lines and circles cutting triangles, and triangles splitting squares, the new art coming through some crack in the impenetrable barrier.” So it seems she was not always immune to the expressive power of abstract art. Indeed, the entire Fountainhead could be seen as a hymn to abstract art – a fact that reportedly (and unfortunately) led her in later and more rigidified life to repudiate the account of architectural art she had defended in the novel. In short, the young Rand was a good deal less culturally conservative than the later Rand. (In fact, I have the impression that in earlier years she was generally more open-minded; would she have become such a fan of the egalitarian socialist Hugo or the Christian existentialist Dostoyevsky if she had first read them in 1960?)

It transpires, then, that there are in effect two Rands, or two strands in Rand: a left-libertarian, feminist, anti-militarist, anti-corporatist, benevolent, experimental strand, and a conservative, patriarchal, homophobic, flag-worshipping, boss-worshipping, dogmatic strand. Which strand represents the “true” Rand? Well, both of them; she just is precisely the person who tried to combine these two strands.

A better question is: which strand most accurately expresses her fundamental principles? And here it seems to me that the answer is: the left-libertarian strand. The conservative strand, as I see it, is in large part (not entirely – human psychology and intellectual development are complex matters, and I don’t mean to be offering some sort of reductionist account) an expression of Rand’s understandably hostile reaction to the Soviet environment in which she was raised. I suspect that she tended to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything (well, almost anything – not atheism, obviously, or contextual analysis) that reminded her of Soviet propaganda or was associated in any way with pro-Soviet sympathies. Hence anything that championed labour against capital, or denounced the United States as imperialistic, or otherwise savoured of left-wing critiques, was likely to trigger her ire. (Maybe this is the story with regard to art also. In the 1920s and 30s, when the Soviets were denouncing abstract art as an expression of western decadence, she liked such art and even found it liberating; in later years, living in the west where leftists had embraced abstract art, she came to detest it. Might it really be that simple? Certainly the Rand who wrote The Fountainhead was eminently equipped to answer the objections to abstract art raised by the later Rand.)

But if we leave aside the influence of anti-Soviet sentiment and simply consider in what direction a radical, contextual-analysis-oriented, secular, individualist, anti-traditionalist, anti-sacrificial libertarian ethic is most naturally developed – it’s left-libertarianism, man.