Watch the Broligarchs!
What Ayn Rand's "Myth of the Founder" hath wrought
Ayn Rand laughed.
Or, rather, she would have (though she didn’t very often), had she lived to witness the triumph of techno-libertarianism and her cult of the founder. And although she died in 1982, right before the introduction of the Macintosh, she probably would have loved the selfish men of Big Tech and their common skepticism over the existence of such a thing as a coercive monopoly (Averted Gaze). Further, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta and Jeff Bezos of Amazon — superlative examples of Roarkish manliness, for sure — joined Musk in prime seating at Trump’s inauguration, in front of the Cabinet picks. The ultimate revenge of the nerds is finally complete.
Trump, no literati, raved about The Fountainhead, saying he identified with the protagonist, the inventor John Gault. “It relates to business (and) beauty (and) life and inner emotions,” the President said, in an uncharacteristically literary moment. “That book relates to ... everything,” Trump said of the 1957 novel, to Kirsten Powers.
The massive tome influenced not just a future President, but a whole host of new business founders. “PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel counts it as inspiration,” Max Nisen of Business Insider noted in 2013. “Lululemon founder Chip Wilson is also a big fan; the company got significant flack for printing the phrase ‘Who is John Galt’ on its bags. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is a Rand devotee as well, at one point using the cover of ‘The Fountainhead’ as his Twitter avatar.” The influence of Ayn Rand’s works — particularly The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged — ought to be examined more closely, with particular reference to how it has shaped the business and political culture of the West.
In the 1950s, when The Fountainhead was just a postwar bestseller of certain eccentric ideas and not yet a full-blown influential tour de force, a young Allan Greenspan was one of Rand’s most ardent disciples. She, in turn, rewarded the somber man’s subservience by calling him “the (original) Undertaker.” The future Federal Reserve Chairman and cult figure on Wall Street in the 90s was a part of an informal ultra-capitalist group called, ironically, The Collective. The Collective is of the first Randian age, the period in between the end of her literary output and the beginning of her life as a polemicist on behalf of laissez-faire capitalism. Jonathan Powers in The Guardian wrote of the second Randian age:
Greenspan is the link between the original Rand cult and what we might think of as the second age of Rand: the Thatcher-Reagan years, when the laissez-faire, free-market philosophy went from the crankish obsession of rightwing economists to the governing credo of Anglo-American capitalism. Greenspan, appointed as the US’s central banker by Ronald Reagan in 1987, firmly believed that market forces, unimpeded, were the best mechanism for the management and distribution of a society’s resources. That view – which Greenspan would rethink after the crash of 2008-9 – rested on the assumption that economic actors behave rationally, always acting in their own self-interest. The primacy of self-interest, rather than altruism or any other nonmaterial motive, was, of course, a central tenet of Randian thought.
Put more baldly, the reason why Republicans and British Conservatives started giving each other copies of Atlas Shrugged in the 80s was that Rand seemed to grant intellectual heft to the prevailing ethos of the time. Her insistence on the “morality of rational self-interest” and “the virtue of selfishness” sounded like an upmarket version of the slogan, derived from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, that defined the era: greed is good. Rand was Gordon Gekko with A-levels.
The third age of Rand came with the financial crash and the presidency of Barack Obama that followed. Spooked by the fear that Obama was bent on expanding the state, the Tea Party and others returned to the old-time religion of rolling back government. As Rand biographer Jennifer Burns told Quartz: “In moments of liberal dominance, people turn to her because they see Atlas Shrugged as a prophecy as to what’s going to happen if the government is given too much power.”
The Tea Party movement, largely a reaction to Obamacare (with a smidgeon of bigotry), was a factor in the 2010 wave election. And Mitt Romney, who eventually ran against Obama in 2012, picked Paul Ryan, a Rand-admirer, as his running mate. It was peak third age of Ayn Rand. Soon after, Greenspan put aside his rose-tinted glasses regarding the blamelessness of big banks and unfettered laissez-faire capitalism. Paul Ryan never did.
The pendulum swings. And the fourth age of Ayn Rand was Trump, 1.0. The former and future President consciously or unconsciously stacked his Cabinet with those influenced by the Russian-born novelist of anti-Communist ideas, which were embraced, widely, in her new homeland. Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, named Atlas Shrugged as his favorite book. His former Labor Secretary Andy Puzder was a big fan of The Fountainhead, and former CIA director Mike Pompeo has said that Atlas Shrugged “really had an impact on me,” according to Powers. Swell and lovely.
