REMEMBER AYN RAND? WELL, WELCOME TO HER WORLD

I’ve been boning up on writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. For even tentative, play-it-by-ear intellectuals of my generation—and I consider myself part of that demographic—her name is very familiar. We’ve been hearing quotes by Rand since we were in junior high. She was a popular author during the Red Scare era in which we were growing up, when the government saw Commies behind every lamp post. During that era, she was an icon of the American right, somebody who had been-there-done-that, since she was born and reared in Russia, and lived the 1917 Revolution and its aftermath in her most formative childhood years.

That experience, and its devastating effects on her family, instilled in Rand a deep hatred of the State and of State control. Her entire philosophy as a writer would turn on an axis comprised of the individual. It is ironic, then, that the place where she first formed the intellectual tools to generate that philosophy was in the Russian State university system, which, under the Czar, prior to the Russian Revolution, was closed to women.

So why my renewed interest? Well, while Rand’s name may have faded from popular view during the post-McCarthyite Protest Era, when liberal thought and critical reasoning were on the rise, it has made a comeback since the advent of Silicon Valley and its self-styled billionaire “tech-libertarians”, who, in the current era of MAGA-fueled oligarchy, are fast becoming tech-fascists.

Born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum into a Jewish bourgeois family in the imperial Russian capital of St. Petersburg, twelve years prior to the Russian Revolution, she would, as an adult, start going by her pen name, Ayn Rand.  From age twelve through her formative teen years, Rand would live through the disruption of her family’s way of life as a result of the 1917 October Revolution and the overthrow of the czarist Russian Empire.

Ayn Rand as a schoolgirl

Rand’s father was a successful St. Petersburg pharmacist and the family had enjoyed a comfortable life under the Russian Empire. But following the Revolution, the Bolsheviks would take over her father’s business and turn it into a State drugstore, plunging the Rosenbaums into financial crisis. They would take refuge in Crimea, which, initially, remained under anti-Communist White Russian control. But after Crimea fell to the Bolsheviks in 1920, Rand’s family returned to St. Petersburg, which the Soviets had renamed Petrograd, in 1921, and Rand graduated from high school there. In Petrograd, her family lived a precarious life of relative poverty

These formative years left Rand with a deep loathing for not only Soviet domination, but also for any sort of State control or oversight. These were the sentiments that would germinate during her intellectual development and eventually lead her to be a radical icon of conservative laissez-faire capitalism, her very specific version of which came to be known as “Objectivism”.

Among the first to enroll when the Russian Revolution opened higher education to women, Rand started attending Petrograd State University at sixteen, majoring in history. She would again find reason to loath the Communist government when she and other young women from the former middle class were removed from the university rolls shortly before graduation in a Bolshevik purge of the bourgeoisie. But complaints regarding the purge filed by a group of foreign scientists later visiting the university led to her reinstatement, and she graduated in 1924 from the now once again renamed Leningrad State University.

After graduation, Rand did postgrad studies in Screen Arts at the State Technicum in Leningrad. It was there that she wrote  a monograph on Polish actress Pola Negri. That monograph was destined to become Rand’s first published literary work. It was from that time that she started going by her pseudonym, Ayn Rand.

At the end of 1925, Rand was granted a US visa to visit relatives in Chicago. Despite having a visitor’s visa, she decided to stay on, and in February of 1926, she relocated to New York City. But her dream at the time was to become a screenwriter, so she only stayed with relatives in New York for a few months—long enough to improve her English—before striking out for Hollywood.

Cecil B. DeMille

Rand’s wasn’t the sad story of the failed writer who follows her dreams to Hollywood, only to be dashed against the rocky cliffs of the Pacific that bathes the shores of LA. It wasn’t, in other words, a tragic story written by Day of the Locust author Nathaniel West.  No, this was the Immigrant Girl Makes Good tale. While trying to break into the Tinsel Town in-crowd, Rand had a chance meeting with blockbuster director Cecil B. DeMille, who, at the time, was working on his King of Kings project. DeMille invited Rand to be an extra in the picture, and that led to her landing a subsequent job as a junior screenwriter. While working on the King of Kings set, Rand met Frank O’Connor, a young actor, and they decided to marry in 1929. Now the wife of an American citizen, Rand was granted a Permanent American Resident visa. And by March of 1931, she had become a naturalized American citizen.

