Atlas is a novel with multiple Roarks. She doesn't spend a lot of time showing how they deal with the average Joes because she already showed that in the earlier novel. She shows them in Atlas dealing with each other.

Atlas is a novel with multiple Roarks. She doesn't spend a lot of time showing how they deal with the average Joes because she already showed that in the earlier novel. She shows them in Atlas dealing with each other.

Cultural conservatives would depart from Rand in that we do feel some obligation to weak, the poor, the powerless, above that which we discern to be in our self-interest. (Self interest was obviously Rand's god, but most people have more compassionate alternatives: Jesus, Hashem, Allah.)

As I said, most conservatives are not in lock-step with Rand. But they translate her selfish philosophy into one whose goal is to breed more self-reliance, which we believe brings more overall success and prosperity. At the same time, we favor charity. (Compare Dick Cheney's contributions to charity with B. Obama's over the past decade, as a percentage of their incomes. It's almost laughable — you'll see the difference in philosophy played out in dollars and cents. Obama is a stingy dude, except when it comes to other people's money. I think I gave more to charity than Obama did in some years, and I don't have one tenth of a Senator's income.) We conservatives believe that government-coerced charity is inefficient, and at this point it should be obvious that it leads to national bankruptcy. (The primary component of our true national indebtedness is in unfunded government entitlement guarantees.) Coerced charity is morally wrong, and in practical terms, it is economic suicide. I suppose in this sense conservatives arrive at a similar conclusion to Rand, but for different reasons, and with different implications for personal behavior.

You're probably not a big science fiction reader. Atlas Shrugged is best read as an alternate universe novel, because you are correct in pointing out that it seems to be about a United States that doesn't exist and never could. Quite a bit of science fiction, being by and for nerds, also has a lot of stilted and unnatural dialog. By that standard, Dagny and Reardon and the novel's other characters are brimming with life. Your criticisms of the characters are not off the mark, though.

As an alternate universe novel, there are no exact parallels with the political struggles we see today. And I too find it odd that some conservatives criticize various administration plans as socialism, when they are self evidently a way to advance big business and big finance in an anticompetitive way. So, they aren't capitalistic, either. Neither fish nor flesh.

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Old authoritarian forms don't fit the current era, but human nature's tendency to want to control others and leech off their productive labor remain a constant. In today's USA it is the middle class and politically unconnected business that are disadvantaged. Special interest groups and politically connected industries are favored and advantaged. Every American will be made to suffer for the criminality of the finance and insurance industry and the stupidity of the auto industry. Did Rand foresee this exactly? Of course not. But Rand's universe still seems gallingly familiar.

Ann Logue offers the most constructive comment here. Atlas Shrugged is entertainment for some, annoyance and tedium for others, but Ann is right that history would be a most productive use of reading time. I enjoy history through biography, and I find that truth is stranger and more wondrous than fiction. Looking at the history of empires, it does not appear that our own American empire will end well. I can't tell you whether the barbarians will overwhelm us tomorrow or fifty years from now. But Franklin once famously told a lady that the Constitutional Convention had given us “a republic, if you can keep it.” I think we will not keep it, because no one even seems to understand what a republic is anymore. Nor do they respect the spirit of the individuals who produced it. Emphasis on “individuals.”