Terence Corcoran on “the most dangerous woman in America”:
Weird, I thought. Why would a world-famous economist, followed by millions, advisor to UN officials and presidents, launch into a personal attack on a novelist who’s been dead more than 30 years by citing one of her novels and paraphrasing the words of one of her characters? How many people have even heard of Ayn Rand? And who the hell cares what one of her characters said in a novel published 60 years ago?
Lots of people, it appears. Ayn Rand may be long dead, but she seems to have been resurrected as the most dangerous woman in America. Judging by the barrage of attacks and references in the media, one can only conclude that Ayn Rand is a pervasive and increasingly powerful force in U.S. politics, possibly on the brink of toppling the prevailing orthodoxies of modern American liberalism.
Media references to Ayn Rand have skyrocketed over the last year, many of them elaborate putdowns. Her name is dropped like a hand grenade into articles and commentaries, as if readers will instantly recognize the menace. Her name has become an explosive device — like Karl Marx’s or Chairman Mao’s — apparently enough to rankle and send shivers down spines.
[. . .]
Rand’s supporters appear to be moving in on Washington’s Cato Institute, a libertarian bastion long headed by Ed Crane but now presided over by John Allison, the Ayn Rand Institute board member. Allison, a former banker from North Carolina, with funding from the billionaire Koch brothers, themselves characters out of Occupy/liberal nightmares, has said he aims to reshape Cato along Randian lines.
This is war. Rand condemned liberals and conservatives, but had even stronger views about libertarians. In a 2009 biography of Rand, author Jennifer Burns records that during Rand’s public speeches, she called libertarians “scum,” “intellectual cranks” and “plagiarists.”
It’s hard to tell today who has more to gain or lose from the seeming resurrection of Ayn Rand as an ideological enemy of the statists. She had no time for most other worldviews, right, left or libertarian. She would have fought the Cato Institute, she would have rejected the Tea Party movement, and she would have sought to demolish the Jeffrey Sachs of the world.
