Lisa Duggan is a historian, journalist, activist, and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University.
Ayn Rand believed that the path to social harmony ran through the inferior masses’ acceptance of brutal rule by their natural superiors. Her perspective was wrong, and its implications were just as grim and nasty as her atrocious personality.
An upsurge in business activism joined with libertarians and conservatives to usher in neoliberalism’s dominance by the 1980s election of Ronald Reagan. A key piece of that dominance: Ayn Rand’s philosophy of optimistic cruelty, nearly perfect in its immorality.