Already the following year, Rand chalked up her first literary success, selling a screenplay entitled Red Pawn to Universal Studios. Despite this early coup, the film project was shelved and the movie was never produced. But in 1934, Rand’s courtroom drama, Night of January 16^th, was staged in a Hollywood theater, and opened on Broadway the following year. It was a unique work in which, at each night’s performance, a jury was chosen from the audience, and, according to its decision, one of two different endings for the play would be performed. It was successful enough that Rand and O’Connor moved from the West Coast back to New York.

Frank O'Connor

Her next big project was a novel entitled We The Living. Set in Soviet Russia, it was quasi-autobiographical. But the main philosophical thrust of the book was what was to become Rand’s recurrent theme, the individual versus the State. Book sales in the US did not do well. The publisher allowed the novel to run out of print. Undaunted, Rand wrote a stage play version for Broadway, but it was an utter flop. It could be argued that the story was ahead of its time. In the post-World War II days of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, anything that poked its finger in the eye of Soviet Russia had a good chance for success.  Rand refloated an edition of We The Living in 1959, which ended up selling more than three million copies.

By then, however, Rand was already a successful author. At the end of 1935 she began writing what was to become her first highly acclaimed book, The Fountainhead. It was what would become a trademark Rand story, the main lessons of which focused on Rand’s belief that independent thought and personal integrity are the ultimate sources of human progress. That personal integrity trumps conformity—true creators need to remain authentic and true to themselves in the face of society’s demand for collective approval and, thus, for mediocrity. And that the true creator will always be faced with the disapproval of a society bent on the conformity of the masses and that resents individual greatness.

But midway through the writing of The Fountainhead, Rand put the project aside to write a novella called Anthem. This dystopian book too depicted a grim future in which totalitarian collectivism reigned. So fundamentalist was this world that the personal pronoun “I” was banned from use, and was completely replaced by “we”. However, the main characters in this story eventually make their escape from the collectivist world and, in the new world that they found, rediscover “I”, and, as such, the power of individualism.

Rand couldn’t get a single publisher in the US to touch that book with a ten-foot pole. But she was able to sell it in England. In Britain it would remain in print. And, as in the case of We The Living, the story would come into its own in the US in the mid-1940s, when a revised version was finally printed and ended up selling three-and-a-half million copies.

But before that, in 1943, The Fountainhead handed Rand her first really smashing success.  The novel was about Howard Roark, a fictional architect with an uncompromising attitude toward creativity. He struggles against “second-handers”, the name he gives to those who steal ideas, attempting to live through the creativity of others while placing themselves and their interests above those of the true creators.

In the book, the protagonist fails to succeed because he won’t conform. He prefers poverty and obscurity to mediocrity, refusing to change his unique architectural style or to compromise his integrity. He ends up being expelled from the school of architecture for refusing to adopt traditional rules of design. He eventually takes up a one-man crusade against his critics and the professional establishment who insist on conformity.

The Fountainhead reaches a climax when Roark dynamites a housing project that he was hired to design because the construction firm introduces alterations that he never approved. The dramatic trial that ensues is where Rand is able to expand on her radically individualistic stance regarding what she viewed as the sacred heroism of the individual and the pernicious effects of societies bent on conformity.

 A dozen publishers rejected the book project before it was finally accepted by Bobbs-Merrill Company, thanks to respected editor Archibald Ogden, who read the advance on the manuscript, fell in love with it, and told management that if they didn’t publish it, he would resign.  The deadline that the publisher imposed, however, was so brutal that Rand started taking benzedrine in order to work the long hours necessary to finish and turn in the book on deadline. She would remain hooked on benzos for the rest of her life.

