EDGE: Conservatives and 'Atlas Shrugged'

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By Scott Galupo

How can you tell that conservatives have responded to the Obama presidency by retrenching rather than reflecting? By what they apparently are reading in droves.

The Ayn Rand Institute this week announced that sales of the novel "Atlas Shrugged" by the eponymous high priestess of capitalism have tripled in the first four months of 2009 compared to the same period last year — all but guaranteeing a new annual record to top last year's benchmark of 200,000.

That this turgid, tedious novel, published in 1957, has continually found fellow travelers on the right is a great oddity of American intellectual life. In his dismissive review of the book, Whittaker Chambers, then at National Review, called it "remarkably silly" and "preposterous" — which no doubt suited Miss Rand just fine.

An exile of the Russian Revolution, she had great admiration for America's Founders. Her early discernment of the evils of Soviet communism was incandescent. Her criticism of 1960s campus leftism was sharp and merciless.

Yet, like the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, she refused to identify herself as a conservative; the movement's Eisenhower-era toleration of the welfare state rendered it a dead letter, she asserted.

Nor did she hold with the libertarian label, a seemingly more appropriate category for her belief in the individual's right to freedom from state coercion. Libertarianism for Miss Rand smacked of free-loving hippies and other assorted moral relativists.

Miss Rand was open about the fact that her self-styled philosophy — objectivism — and her belief in unfettered free markets were profoundly radical.

Then, too, there's Miss Rand's strident atheism. If she were alive today, she'd be right alongside Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, railing against the moral perversity that results from belief in a deity.

How well I remember reading, as a boy, a syndicated column by an Ayn Rand Institute representative that defended the "this-worldly" aspects of the Winter Solstice, better known in these parts as Christmas. The materialism of the season, he wrote, was a feature, not a bug.

Conservatives' embrace of "Atlas Shrugged" today is nothing more than blinkered escapist fantasy — rather like a besieged army turning to Norse mythology or J.R.R. Tolkien to boost morale.