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A Sense of Life: Ayn Rand and White Nationalism

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A Sense of Life: Ayn Rand and White Nationalism A SENSE OF LIFE: AYN RAND AND WHITE NATIONALISM GREGORY HOOD ____________________________________ The story is clichéd. A teenager discovers a book. It challenges his religion. It rips apart his morality. He radically changes his behavior within days. The path of his life is forever altered. As Jerome Tuccille titled his book about the libertarian movement, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. Even a casual glance at the American scene shows Rand’s influence is growing. Sales of Atlas Shrugged are brisk, and Rand’s magnum opus is consistently ranked in polls as one of the most influential books in Americans’ lives, just behind the Bible.1 Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, is unapologetically self- ish. Rand proclaimed “greed is good” well before Gordon Gekko. Family, religion, nation, and race were all collectivist “mysticism” that a free man must ruthlessly wipe aside. Objectivists heaped scorn up- on the very concept of race, declaring that the individual holds no al- legiance to anything except those loyalties that are freely chosen. Background is an accident; heritage an irrelevance. The Russian Jew- ess Ayn Rand (real name Alisa Rosenbaum) seems a bizarro version of Emma Goldman designed to wean the American Right away from White racial nationalism. Objectivism, in theory, is a mortal threat to White racial identity — another rabbit hole for White Americans to fall down in their never ending quest to pursue every ideology, party, or platform except the ones that might allow them to take their own side. In fact, Objectivism denies that they have a side at all, or even that there is a “they.” And yet, despite it all, for a surprising number of White advocates, it usually begins with Ayn Rand. The journey from the world of the heroic architect Howard Roark to Jared Taylor or even Julius Evola is not uncommon. Strange as it seems, the writings of an anti-racist Jew- ess have real value to White nationalists even beyond serving as a stepping stone to greater truths. A closer examination of Rand’s life 1 “‘Atlas Shrugged’ 50 Years Later,” Christian Science Monitor (March 6, 2007). http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0306/p09s01-coop.html 20 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 2011 and work reveal that some of the assumptions behind Objectivism can lead to White advocacy. It may seem contradictory to interpret Alisa Rosenbaum as some kind of proto-White nationalist. However, as Francisco d’ Anconia said in Atlas Shrugged, “Check your premises. Contradictions don’t exist.” The answers we find might surprise us. * * * To answer the question, “Who is John Galt?” one must first know “Who is Ayn Rand?” Alisa Rosenbaum was destined to create a phi- losophy of deracination, as her own roots were shallow. She was the daughter of a pharmacist in St. Petersburg who nursed a quiet hostili- ty for Bolshevism. The Rosenbaums, middle class Jews in the midst of tsarist Russia, were an oddity, and the young Rosenbaum had an eco- nomically comfortable but isolated early life, with no participation in Jewish religious life, the resentment of the peasantry, or the Orthodox Russian upper class whose glittering existence she could only glimpse. Rand’s family was non-observant but even the ultimate in- dividualist had to be aware of a distinction between her Jewish family and the Orthodox masses of Holy Russia. Rand, even at an early age, was recognized for her fierce intelli- gence and aloof attitude towards those she considered intellectually beneath her. Family was never terribly important to Rand, with even a real relationship to her father dependent on intellectual agreement. It is also not surprising that Rand despised what she saw as the “mys- tical” soul of her Orthodox homeland and looked west, especially to England and America, for a place that fit what she called her “sense of life.” Perhaps reading into the Anglosphere what she wanted to see, she viewed the English-speaking world as a bastion of reason, liberty, and science in contrast to the Oriental despotism of Russia. She was proud of her westward looking home city of St. Petersburg, calling it a “monument to the spirit of man.” Rand supported the downfall of the Tsar and the rise of a parliamentary regime, identifying her first hero in Alexander Kerensky. Unfortunately for Rand and for Russia, the Kerensky regime was only a placeholder for the more disciplined and dedicated Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik Revolution destroyed what order existed in Rand’s world, with her “bourgeois” father’s wealth confiscated and his shop destroyed. Rand genuinely respected her father and saw with shock how the work of a lifetime was destroyed in the name of revolution. Hood, “A Sense of Life: Ayn Rand and White Nationalism” 21 Rand’s life was a nightmare