Corey Robin reviews the two new books on Ayn Rand, including my favorite among them by Jennifer Burns, in this week’s The Nation. It makes for a gripping read, if you can stand the posturing throughout.
The Nation serves up the predictable usual (wouldn’t it make life more interesting if political rags said something unpredictable from time to time?) but, even so, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read that Rand should not have been angry at the Soviets; on the contrary, the Soviets were her benefactors: “She got a college education thanks to the Russian Revolution, which opened universities to women and Jews and, once the Bolsheviks had seized power, made tuition free.”
There we see Robin’s core critique of Rand: in his view, Ayn should have stayed in Russia to experience the full glories of the socialist paradise rather than risk life and limb to come to the U.S. and then end up in Robin’s equivalent of the Gulag, which is of course Hollywood. He is absolutely aghast that she came to Hollywood “willingly, eagerly.”
I guess with some readers out there, this amounts to a devastating indictment?
Okay, it’s one thing to trumpet the communists, celebrate the Soviets, confuse Hollywood with a concentration camp, but surely, it would be too low even for The Nation to attempt to link Rand’s views with….Hitler. Well, apparently not: there are four or five paragraphs that do that very thing, however absurdly.
Robin must be following some sort of preset template that they give all reviewers. The only thing really fascinating here are the details he gleans from the books under review but even these are reported in the voice of the reviewer rather than to their source in the books themselves – a habit of reviewers I find extremely annoying but Rand herself would describe in more bitter terms.
To think that Henry Hazlitt was literary editor at The Nation between 1930 and 1933. They drove him away for refusing to endorse the central planning of the New Deal. He was astonished to see his old liberal friends come to embrace an obvious corporate/fascist scheme in which the government linked arms with industrial elites to muscle the population. Opposition to this very thing is what once defined what it meant to be a liberal. A review like this gives rise to the observation: these folks lost their way long ago.