The book was an instant success and an eventual bestseller. The same year that it was published, Warner Bros. picked up the film rights and made the movie version starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The sale of the book to Hollywood also landed Rand regular work as a screenwriter.

Gary Cooper in a scene from
The Fountainhead

In Hollywood, she became heavily involved in politics and the infamous investigations into alleged communist activities in the movie business. She formed part of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an anti-communist organization—in which John Wayne, Ronald Reagan and Hedda Hopper were also prominent members—that worked in tandem with the McCarthyite US House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was conducting an anti-Red witch-hunt throughout the country but with particularly zealous focus on the movie industry. She would testify as a “friendly witness” against the film entitled Song of Russia, which she depicted as soft on Soviet communism and as portraying life as much better in Russia than it really was.

In her contribution to the committee’s hearings, she also lashed out at the popular picture The Best Years of Our Lives, which she accused of painting an unflattering portrait of American business, but, in the end, the committee refused to allow her arguments regarding the film to enter into the official record. Clearly, her stance against leftist ideals was even more radical than that of the nefariously paranoid House committee.

And this is where the Silicon Valley billionaires embrace the ideas of Ayn Rand—in her ardent defense of business and her skepticism regarding democratic rule. For Rand, business was where all progress lay, and as such, she felt government should get out of the way and let business lead the world.  In her day, it would have been a lot harder to predict where that sort of “leadership” might lead, but ultimately, those who opposed her views had a much more prudent read of the future, and could foresee exactly what we are witnessing today: a world in which a felonious, psychopathic narcissist like Donald Trump is president of the United States, in which the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is starving the world’s poorest children, in which empathy is considered a fatal weakness, and in which the upper one percent of the population has accumulated fifty percent of the world’s wealth and is hell bent on continuing to further impoverish the common people.

The success of The Fountainhead suddenly made Rand part of the New York right’s intelligentsia. She was swamped with reader correspondence telling her how much the book had influenced their thinking. Some of these admirers were right-wing influencers in their own spheres. In the early fifties many of them gathered on the weekends at Rand’s New York apartment.

Rand with Alan Greenspan during
 the Gerald Ford administration

Among bright young minds who were regulars for those weekend philosophical and political discussions was a thirty-plus Alan Greenspan. Greenspan, up to that time, had been a successful jazz musician, who had studied at Julliard and would later play sax and clarinet with the swing band of jazz great Stan Getz. But he had lately begun following in his economist father’s footsteps and delved into serious university studies of economic sciences. Greenspan would eventually be known as a leading conservative American economist and would serve as the highly influential chairman of the Fed, America’s central bank. 

It was during this period that Rand wrote and published her seminal work, Atlas Shrugged. Riding on the wave of The Fountainhead, this new book, though brutally panned by literary critics and intellectuals alike, would also become an international bestseller. The negative reaction of intellectuals discouraged Rand, who never wrote another work of fiction and devoted her time to her philosophical school of Objectivism. She was aided in this task by her erstwhile lover and right-wing intellectual Nathaniel Branden. Branden created the Nathiel Branden Institute (NBI) basically to espouse Rand’s Objectivism, and NBI became an outlet for many of Rand’s articles and studies.

As with the radical laissez-faire trend of today’s Silicon Valley tech-billionaires, traditional intellectuals found Rand’s Objectivism lacking in rigor and objectivity and they saw NBI as a narrowly-focused organization with an excessive reverence for Rand. They saw it more as a cult than a thinktank, with Rand as its goddess. But despite Rand’s mixed feelings regarding her rejection by much of the New York intelligentsia, and her decision to give up her successful career as a novelist, Atlas Shrugged basically and succinctly encompassed the tenets of her Objectivist philosophy.

