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EPILOGUE: AYN RAND IN AMERICAN MEMORY 283
river to break loose and crush every impediment to its free running.
I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desires—
nothing between me and greatness itself—but the temptation to doubt
my will and bow to councils of moderation, expedience, and conventional
morality, and shrink into the long, slow death of respectability.
That was where the contempt came in.” 8 Wolff was not the only writer
to fi nd Rand an irresistible target for parody. The cape, the ivory cigarette
holder, the dollar-sign pin—she is a satirist’s dream come true. In
Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin, she is the stern Anna Granite,
founder of “Defi nitism,” while Murray Rothbard mocked her as Carson
Sand in Mozart Was a Red. 9
That Rand had spawned a veritable genre of parodists spoke to her
continued appeal. Twenty years after her death she was selling more
books than ever in her life, with Atlas Shrugged alone averaging sales
of more than one hundred thousand copies per year. These fi gures kept
her from fading out of public memory, as did her connection to Alan
Greenspan, her most famous protégé. As Greenspan’s star rose, so did
Rand’s. Profi les and biographies of Greenspan inevitably lingered over
his time spent by her side, and enterprising reporters even exhumed
Greenspan’s Objectivist Newsletter articles for clues about his intellectual
development.
The fi nancial crisis of 2008 ushered in a new Rand, one stripped of
historical context and at times mythic in stature. She suddenly became
a favored citation of the left, who saw in her ideas about free markets
and selfi shness the roots of economic devastation. Greenspan’s startling
admission that he “found a fl aw” in his ideology offered the ultimate
proof for this line of reasoning. To these criticisms Rand’s followers had
a ready answer, the same one she herself would have proffered. True
capitalism has never been known, the Objectivists cried, and it is the
statist economy that collapsed, not the free one. Rather than cause libertarians
and Objectivists to recant their beliefs overnight, for many the
fi nancial meltdown simply confi rmed the predictive powers of Rand’s
work. Yaron Brook, ARI’s director, summarized the reaction: “We’re
heading towards socialism, we’re heading toward more regulation.
Atlas Shrugged is coming true.” This understanding was not confi ned to
Objectivist circles. Sales of Atlas Shrugged spiked in 2008 after the U.S.
Treasury bought stakes in nine large banks and again in 2009 when the
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