Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

by Thomas Frank

  Actually, Rand’s revival makes perfect sense in our upside-down age. Atlas Shrugged is the story of an alternative Great Depression in which everything happens the way market-minded conservatives would have had it happen: meddling government is the obvious culprit of the economic slowdown; business types are both heroes and victims; and the gigantic strike that is the book’s central thread is led not by some labor type but by genius entrepreneurs who are sick of being told what to do by politicians.

  Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 and is set in the indefinite future, but to judge by its account of American life it is actually a commentary on events of several decades previous. It chronicles an era when steel and railroads, the two industries described most prominently in the novel, were at the vanguard of American enterprise. That era is most definitely not the fifties, when railroads were in catastrophic decline, but it could well be the thirties, when streamliners and steel mills were the symbols of American economic might. And although the book was published well into the television age, the various speeches in which the characters mouth Rand’s market-friendly Nietzscheanism are all radio broadcasts, the great medium of the thirties. TV is mentioned only in passing.

  The novel seems in many of its details to be an artifact of the Depression. Its first page describes an exchange between one of the main characters and a “bum” who has “asked for a dime.” And illustrating the great literary fear of 1932—the sense that society itself was disintegrating—is one of Rand’s few points of aesthetic strength. Atlas Shrugged gives us scene after scene of rural poverty, of listless people who don’t know what to do with themselves, of houses and towns overgrown with weeds, of desperate humans carting their belongings down the road, of children turned into roving animals; each might have appeared in some collection of essays surveying the ruins of the nation in the days of Herbert Hoover.

  The same is true of Rand’s cast of capitalist hero-victims. One of them was reportedly inspired by the financier Ivar Kreuger, a villain of the Depression years.15 The travails of another of her main characters, a steel manufacturer, appear to have been borrowed wholesale from a 1935 episode in the comic strip Little Orphan Annie.* And of course there’s a righteous gangster we are supposed to admire in the manner of Woody Guthrie’s 1939 song “Pretty Boy Floyd,” only with the poles reversed: he robs the government to fill the bank accounts of the deserving rich.

  The book’s Depression flavor goes beyond its setting and characters; it is also a thirties novel thematically and philosophically. Atlas Shrugged may be the favorite novel of the millionaire class, but it is also the most commercially successful exemplar of that short-lived literary vogue of the thirties, proletarian fiction. If that literary school is remembered at all anymore, it is for its stereotyped businessmen-parasites, its hackneyed plots in which a worker-hero attains class consciousness, and the climactic strikes toward which its plots seem always to steer. The genre was a species of propaganda that shunned wit and seemed to privilege leaden writing; it was only slightly more sophisticated than a comic book. It was also the paradigmatic hard-times literary style.

  Atlas Shrugged deserves to be considered part of the genre.* It retains the wit-free writing and the heavy-handed propaganda, with conversations between characters frequently devolving into multipage philosophical monologues. (How any real human could stand to listen to these tedious stem-winders is one of the points of disbelief that this Rand reader found it most difficult to suspend.) As far as its characters are concerned, appearances are almost always reliable indicators of essence: bad guys are usually 100 percent bad, as the reader knows from their first step upon the stage, while good guys are uniformly awesome, endowed with the same good taste, the same weird syntax, the same mechanical aptitude, the same marksmanship, even names with the same crackling consonant clusters.* For some reason, they almost all seem to know how to fly airplanes.

  It is, of course, a novel about a strike, a standard plot device of the Popular Front era. As per the genre’s requirements, its protagonists are noble producers who are unfairly oppressed. But in this iteration of the proletarian novel, the self-interested businessman is the hero instead of the villain. The parasites are the rest of us, the rabble and the intellectuals who use government to mooch and freeload on the labors of the virtuous capitalist.

  In Rand’s dystopic America, government meddling of the New Deal variety has been allowed to run wild. Washington interferes constantly in the affairs of private businesses, from big decisions to small ones, and then interferes more when the first interference doesn’t achieve the desired result. The government forces inventors to surrender their inventions, rich men to turn over their income, producers of raw materials to divert supplies from their rightful clients to more politically favored ones. The business class resents the threats and the meddling, and, as in standard Marxist agitprop, slowly becomes aware of their exalted nature and their victimization at the hands of politicians and intellectuals. Class consciousness!

  Billionaire solidarity having been achieved, the great tycoons disappear one after another into a mountain hideout pioneered for them by the genius inventor John Galt. This strategic withdrawal of entrepreneurship—the strike—is so crushing that civilization itself begins to unravel. It’s war between the “subhuman creatures” of the world and “their betters,” as one heroic capitalist describes the two sides. But the subhumans, meaning the general public, won’t give in or learn their lesson. And so Galt, the leader of the walkout, delivers an ultimatum over the radio. “If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society,” he tells the “moral cannibals” of the human race, “it will be on our moral terms.”16

  One of the stated objectives of the capitalists’ strike in Atlas Shrugged is to reverse the conventional hard-times understanding of social class. Workers didn’t build America, Galt and Company intend to prove; businessmen did. “We’ve heard so much about strikes,” Galt lectures his industrialist friends, “and about the dependence of the uncommon man upon the common.”