Elon Musk

The book posits that rational thought is man's sole survival tool. It promotes the need to comprehend objective reality, and it rejects mysticism, emotion and religious faith. A philosophy that has, sadly, come of age in the Trump/Silicon Valley era, it also champions “rational self-interest” (read: egoism), meaning that people should pursue their own personal interests, and that individuals should never live to serve others. This clearly aligns with the ideas and actions of tech-billionaires like Peter Thiel and—particularly—Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who says that empathy is the "fundamental weakness of Western civilization," and who, as the head of Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—the main purpose of which was to strip funds from the State in order to fund billionaire tax cuts—gutted USAID, which had for decades saved lives worldwide through the provision of food, medical supplies and coverage of other human needs to millions of the world’s poorest people—a move that basically condemned hundreds of thousands of, especially, women and children to certain death.

Atlas Shrugged also celebrates “the virtue of productivity” and portrays industrialists and innovators (a posthumous shout-out to the tech-bros of Silicon Valley) as “heroic producers” who drive human progress and thus create both material and “spiritual” value. The book rejects altruism, positing that self-sacrifice is a destructive force that employs guilt as a means of penalizing competent achievement. As such, it proposed that the ideal society should be built on laissez-faire capitalism, in which voluntary trade transpires with no government coercion, taxation or regulation. This is precisely the argument of tech-billionaires and their lackeys (like House Speaker Mike Johnson) in Congress who believe Silicon Valley tech-bros should self-regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), even as credible AI experts warn that this advanced technology could kill everyone on earth by the end of the decade if urgent safeguards are not introduced.

Finally, Atlas Shrugged breaks society down into "makers" (creators of wealth) versus "moochers and looters" (those who rely on force or government mandates to confiscate wealth). Taken to today’s dystopian, but very real extremes, this plays to the argument of the upper one percent which is convinced that it deserves to accumulate the vast bulk of the world’s wealth with no obligation to return anything at all to society. And as AI continues to destroy jobs and to render labor increasingly obsolete, the tacit message is that only the wealthy deserve to survive, while the irrelevant poor are condemned to perish in a rich elite’s world.

Although Rand has long endured as an icon of the right—she was known as the “novelist laureate” of the Reagan White House—the    most consequential legacy she has bequeathed may not be to conventional conservative politics, but to the “techno-fascists” of Silicon Valley. That said, it would be completely unfair to call Ayn Rand the mother of techno-fascism. But at the same time, Rand has supplied Silicon Valley “libertarians” with a pseudo-ethical and, indeed, an heroic mythology that they have twisted into a scenario in which billionaire technology founders are “entitled” to operate above democratic constraint.

It is easy to understand, then, why there has been such renewed interest since the turn of the century in Rand’s work. Not, clearly, among the serious intellectuals of the American intelligentsia, but definitely among the tech-cultists of Silicon Valley extraction. By all accounts, the Rand revival has been formidable over the course of the past twenty years, even despite political science heavyweight Alan Wolfe’s having expressed what is seen as "the traditional academic view" of Rand, by declaring her a "nonperson among academics.”

Rand’s popularity among techno-authoritarian billionaires is due to her having posthumously provided them with something far more powerful than economic theory. What she has bequeathed them is her portrayal of “the morality of the exceptional individual.” In both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the “great creator” is portrayed as an heroic individual whose genius is continually obstructed by mediocre bureaucrats, collectivists and a society that demands that the exceptional serve the ordinary. Atlas Shrugged takes this idea to its extreme, since in that book, productive industrialists withdraw completely from society, leaving the collectivist system to collapse without them.

What is different about the techno-fascist billionaires of today is that they are not withdrawing in order to test the theory of whether democratic society will collapse without them. Instead, they have gone on the offensive, and with the help of their shill, Donald Trump, they are infiltrating the State and, indeed, the democratic society of the United States with the aim of destroying it from within. Not standing back and allowing democracy to collapse, as in Rand’s book, but rather, taking over in what is basically a techno-fascist coup, and forcing the system to collapse.

It is ironic that Rand had nothing but disdain for libertarians of any stripe, given that the techno-authoritarians continue to depict themselves as techno-libertarians—even though they long ago crossed the line from libertarianism to a new form of fascism. Rand dismissed libertarians as “the hippies of the right” and accused them of “anarchism”. Still, Rand’s industrial-creator-hero  mythology has been a veritable aphrodisiac for the Silicon Valley elite.

