Who is Ayn Rand?

"A hypocrite," grumbles my girlfriend. "A visionary...a great writer...a little weird," concedes an old buddy from high school. "A dude," quips a TDI veteran strolling along the Green last weekend.
"A fine libertarian...a morally disgusting and reprehensible person," declares an old Mormon scholar at an academic conference in my hometown of Salt Lake City.
In keeping with tenets of objectivism, the radical school of philosophy she developed in the middle of the last century, I have tried my damnedest to draw independent conclusions about Ms. Rand. As she would say, if I were to change my opinions for the mere sake of solidarity with those around me, then I would become a "second-hander" - a sort of intellectual parasite who surrenders his identity to the whims of more influential people.

I don't want to be a parasite. Then again, does agreeing with Ms. Rand make me one anyway?
She was a hard-nosed individualist, a crusader for creative genius, and a relentless critic of authority. She was a libertarian who refused to be called one, a disciple of Nietzsche who later rejected him for his "abandonment" of rationality, and a child of pre-Revolutionary Russian privilege, permanently bruised by the legacy of Bolshevism. She despised charity and socialism; rather, she was a devout believer in free market capitalism. Her novels are moody, humorless, and thought-provoking. Her protagonists - particularly in her landmark works The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged - are impossible übermenschen. She was herself a shameless hero-worshipper, at times taking this fascination to a fetishistic extreme.

My opinion of her? I think she reminds me of Cloris Leachman's Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein. I also happen to believe that we are suffering a painful shortage of her kind of thought.

As a precipitous financial crisis chokes the national economy and globalization leeches traditional American jobs away from our shores, popular opinions are raging against a semi-visible elite perceived to have navigated the country into these murky straits. Though American society is, in many ways, more egalitarian than ever, "Joe Six-Pack" feels just as downtrodden as ever.

Populism is on the rise. Listen to either presidential candidate or a cable news pundit and it is manifestly clear: we are trembling about health care, unemployment, illegal immigration, and bad mortgages. But more importantly, we blame the Men on Top - the nebulous plutocracy in Washington and Lower Manhattan - for our troubles. We've all been collectively duped by an Enron-style conspiracy against the common man, or so they say.

At the risk of sounding like a sagging relic of the 1950s, I will say this: Americans need to own up to their share of the crisis. We are all individually responsible for the disasters of the last decade, whether by our votes or our habits as borrowers and consumers. Though foreign policy and regulatory practices may be ultimately decided by the big fellows in smoke-filled-rooms, their grip on the world is contingent on our participation in it. For every George W. Bush, there are a hundred million voters who stood behind him on election day; for every predatory mortgage lender, there are entire cities full of overzealous consumers with eyes bigger than their paychecks. When things go wrong, our political and economic leaders make convenient and attractive scapegoats, because self-criticism is painful and angry mobs are warm and inviting.

Rand in particular emphasized the importance of the very elites we find ourselves railing against in trying times like these. History's experiments with communism have showed us that healthy economies cannot be built "from the ground up"; without the financial and intellectual capital of America's elite, prosperity - let alone recovery - would be a pipe dream.

Sadly, this has never been a politically expedient position to take. Where Ayn Rand may have asked a struggling American to prop up his flagging life with meaningful work and a strictly self-reliant attitude, our politicians know him too well to make such trying demands. Both major presidential candidates have drenched their rhetoric in mob-friendly syrup, making lavish promises and reinforcing the public's already dangerous sense of entitlement. The left promises us universal health care and outsource-proof jobs; the right vows to bring us cheap gas and energy independence well into the next century. Both agendas would cost us dearly by stifling free markets and boosting taxes, and neither acknowledges the ordinary American's role as anything but a victim in the unfolding tragedy.

Ayn Rand's life came to an unspectacular close in 1982, but her legacy endured - likely in more places than we realize. Her works inspired a generation of enterprising innovators and entrepreneurs to "dream big," in the words of The Economist, and in doing so, helped to preserve a unique national identity - one grounded in merit and intrepid self-reliance - into the 21st century. As we hurtle into an uncertain future, we might learn a thing or two by examining her core beliefs and heeding her warnings. Our troubled country could benefit from a little self-love.