  “We’ve heard it shouted that the industrialist is a parasite, that his workers support him, create his wealth, make his luxury possible—and what would happen to him if they walked out? Very well. I propose to show to the world who depends on whom, who supports whom, who is the source of wealth, who makes whose livelihood possible and what happens to whom when who walks out.”17

  Maybe you had trouble following that passage, with all its interweaving “whos” and “whoms,” but the general sentiment is simple enough. Successful businesspeople, which is to say, society’s victims, are going to rise up and show the world who’s boss. You are to acknowledge their suffering and their power at the same time. As the novel ends, they are preparing to resume their rightful position over the nation.

  In pushing this absurd social theory, the novelist is most emphatic. Captains of industry are “the great victims,” as one character puts it, “who have contributed the most and suffered the worst injustice in return.” And as the long, long novel plods slowly on, Rand doubles down on the idea, having John Galt declare himself to be “the defender of the oppressed, the disinherited, the exploited—and when I use those words, they have, for once, a literal meaning.”18

  The libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises loved Atlas Shrugged, nailing the book’s antipopulist message in a single perceptive sentence. “You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them,” he wrote in a fan letter to Rand: “you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you.”19

  It is hardly a democratic formula. Indeed, democracy is part of the problem for Rand, since it puts “ward heelers” in legal authority over captains of industry. And so Atlas Shrugged pushes this political dilemma to its logical conclusion, with the politicians making crushing demands and the business elite rising up against them. It’s a sort of Marxism for the master class, a hard-times story in which business is
a force of pure light* and the “looters” in the government are responsible for every last little disaster.

  Why Atlas Shrugged appeals to successful businesspeople is no mystery. But how does a book that tells the rest of the world You are inferior become the manifesto of a populist revival?

  The usual explanation for the newfound popularity of Atlas Shrugged, as we noted, is its supposed prescience: it seems to predict the emergency bank-rescue measures of 2008 and 2009, plus the hounding of business leaders by federal officials that supposedly followed. There have even been efforts to take matters to the next level. During the AIG bonus debacle, a Wall Street type published a peevish resignation announcement as an op-ed in the New York Times; he was walking out, he wrote, because he was sick of being “unfairly persecuted by elected officials.” And in September 2011, House Speaker John Boehner announced that the economy wasn’t improving because “job creators in America, basically, are on strike.” We needed to “liberate” these powerful ones from taxes and an insane, meddling government—or else. If talent isn’t treated the way talent wants to be treated, it will walk. Just try running your economy then.

  But Atlas Shrugged also resonates on a much grander scale than this. It has all the answers—and I do mean “all”—for a world facing Great Depression II. The institutions of government have grown corrupt and misguided, Rand tells us; they have become instruments not for protecting us but for robbing us. When the economy falls into catastrophic collapse, she insists, it is always because government has interfered in its destructive and self-serving way. And salvation can only come after the producer class has been liberated from the state.

  For its readers, Atlas Shrugged acts as a sort of exposé, pulling back the curtain to reveal the powers that manipulate our world. Angelo Codevilla’s Country Class is figuring out the essential perfidy of the “ruling class,” and this great novel of the age of Obama is there to assist them in the project of unmasking. The resurgent Right regards it as a powerful cry for justice.

  But what starts out as a cry for justice quickly becomes a sort of bonus track from that event where the coal-mine CEO claimed to speak for the working people of West Virginia. Rand fandom is the equivalent of those working people rushing the stage to acclaim that CEO’s wisdom, cheering hip-hip-hooray for that government-damning tycoon.

  And so average Americans declare that they are joining the great strike of the producer class, shouting to the world that they have had it, that henceforth they will shut down their coffee shops, fill no more cavities, paint no more houses. They link arms in solidarity with John Galt and announce from their websites that they, too, hereby declare war on the government for all the ways it has stifled their ambitions, pocketed the fruits of their hard work, and coddled the lazy. They are “going Galt,” they proclaim.

  We have seen a proud, strong country fall to her knees. Her people have become slovenly, inept and irresponsible. We do not see any morality in working hard for the benefit of those who choose not to. We do not see any moral value in contributing to a society that seeks to rule, rather than govern and steal from the Producers to give to them who are Looters and Moochers. We herby [sic] withdraw our Producing abilities, from a society that is unworthy of such contributions.

  You, who would damn us, for a pursuit of success, for aspiring to our greatest human potential; yet who depend on our contributions to a society which you leach [sic] from.

  Have you missed it?

  Atlas WILL Shrug!!20

  That 99 percent of us will not, in fact, prosper in some every-man-for-himself Rand-land is a fine point that pretty much drops from view among the resurgent Right. They do not really comprehend that the only winners from a campaign to hack government down, deregulate everything, abolish taxes, and restore the gold standard would be people like that coal-mine CEO—or that the fate of most of us would be closer to that of the country’s miners, toiling in a dangerous place for lousy wages and powerless to do anything about it.