And so too has her narrative as a whole. In Rand’s tech-elitist world, the “logic” goes like this:

“I am a creator and an innovator. Government is inefficient. Democratic majorities do not understand innovation. Regulation constrains genius. I am exceptionally productive. Therefore, interference with me is interference with human progress itself.”

Atlas Shrugged depicted businessmen as “heroic, productive thinkers.” And it defined laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral economic system. Rand regarded even unlimited democracy as a form of “statism” incompatible with the independent rational individual. Her philosophy was clearly elitist and almost Darwinian in its concept. And this is what has appealed to tech-billionaires. But while in the philosophy of Rand the idea is that government should get out of the way of creators and allow them free rein to innovate, techno-fascists have reinterpreted this to mean “government has no moral or legal authority over me.” And that is the message being transmitted to the public by techno-shill Donald Trump, who has repeatedly violated laws and the rules of business first, and then let his opponents get tied up in the courts seeking to sue him.

Ayn Rand’s novels and philosophy were much more naïve and theoretical than the way in which they are being interpreted today. Just as each individual or segment of society has their own interpretation of philosophical works like the Bible, the Torah or the Koran, the techno-cultists of the far-right have pressed Rand’s writings into the service of their cause and interpreted them without nuance to suit their own radically anti-democratic take.

Classical libertarianism argues for limited government and individual freedom. There is nothing fascist about that idea, and true libertarians have a long history of anti-authoritarian traditions. But something much darker takes place when that philosophy is fused with extraordinary concentrations of private wealth, technological power and political influence.

In this case, the question ceases to be, “How much power should government have?” It becomes, instead, “Why should anyone or anything have the power to restrain me?”

And that question turns highly elitist and, hence, fascist when it goes still further and asks, “Why should democratic government have authority over people who are smarter, richer and more technologically capable than the government itself?”

This is where the rubber meets the road between simple techno-libertarianism and tech-fascism. And there is ever-increasing evidence that this is no longer a merely academic concern. This is real, and it is a clear and present threat to democracy, not only in the US, but worldwide as well. It is as if an arguably tentative and experimental idea has turned to cancer and metastasized throughout society, in the form of a rogue, lawless government, generously backed by equally rogue and lawless tech-billionaires.

Peter Thiel

Vice-President JD Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel is the clearest example. A major Silicon Valley investor, early Facebook investor, and one of the most influential figures in the tech-libertarian movement, he has openly rejected democracy. And his political philosophy has helped inspire a generation of techno-entrepreneurs and high-rolling investors. Le Monde has described Thiel as a libertarian billionaire whose skepticism toward democracy and hostility toward the state have helped make him an important bridge between Silicon Valley and Trumpism. But considering himself too restricted by government even in Trump’s Washington, Thiel recently took his billions elsewhere, setting up shop in Argentina, where Trump lapdog and president Javier Milei is likely to be even more forgiving, and indeed supportive, of his lawless power.

Herein lies another contradiction to Rand’s theories. While techno-fascists claim to represent libertarianism and to despise government, they actively seek to impose enormous influence on the State—as in the near co-presidency that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, exercised during the early days of Trump’s second term, and which he only gave up when it started affecting his bottom line at Tesla. Nor did he give it up completely, still acting today as an ideological Rasputin behind the scenes.

None of this is unintentional or spontaneous. It is a techno-authoritarian strategy. If you can weaken democratic institutions by backing Trojan horses like the Trump regime, privatize functions traditionally performed by the state, make governments dependent on your technology, and accumulate enough wealth to influence elections and public policy, you don't have to abolish government. You simply have to make government increasingly dependent on you, which is a completely different proposition from that of traditional libertarians. And so it is that Rand’s mythology surrounding the lone-wolf genius morphs into a false justification for the accumulation of unprecedented power and wealth. 

