What Ayn Rand got right about the left

Ayn Rand saw clearly the danger posed by the resentful left. Full of hate and envy, they desire to destroy more than they desire to create. Radical progressivism is a terrifying confirmation.

Written by John McLaughlin

The Chicago Board of Education recently voted to end the city’s highly successful selective-enrollment public schools, instead directing their funding to its failing general education schools. As its rationale, the Board cited a desire to move away from “admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools.” In other words, Chicago’s teachers union would prefer their students to be universally immiserated than for the most capable to be able to rise above their peers. Equality over excellence.

An article titled “Whiteness is a Pandemic” enumerates the many ills caused by “whiteness”: war, air pollution, deforestation, and melting ice caps, among other bad things. The author closes by subtly informing readers that white supremacy “will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it.”

Following the October 7th, 2023 massacre of over 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas, leftist groups across the US celebrated on university campuses, cheering this victory of the oppressed over their “colonizers.”

What do the above phenomena share in common? Ayn Rand offered a prescient answer over half a century ago.

Rand rose to fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead, the story of intransigent architect Howard Roark and his fight against an architectural profession and society paralyzed by conformity. Roark’s eventual triumph was the central lesson of the novel: a defense of the sanctity of the individual against the stultifying influence of collectivism. But it was in Rand’s magnum opus and final novel Atlas Shrugged that her philosophy was most fully developed. The story follows Dagny Taggart, vice president of operations at Taggart Transcontinental, as she struggles to sustain her ancestral family railroad under the weight of increasingly onerous government regulations and the incompetence of her older brother, James. The setting reflects Rand’s love of American industry but the novel is philosophical in purpose. It explores the nature of virtue, the proper relation of the individual to the state, and makes a case for independent-minded creators as the “prime movers” of society to whom we owe all our progress.

Although it was her goal in Atlas Shrugged to define and celebrate the ideal man — John Galt: the rational, self-sufficient, creative spirit — Rand also fleshes out in stark contrast her villains, a recurring character type she describes as the “altruist-collectivist.” In both her fiction and later non-fiction writings on culture and politics, Rand attacks the figures and movements falling under the altruist-collectivist umbrella: socialists, progressives, environmentalists, hippies, and religious believers are among the most frequent offenders. What unites these apparently disparate worldviews is the morality of self-sacrifice, and a hostility to reason, individualism, virtue and success.

It was this latter phenomenon that Rand grappled with throughout all her fiction but most fully developed in Atlas Shrugged, where she described it as “hatred of the good for being the good” — a toxic mixture of nihilism and resentment directed by society’s most dysfunctional haters against their superiors, despite their knowledge that by hobbling the most capable they will surely harm themselves even more. This damning of all values achieves two important ends for the hater: it absolves him of the responsibility or effort to pursue values for himself, and also helps to prop up his false egalitarian worldview.

In Atlas Shrugged this most extreme species of hatred is personified in the character of James Taggart, who subscribes to an “altruist-collectivist” morality in which the competent and productive must be sacrificed for the benefit of the needy masses. He promotes social and economic policies designed to strangle the country’s most prolific creators in order to level the playing field for his incompetent friends. He damns ingenious and efficient industrialists as greedy hoarders of wealth. Most appallingly, he marries a simple but moral woman for whom he feels no romantic love, for the sole purpose of breaking her spirit. As society collapses around him — thanks to the morality for which he has advocated all his life — James is finally forced to confront the true motivation behind his worldview, a conclusion he has worked his entire life to obscure and evade:

“He was suddenly seeing the motive that had directed all the actions of his life. It was not his incommunicable soul or his love for others or his social duty or any of the fraudulent sounds by which he had maintained his self-esteem: it was the lust to destroy whatever was living, for the sake or whatever was not. It was the urge to defy reality by the destruction of every living value, for the sake of proving to himself that he could exist in defiance of reality and would never have to be bound by any solid, immutable facts… Now he knew that he had wanted [John] Galt’s destruction at the price of his own destruction to follow, he knew that he had never wanted to survive, he knew that it was Galt’s greatness he had wanted to torture and destroy…”

In the years following the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Rand turned away from fiction and devoted her time to essays on culture, politics, and philosophy for her Objectivist Newsletter and several essay collections; the 1960s and 70s provided her ample material for analysis. In 1969, two simultaneous and significant events drew her attention: the Woodstock music festival and the Apollo 11 moon landing. In her essay “Apollo and Dionysus,” Rand distilled the essence of each event to an underlying philosophical worldview, represented by an ancient god of Greece. Dionysus, in her view, represented Woodstock: a drug-addled mob passively indulging in hedonism — while the Apollo mission was a scientific triumph fittingly named for the god representing beauty, virtue, and reason.