  Those who think they have something to look forward to in the libertarian future would do well to reread the famous scene in Atlas Shrugged where Rand illustrates the breakdown of society with a colossal train accident. Rand arranges this disaster in such a way that the crash is attributable not to some act of negligence by the railroad but to the arrogance of one of the train’s passengers, a powerful politician who forces the train’s crew to proceed into a dangerous tunnel.* And then, in a notorious passage, the narrator goes through all the other passenger cars on the train and tells us why each casualty-to-be deserves the fate that is coming to him or her. One of them, she points out, received government loans; another doesn’t like businessmen; a third is married to a federal regulator; a fourth foolishly thinks she has a right to ride on a train even when she doesn’t personally own the train in question. For each one of these subhumans, the sentence is death.

  For a reader like me, Ayn Rand’s almost total contempt for humanity is her most repugnant point. For the master spirits of our contemporary Right, though, I sometimes suspect that’s the stuff that rings truest: straightforward sympathy for the billionaire plus tangled rationalizations for the death or humiliation of everyone else. The game is finally up for the whiners of the world, they exult. The first shall be first. Root, hog, or die.

  CHAPTER 9

  He Whom a Dream Hath Possessed Knoweth No More of Doubting

  One sunny morning in August of 2010, I drove up to the old Carnegie Library in Port Townsend, Washington, to work on the project that eventually became this book. Out in the rest of the country, according to a much-publicized poll, a majority of Americans now believed the word “socialist” described President Obama well. Conservative entertainers were in full-throated denunciation of the collectivists running America into the ground, and a wave of revulsion against overreaching government was fixing to deliver a huge Republican victory that fall.

  And yet none of the fears propelling the country to the right were even close to being realized. Lying on one of those big, old-fashioned tables as I walked into the library was the new edition of the Guardian Weekly, the British newspaper; its headline proclaimed, “Capitalism Is Still the Only Game in Town.” By then it had been three years since the first shocks hit international credit markets, and yet politically nothing had changed. The free-market ideology was still in the saddle, the paper reported; the creed of Davos still ruled the world; the near collapse of the financial system had barely caused it to break its stride. A high official from the Bank of England told the paper that “there have been far fewer repercussions than there were after the 1930s.”

  “Then there was a real contest in the world about what was the right model for a modern society, and the crash convinced many people that capitalism and free markets were not the right way forward, but there has been no echo of that this time.

  “Maybe India and China have slowed down on deregulating their financial industries, but broadly speaking, the direction the world had been moving in is continuing. It reflects an end of ideology. Capitalism is still the only game in town.”1

  I thought about the hardworking Americans who were, at that moment, dutifully responding to the Tea Party’s clanging emergency call. Here they were, raging against the socialist takeover, swearing to resist the leftist usurpers in Washington, and there in the paper a central banker was explaining that none of it had happened. From the Newsweek “socialism” cover to last week’s bestseller about liberal tyranny, it had all been a false alarm.

  Nothing had changed. We weren’t going to be rounded up for the Gulag. Capitalism wasn’t going to be abolished. The financial crisis hadn’t put radicals in charge of America after all. Essence was in such violent disagreement with appearance that the force of it seemed likely to snap one’s neck.

  This is the enigma we turn to now: the resurgent Right’s epistemology; its way of perceiving the world around it—or, more accurately, its way of not perceiving; its ability to keep the fear of a Martian invasion stoked f
or years despite the Martians’ stubborn refusal to appear.

  What kind of misapprehension permits the newest Right to brush off truths that everyone else can see so plainly? What backfiring form of cognition convinces them that critics of bailouts were in fact responsible for those bailouts? That deregulation is not the problem but the solution? That Ayn Rand is the hero rather than the villain of the present disaster? What allowed this tremendous divergence between fact and appearance?

  An End of Ideology?

  To understand, we might want to take into consideration other examples of conservatism’s dalliance with error. We might cast our eyes back over the long, embarrassing story of the evolution debate or the global warming controversy. We might recall the Bush administration’s various campaigns against government scientists and those who doubted the official rationale for the Iraq war. We might examine the GOP’s tenacious adherence to the “supply side” theory of budget-balancing despite that theory’s persistent failure to work.

  We might decide to put a spotlight on the outright falsehoods that the conservative movement lists among its articles of faith: Its idea that the Franklin Roosevelt administration either caused or worsened the Great Depression. That progressives have been in control of the nation ever since the days of Woodrow Wilson. That George W. Bush was just pretending to be a conservative. That bond traders are ordinary workers. That government bears the entire responsibility for the mortgage meltdown and its every little ramification. (And I have not bothered with the strange ideas that some on the newest Right hold about Barack Obama’s true birthplace, or his secret army, or who wrote his first book.)