Atlas Drugged

Linda Li on Ayn Rand's place in the conservative movement:

David Boaz read all 1,168 pages of Atlas Shrugged in four days during his senior year of high school. "It was the most fascinating thing I'd ever read," he announced to the Cato Institute audience. As Cato's executive vice president, Boaz launched last week's Ayn Rand book forum with a clarion call for "individual rights, free enterprise, and strictly limited government." Conservative groups of every stripe were represented: the gun-toting U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation; the protectionist Manufacturers Alliance; and the Atlas Society, heir to the original Objectivist Institute. These varied delegates all could pinpoint the feverish moment in their adolescence when they experienced a Randian epiphany. One audience member testified that he, too, "was one of those 19-year-olds" who discovered The Fountainhead
and thought he was "the only rational person on the earth."

The publication of two new Rand biographies by Jennifer Burns and Anne Heller coincides with Rand's apparent resurrection. In February, CNBC's Rick Santelli inspired the tea party movement when he decried President Barack Obama's housing bailout as anti-Rand and encouraged every freedom-loving American to go John Galt. That same month, Atlas Shrugged's sales ranking on Amazon.com surged into the top 100, well above its place in the 500s over the past two years. After languishing at the sidelines of the political arena, Rand has entered into public discourse. Will this "Ayn Rand moment" last?

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