Rand was most struck by how these two events were appraised by intellectual elites. Woodstock was praised by several prominent publications, with Time magazine hailing it as “one of the most significant political and sociological events of the age.” And Apollo 11? “With rare exception,” Rand wrote, “the intellectuals resented its triumph. A two-page survey of their reactions, published by The New York Times…was an almost unanimous spread of denigrations and denunciations.” How could Apollo 11 — a technological marvel, triumph of rationality, and source of national pride — be so vilified? Echoing the motif she had earlier established in Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s answer in this essay points to resentment at the sight of such an undeniable accomplishment: “And this is the whole shabby secret: to some men, the sight of an achievement [Apollo 11] is a reproach, a reminder that their own lives are irrational and that there is no loophole, no escape from reason and reality.”

In a later essay, “The Age of Envy”, Rand expanded on this line of reasoning. Here she teased apart the nuances of this emotion — “hatred of the good for being the good” — and its distinction from what we typically call envy. An envier desires the object of envy for his or her self — to be more beautiful, or intelligent, or talented or successful. What distinguishes envy from the hatred that James Taggart feels is the latter’s nihilistic character: James does not seek the virtues that John Galt possesses, perhaps aware that he is incapable of attaining or wielding them. Instead he simply wants to destroy them:

“This [phenomenon] is particularly clear in the much more virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man (or a woman) because he (or she) is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or to use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or the mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction.”

As Rand observed consistently throughout her life — from her teenage years in nascent Soviet Russia, to her early Hollywood career during the “Red” 1930s, through her mature work of the 40s, 50s and beyond — a desire to level humanity has always been the left’s motive; it is merely their rationalizations that have changed over time. Beneath the left’s philanthropic mask, nihilism and resentment are in fact the core features of their politics.

In her 1971 essay “The Left: Old and New,” Rand exposed this shifting “mask” of the left. She contrasted the “Old Left” which dominated prior to the 1960s — heavily influenced by the Soviet Union and concerned primarily with economics and labor unionization — with the New Left, an assortment of environmentalists and new interest groups centered around racial, gender, and other collective grievances (essentially “woke” in its embryonic form). The Old Left, which Rand had spent most of her life battling, had always maintained a pretense of aiding the common man – a tired narrative she remembered well from her childhood. According to Rand, “Old-line Marxists claimed that they were champions of reason, that socialism or communism was a scientific social system, that advanced technology could not function in a capitalist society, but required a systematically planned and organized human community to bring its maximum benefits to every man, in the form of material comforts and a higher standard of living. They predicted that the progress of Soviet technology would surpass that of the United States.”

But what distinguished the New Left was the brazenness with which it pursued its true goal: trimming the tall poppies. “The social veneer of the collectivist is cracking and their psychological motivation is showing through,” Rand wrote. “The activists of the New Left are closer to revealing the truth of their motives: they do not seek to take over industrial plants, they seek to destroy technology.”

Has recent history vindicated Rand’s appraisal of the left? Honest observers must admit that the welfare of the law-abiding, hard-working common man is not the left’s apparent focus. Rather, their energy is devoted to meting out punishment for real or imagined historical wrongs, inflaming old identitarian resentments or inventing new ones, and allowing criminals to economically devastate whole communities.

Many political observers were shocked by the left’s eruption of glee this past October 7th, but Rand, who understood the importance of ideas, would have been unsurprised. The reactions to that day were predictable to anyone who takes seriously the left’s underlying philosophy: a zero-sum picture of the world in which the virtues and achievements of others — whether of individuals or of nations — are viewed not as a source of inspiration or a benefit to all, but rather as an insult and deprivation from those who can’t attain them. A recent X thread provides a hilarious and illuminating case study of this phenomenon in action. After a well-meaning leftist encouraged her followers to exercise in order to strengthen their bodies, she was inundated with hundreds of replies accusing her of ableism, advocating for eugenics, minimizing the plight of Long Covid victims, and complaints that self-discipline is a white supremacist concept. A vivid reminder that the hater’s goal is not to acquire values, or to help the deserving needy acquire them, but to slander and destroy them, for only by destroying can the hater satisfy his deepest desires.

One of the most common criticisms of Rand points to the exaggerated, cartoonish quality of her villains. But imagine traveling back in time to tell her that in 50 years progressives would denounce objectivity and the written word as “white supremacy” and wear name badges declaring their pronouns. Rand would have dismissed this prospect as too unrealistic for her novels.

John McLaughlin is a former scientist interested in philosophy, science, and education.

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