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Thursday
Last month blogger Thom Hartmann of Substack’s Hartmann Report wrote two illuminating essays (here and here) on the libertarianism of some of our Trump-supporting billionaires. Why would figures such as Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk be signing on to a philosophy that wants to strip Americans of basic social safety net protections and regulations? Their views, Hartmann contends, can be traced back in part to two highly influential novels, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
As an added bonus, Hartmann also alerts us to Trump’s enthusiasm for The Fountainhead.
Given that these billionaires are very close to achieving their dream—their acolyte J.D. Vance in the White House with a declining Donald Trump—it’s important to look closely at what the novels say and how they came to be written. But first let’s remind ourselves of the GOP’s 40-year love affair with libertarianism.
That’s how long it’s been, Hartmann points out in the first of his two essays, since rightwing billionaires began
pouring money into libertarian ideas, setting up think tanks and funding hundreds of college professors nationwide to preach their libertarian ideology. They have also “set up organizations nationwide and in every state to bring Republican legislators together with lobbyists to craft libertarian ‘corporate friendly’ legislation that consistently enriches the top 1% and screws average Americans.”
Billionaire David Koch, who ran for vice-president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, advocated privatizing the post office, ending all public schools, giving Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, ending all taxation on the wealthy, terminating all forms of welfare, regulating all corporate oversight, and selling off much of government land to billionaires and large corporations.
While Koch never won public office, he found a sympathetic ear in Ronald Reagan, who did win in 1980. While railing against government programs, Regan began the massive shift of wealth from the American middle class to the wealthiest Americans, which accounts for the Gilded Age kind of imbalances we see today.
Trump continued this trend. Hartmann notes that libertarians got a taste of what was possible in 2017, with Trump
installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, a billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department.
And then there was Trump’s chief of staff, who (Hartmann points out) “said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven died) would actually be a public good.”
In addition to making the rich richer and everyone else poorer, however, there is also a mean streak to libertarianism. Hartmann lays out some of the results in the form of a series of questions:
How is it that Republicans so often embrace casual cruelty like tearing mothers from their children or throwing pregnant women in poverty off public assistance? Why have 11 GOP-controlled states refused to this day to expand Medicaid for their 30 million minimum-wage working people when the federal government covers 90 percent of the cost? Why are Republicans so committed to destroying Medicare and Social Security?
I’ve long known that the Reaganite maxim that “greed is good” has its roots in Ayn Rand’s novels, but until I read Hartmann’s essay I didn’t know that she based Howard Roark, the protagonist of Fountainhead, on the most notorious psycho killer of the 1920s.
I also didn’t know that Trump himself was a fan of The Fountainhead although, if there’s any book I could imagine him reading (besides the speeches of Adolph Hitler, which first wife Ivana reports he kept by his bedside), it would be this one. After all, it’s about a maverick architect who is enthusiastic about skyscrapers and who has contempt for “the collective” that pressure him to conform to their vision. Roark also gains the adoration of a woman after raping her. Here’s a section from that scene:
[S]he felt the blood beating in her throat, in her eyes, the hatred, the helpless terror in her blood. She felt the hatred… She fought in a last convulsion. Then the sudden pain shot up… …and she screamed. Then she lay still.
It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him–and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.
In a poster of the 1949 King Vidor film, incidentally, we see Gary Cooper holding a struggling but yielding Pat Neil in his arms with the tagline, “No man takes what’s mine!” Toxic masculinity on steroids, one might say.
In an interview with USA Today’s Kirsten Powers, Trump said of Fountainhead, “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to … everything.” He told Powers that he also likes how Roark “rages against the establishment.”
In the book, Roark is kicked out of his architecture school because he refuses to do what everyone else is doing and then proceeds to have a rocky career because he insists on his own vision. When someone makes changes to one of his designs, he blows the building up. In the end, however, he gains adherents and builds a skyscraper that serves as a monument to human achievement. He and his former rape victim (now his wife) meet atop the building at the book’s close.
What Rand wrote about Roark at the time also applies to Trump:
He has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.
Now, for the psycho killer. In 1927 a man named Edward Hickman kidnapped a girl, demanded a ransom from her father, killed her,, and then staged her to look like she was still alive when the father showed up with the ransom money. But while the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s,” Rand was entranced. As she saw it, Hickman’s greatest quality was “his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.” This was why the public demonized him, she said, noting in her diary,
It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”
Perhaps Rand saw, in Hickman, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov aspires to be a Nietzschean Übermensch and seeks to prove to himself that he is superior to others by his ability to kill—in his case, an old lady pawnbroker. But unlike Rand’s flat characters, Raskolnikov has a complex inner life, which includes self-doubt and guilt. It’s as though Rand saw in Hickman a successful Raskolnikov, one who could confidently and coldly say at his trial (as she observed in her notes), “I am like the state: what is good for me is right.”
But if Roark is a successful Raskolnikov, Rand is a failed Dostoevsky. Both had traumatic early experiences: while he was almost executed as a nihilist, spared only at the last moment, she saw her father’s pharmacy looted by the Bolsheviks. But whereas he developed a depth of soul following the incident, she was left only with implacable resentment and a desire to make others pay.
Could it be that Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Musk see themselves as supermen themselves, superior to democracy and the mob and entitled to treat the country as their plaything. Certainly reading The Fountainhead could bolster them in that belief. Whether or not they, like Trump, are Rand fans, they have signed on to a movement that she helped set in motion and that her novels, never out of print, continue to promote.
My favorite response to Rand is by blogger John Rogers, who accounts for the success of Rand’s other novel (Atlas Shrugged) as follows:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
In Trump, we certainly have all the qualities of someone unable to grow up. If he and these billionaire supporters succeed in imposing their will on the United States, God help us all.
One other thought: In a thoughtful but depressing Atlantic essay yesterday, former Republican Tom Nichols attributes Trump’s enduring popularity to a Rand-type resentment and believes that nothing Kamala Harris does will be able to penetrate it. As he puts it,
For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting….
Some Trump voters may believe his lies. But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge. Harris cannot propose any policy, offer any benefit, or adopt any position that competes with that feeling.
“The hard choice of civic virtue,” Nichols concludes, “will never match the rush of racism, hatred, and revenge that Trump offers in its place.”