Suffice it to say that Elon Musk’s nearly one trillion-dollar net worth is greater than the GDPs of any of 174 countries worldwide, since there are only 25 nations on the planet whose GDPs get anywhere close to a trillion dollars. Musk could literally buy and sell any of a large number of countries like properties on a monopoly board. That includes his own native South Africa, which, as the largest economy on the African continent, has a GDP of less than half a trillion dollars.  

The creative titans of industry that Rand celebrated in her works were the so-called “robber barons” of the 19^th century—the Rockefellers, the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts, as well as innovators like Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler and Howard Hughes. Greedy and aggressive though they may have been, and ruthless in their quest for money and power, these were all tycoons who believed in improving the society in which they did their business, and who, through their foundations, reinvested part of the money they accumulated in that society. They supported the arts, built schools and hospitals, funded scholarships and became deeply involved in international relief efforts.

These were not today’s tech-billionaires who subscribe fully to the school of egoism and to the Simon Legree mentality of the ruthless plantation owner whose cruelty and moral emptiness define him as the ultimate antagonist in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin.

That said, then as now, the robber barons, like the tech-authoritarians, hoarded the lion’s share of society’s wealth. In that, nothing has changed. The upper one percent then and the upper one percent now have controlled more than half of all wealth. Nor did they pay their fair share in taxes—despite Rand’s lamenting of how put-upon they were. In fact, they paid next to nothing, just as do the tech-fascists of today. And that is why society is in the trouble it is. Not because of any “unfair treatment” of billionaires by the government.

What is clearly different is the scope of power between tycoons past and present. While a robber baron might arguably have dominated an industry or sector, the tech-fascists of today have far more diverse and invasive interests. While a robber baron might have had vast power in steel, oil or the railways, tech-billionaires have the potential and, indeed the means, to control social-media platforms, enormous information and entertainment networks, satellite communications, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, financial infrastructure, private aerospace technology, defense technology, massive databases, political advertising and information distribution, and the list goes on. They have the potential, in other words, to control practically everything.  

Gil Durán, author of the best-selling book The Nerd Reich, argues that Silicon Valley billionaires are actively seeking to replace democratic government with a corporate authoritarian order. That is not libertarianism. It is oligarchic fascism. It previews a post-Orwellian scenario in which it will not be a super-State Big Brother controlling everything, but rather, a society in which a handful of extraordinarily wealthy private individuals possess so much technological and economic power that they can intervene in every phase of society, and in which democratic government is utterly incapable of controlling them, and, as such, is rendered moot.

The one person, one vote ideal of democracy is anathema to the tech-billionaires, Already they have bastardized that tenet through laws like Citizens United that equate corporations with individuals and provide them with the “right” (as sanctified by a corrupt US Supreme Court) to donate “generously” to political campaigns. In point of fact, what laws like this have done is to permit techno-fascists to literally buy politicians and, indeed, entire administrations, as witnessed by the current one in the US.

This is, then, the point at which Ayn Rand's celebration of the “heroic individual” mutates into something she herself might well not have recognized: a veritable political theology in which technological wealth becomes evidence of superior merit, superior judgment and, ultimately, superior entitlement to rule.

The overriding idea here, then, is not that Ayn Rand fostered tech fascism. It is, instead, that Rand helped provide tech-fascism with an intellectual mythology to hang its hat on.

She supplied the “heroic entrepreneur” with self-righteous contempt for bureaucratic constraint, suspicion of democratic collectivism, the “moral” elevation of self-interest, and the conviction that society ultimately depends on its exceptional creators to the point that they are practically gods.

Silicon Valley, for its part, supplied the technology. Billionaires supplied the unprecedented wealth. And paid-off politicians supplied the opportunity for what amounts to a corporate coup d’etat. That isn't freedom. It is private sovereignty.

Put those three things together and the danger is no longer merely that technology will change democracy, but that it will massacre it, and make techno-fascism the force that will enslave rather than free the individual, and that will ultimately rule the world.