Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [234]
By the beginning of 1970, with the Holzers gone and others disillusioned or scattered, Rand’s full-time following dwindled to a few newcomers and five or six inner-circle members competing for her favor in the absence of the Brandens. They were, they had to be, prepared to act as unquestioning loyalists and, in some cases, willing avengers in her cause. And the greatest of these was Leonard Peikoff.
* In Ayn Rand’s view, concepts are formulated by looking for similarities among perceived objects (i.e., seeing that all tables have legs and tops), setting aside differences in measurements of shared qualities (such as the differing lengths of two tabletops), and retaining the essential conceptual similarities.
SIXTEEN
IN THE NAME OF THE BEST WITHIN US
1969–1982
When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great, is an attribute of youth—and the process of aging is the process of that expectation’s gradual extinction.
One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.
—Introduction to Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three, 1962
The 1970s found Ayn Rand’s ideas gliding quietly—almost anonymously—into the conservative mainstream, including the National Review and two Republican administrations. (Gerald Ford told a convention of small businessmen that Washington was “an instrument of philanthropic collectivism,” for example.) But her ideas roared and shouted within a new group of young right-wing libertarians who were disgusted with the economic policies of the Republican Party and determined to found a party of their own, which they called the Libertarian Party. In its “Statement of Principles” it rejected “the cult of the omnipotent state” and called for the restoration of each individual’s right to “exercise sole dominion over his own life.” It recommended a speedy return to the gold standard and, when seeking its first presidential candidate in 1972, it chose Rand’s erstwhile friend John Hospers. Its founders and members, many of whom were self-declared Objectivists, almost universally revered Rand as the guiding light and most courageous exponent of limited government and free markets.
Rand rejected the libertarian cause, alleging that its promoters had stolen her ideas while failing even to try to master her complete philosophy. The presence of Murray Rothbard and John Hospers among the movement’s leadership didn’t improve her opinion. In fact, after the departure of Branden she wasn’t much interested in praise from the idealistic young. The world was small and personal.
She removed Branden’s name from the dedication page of all future editions of Atlas Shrugged and made a new will, bequeathing her estate jointly, at first, to Leonard Peikoff and Allan Blumenthal. Keeping to her practice of revising her history with former friends and allies, she diminished the importance of the Brandens and denied the originality of Nathaniel’s work. But she did not expunge his essays from future printings of The Virtue of Selfishness or Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. And for two long years, she brooded over the questions of Branden’s character and motives. Had he always been corrupt, or had he gradually become so? When had the evil in his soul begun to dominate? Was he a con man? A common crook? Had he ever loved her? She continued to say that he had embezzled money from her, although she knew that he had not. She and her remaining loyalists insisted that he had stolen and exploited