world of grinding poverty, constant hun- ger, and creeping terror that at any time she would be denounced or arrested. Rand was also forced to study Marxist ideology as part of her education. The Revolution became the formative experience of her life. Rand could Justifiably state that she thoroughly understood Communism as both theory and practice. Rand’s unique background combined with her oppression at the hands of the Bolsheviks provides the key to understanding her work. Rand’s Jewish heritage and scorn for Russian culture prevented her from conceiving of the Communist Revolution as a hostile or “for- eign” movement. Rand could not identify with any resistance to the Bolsheviks couched in terms of traditionalism, Orthodoxy, or Russian patriotism or identity. However, Rand’s “bourgeois” background en- sured that she also did not conceive of the Revolution as liberation or as revenge for anti-Semitism that she never experienced. She and her family suffered horribly at the hands of their supposed co-ethnics amidst the Bolsheviks, a persecution she could only explain as a product of class hostility divorced from considerations of race or reli- gion. Rand’s forced education in the historical dialectic also affected her interpretation of Bolshevism. Rand boasted that she had never been affected by Marxist propaganda and “learned in reverse” by critically analyzing everything she was taught and formulating reasons as to why the Communists were wrong. The dialectical method of educa- tion emphasized the interplay of philosophical principles with eco- nomic and social factors that led to “inevitable” conclusions. Thus, Rand viewed history as the conflict of abstractions in the real world. She created her own dialectic, in which “values” determine the suc- cess or failure of societies and individuals. Rand absorbed much of the Marxist method — she just changed the conclusions. For a society — or a person — to succeed, it was simply necessary to have the cor- rect principles and all else would follow, systematically and inevita- bly. Thus, because of her background and education, Rand did not view the Russian Revolution as an ethnic struggle between Jews and non- Jews, the byproduct of a poorly waged war, the victory of professional revolutionaries or even the end product of a host of complicated fac- tors. Instead, it was the inevitable result of mistaken philosophy, the real world manifestation of an abstract ideological battle. Indeed, decades later, Ayn Rand would say to the graduates of West Point, 22 The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 2011 “politics is not the cause, but the last consequence of philosophical ideas.“2 Hence, Rand would later say that the “most evil man in his- tory” was not Marx, Lenin, or Stalin, but Immanuel Kant. A central premise of Rand’s worldview is control. Rand tried to “name her path, to grasp it, to conceptualize it, and, most important, to put it under her conscious control.”3 The moral man guides himself through the dispassionate application of his reason to his chosen goals, sweeping all else before him. He is therefore successful. If a person neglects to choose any particular course and simply follows everyone else (a profoundly immoral act in Rand’s view), he will be condemned to flail wildly throughout his life, a victim of circumstance and the machinations of “collectivists” and “mystics” that seek to ex- ploit him. The immoral, irrational man will be a failure. Of course, Rand’s own life was heavily affected by the uncon- trolled. Her own intellectual outlook was at least partly a product of her background. The fact that she was able to get an education only occurred because the Communist Party spared “bourgeois” students in her school years while purging them the next year. She also was fortunate in securing her escape from Russia. Her family randomly received a letter from relatives in America in 1925. Seizing the oppor- tunity, Rand announced her intention to leave Russia and stay with her relatives, thus beginning a nearly impossible bureaucratic struggle to obtain the proper paperwork from Bolshevik authorities. Her fami- ly also raised the necessary money for the journey, an almost insur- mountable obstacle in its own right. Rand lied on her paperwork and was not caught, and also noticed a minor clerical error that would have prevented her from leaving. Only through luck, unchosen fami- ly ties, and the sacrifice of others was Alisa able to emigrate from Rus- sia. Her parents were not so lucky — they would never obtain permis- sion to leave Russia and died in the Siege of Leningrad. However, this narrow escape did not seem to affect Alisa Rosenbaum’s emerg- ing worldview, nor did it challenge her conception of herself as entire- ly self-made. Her American relatives were perturbed at her seeming indifference to their existence and lack of gratitude, and she quickly 2 Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It.” Lecture given at West Point, 1974.
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