By the way, the vitriol and the stupid “sociopath” comments just make me want to recap what I think the obsession with Ayn Rand by, not the right, but the left, is all about. Note that I’m not an Objectivist or a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, but I do define my core political orientation as “intolerant of bullshit” and I see a lot of it whenever Ayn Rand comes up:
Ayn Rand is not a significant figure in American politics. She will, once in a blue moon, get mentioned in a Republican primary context, by people who surely haven’t read anything she wrote and would have to distance themselves from her atheism and other beliefs if they ever seriously invoked her. On the whole, Objectivism is a movement with a few thousand self-declared followers and maybe a few hundred or less who actually live by all its tenets. In terms of both stated and actual followers, it has far less influence on American society than Bahai, or fruitarianism, or JFK conspiracy theories do, and we’re not constantly analyzing how those belief systems influence any major political party.
The reason that the left cannot stop bringing up Ayn Rand is because she’s an easy target. Attacking people who say “the free market has proven to be the best overall approach historically, though of course there is room for a reasonable degree of taxation and public services” is hard. Attacking people whose argument is “the top marginal tax rate should be 33% and not 35%” is hard. Attacking people who say “public schools would be better if teachers unions’ had less power than they currently do” is hard. Comprehending and responding to these positions requires some sort of actual understanding, some nuance, and some ability to actually put forth an argument as to why one’s opinion on the specific issue at hand.
But responding to any suggestion of lowering taxes or reducing government control of anything with “oh, you must be one of those Ayn Rand followers. What a sociopathic cunt she was! Haha I bet she had sand in her vagina!” is really, really easy. Reducing any slightly pro-market argument to this boogeyman of Objectivism and then attacking some person who has been dead for thirty years with childish insults is really, really easy. Why learn anything about the particulars of the Wisconsin public employees union situation when you can just continually discuss someone who wrote a bad novel in 1957?
So, having the ghost of Ayn Rand around is great for the left. Since she has nearly no followers, it’s basically a wash for the right–they’re more interested in beating their gay children with Bibles than propping open the door with Atlas Shrugged. Without this straw man, it would be a lot more difficult to be a left-winger on the Internet, because people would have to engage with the actual ideas and policies being proposed instead of reducing everything to “exactly what the Democrats proposed v. Mad Max like anarcho-capitalist wasteland.”