Whose afraid of Ayn Rand (And Why)

The Left loathes,  detests and fears Ayn Rand and for good reason. She is like the atom bomb -she spoils their whole day. Conservatives and Republicans are easy to attack because they are so feeble,temporizing, weak,equivocating and generally pathetic and compromised in their half-hearted apologetic defence of markets and the smaller state because they sold out their core principles decades ago in their accommodation and acceptance of the mixed economy welfare state and it is questionable whether they ever had any core principles from the get go so quick were they to capitulate to the welfare status/statist quo.

Ayn Rand and her totally uncompromising passionate defense of individual rights, liberty,the delimited state and man's inalienable right to live for himself and not be regarded as a means to the ends of others with their  needs and wants is historically unique in the whole philosophy of politics although other figures contributed in the groundwork going back to Aristotle,Locke,Adam Smith and Hume but she is the only one who provides a systematic philosophically based system dedicated to the defense of individual rights presenting  man as a self made being rather than as a sacrificial animal to the needs of others.

Confronted with this direct assault on everything the Left holds most dear,the collectivist herding of men through government dictat,it simply does not know how to handle Rand and starts off ignoring her, hoping she will go away. Decades go by but her influence steadily grows in the culture but although resistance is total the Left at least has to start acknowledging her existence.So what does it do? It demonises her by smear and misrepresentation. Rand is a Nazi is the commonest abuse it musters relying soley on the hope that no one will actually read her and discover the terrible truth namely that she is the scourge of all manifestations of collectivism be it Left or Right. Conservatives equally have nothing but fear in response to her total excoriating of their compromised vacillating accomodation with statism and welfarism. She has exposed their joint fraud,their collectivist sleight of hand exposing them both as illiberal and anti individual.

So hated by the whole political establishment Rand stands alone in the culture and even the libertarians who attempt to co opt her teachings rip them to shreds with their anti intellectual anti philosophical expediency and compromises,hideously misrepresenting and distorting her ideas and by so doing discrediting and setting back the objectivist cause by decades.

But what can the Left do in the face of Ayn Rand's  continued and ever growing direct existential threat to them and all they stand for and have constructed this past century across the Western world and beyond threatening to bring the whole shaky edifice crumbling around their ears? The 3 choices remain still: Ignore, misunderstand or misrepresent. The first is myopic and doomed,the second offers no protection and is an argument from ignorance and the third will not succeed because truth will out.