So, here we are, in the fifth age of Ayn Rand — an era of hyper-masculine egotism and rapacious capitalism. Rand was positively rhapsodic on both subjects. In Trump’s second season, the Age of Thumotic Excess is all pervasive. Blame the Broligarchs, who are roughly as popular as the band Nickelback, but even more Caucasian in their whole aesthetic. One year ago, Pew found that eight-in-ten Americans (78%) said social media companies have too much power and influence in politics today. Regarding the government takeover by the tech bro and the crypto bro set, media observer Tina Brown mused: “They are busy re-designing our world at warp speed … you really get the sense that all they do in their mansions in Silicon Valley is (staring at other rich people) … inflicting their vision on us all.” It is the speed and scale of their moxie that is so off-putting. The FT reported at the end of last year that Elon Musk’s SpaceX, autonomous-ship builder Saronic, ChatGPT maker OpenAI and artificial intelligence data group Scale AI have joined two of the largest US defense technology companies in order to disrupt — of all things — Pentagon contracts. And they are just the gang to do it.
Would Ayn Rand have approved? “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” That was the Credo of The Fountainhera’s John Gault, which has reverberated, in the decades since its composition, throughout libertarian politics and into the living philosophies of the present-day Broligarchs, who make their own morality. Franklin Foer certainly sees Randian parallels in Elon Musk, when he writes:
Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.
And its not just Musk, the soi-disant libertarian “master builder” with over $15 billion in federal contracts, trapped in the loop of libertarianism and techno-authoritarianism. Conflicts of interest be damned (fake news!). Project 2025, which seeks to starve funding for the federal government, is proceeding apace (though Trump claims to know nothing about it). The authors of whole policy chapters — Russ Vought, John Ratcliffe — are now in his administration. The Department of Education is on track to be demolished. And, in that process, some of the last remaining legacy of Jimmy Carter evaporates as well, entirely by design.
There’s more. Head Start funding is drying up in the wake of the federal funding freeze. DEI is in the process of erasure. Also: US AID — which is roughly the same percentage of the federal budget (under 1%) as the amount of fentanyl coming across the Canadian side of the border. In the midst of this shrinking of big government, comes the rise of Big Tech, gnawing on what will be left of government carcass. Remember what Gordon Gekko did to Teldar Paper and tried to do to Bluestar? Is this really what working class voters wanted?
Biden, in his closing address, conjured Eisenhower’s dire warning, echoing “military industrial complex.” But this time one involving the techno-elite broligarchs. Atlas Shrugged had been published three years before that speech was written; the Fountainhead was almost twenty years old. The former President Biden, citing ominous parallels, warned of "the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers to our country as well." There is much to blame Scranton Joe for — for staying in too long; for hubris; for essentially ceding the last month of his Presidency to Trump — but not this final, poignant warning about the threat of the Broligarchs.
In the coming years, Trump will “flood the zone” with distractions clearly calculated to rasp. The strategy will be to boggle the mind, confound the senses and leave progressives on the verge of despair. Outrage is a finite resource, they surmise, and they may be right. Guard your Chi — your lifeforce — always. Don’t sweat the obvious microaggressions, even if they come from the Executive Branch of the government. Because underlying all of these tweets, these “truths,” EOs and triggering pressers will be the ongoing further encroachment of the Broligarchs, the vital power behind an unpredictable and unstable President. And as putrid as Trump’s “truth” arguing that the South African government was possibly in the future going to be unfair to wealthy, landed whites, it is actually apartheid Elon’s accessing of the Treasury payments system that is a far greater and more present danger. Be vigilant. Watch the broligarchs!
“For brave warriors, these men really like their hidey holes. They’re afraid. They always need a bully on their side. Trump’s stand-in U.S. Attorney in DC, Ed Martin (a long-time anti-abortion fanatic and long-time Phyllis Schafly sidekick) just openly threatened to prosecute anyone who stands in the way of Musk’s boys. The Musketeers invading the offices reportedly refused to share their surnames. In a lovely little scoop, WIRED identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, with little to no government experience. Their names, should you feel moved to crowdsource them: Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. All had trails on the interweb, some rapidly being erased. Kliger writes a Substack newsletter under his own name. A recent cogitation was titled ‘Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears.’ A day before he was reportedly among the tools who invaded the federal computers, Kliger wrote a post titled ‘Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America.’” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)