Hollywood’s new right gets it wrong on Ayn Rand

Efforts to counter Hollywood’s left-wing bias are laudable but individualism is not the antidote.

Actor Helen Mirren in a scene from the film, The Passion of Ayn Rand.

Hollywood is trying to move its cultural dial. A group of tech bros has launched Founders Films, which is seeking investors for movies that will be unapologetically conservative. Its approach, as it has outlined to potential supporters, is: “Say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America’s enemies, back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP (intellectual property).”

Projects reported to be in the pipeline include a film about the evacuation of the World Trade Centre on 9/11, another about the US assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, a spy series that “lays bare China’s plans to replace the US as the dominant global power”, and a three-part adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, a novel written in 1957 by Ayn Rand. At that point, the heart promptly sinks. The inclusion of Rand, a Russian-born American writer and philosopher, indicates an obsession that mirrors the very problem these tech bros are anxious to correct.

Many will sympathise with the impulse behind this film project. Hollywood has long been consumed by an agenda that promotes left-wing, anti-West orthodoxies about race and colonialism, sex and gender, patriotism and other such issues. Apart from anything else, the films generated are almost always predictable, pretentious and prejudiced. American Beauty, which identified the soul of America as a flag-waving, gay-bashing, sadistic bigot, was a stellar example.

Ayn Rand in 1943.

Ideology is the enemy of art and creativity. Instead of exploring the world, it seeks to impose its own view upon it. That, however, also applies to Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged, which portrayed a dystopian society in which titans of industry fight back against burdensome bureaucracy, has been widely panned as fantastically tedious. Rand was didactic, dogmatic and dull. The deeper objection to her as some high priest of conservatism, however, is that she was the arch-apostle of the cult of the individual. But individualism is not the antidote to contemporary left-wingery. It’s at the root of it.

While the old left was about collective action through the workers taking control of the economy, current progressive thinking is about empowering the autonomous individual. All external norms and sources of authority were accordingly dismissed as an attack on personal freedom. Lifestyle choice, moral relativism and individual rights became the unchallengeable creed. At the root of that has been an onslaught against the core biblical values of the West. These include constraining personal behaviour in the interests of others, and differentiating between right and wrong, good and bad, truth and lies.

Rand was opposed to all that. She dismissed religion and embraced “objectivism”, a doctrine that questions the value of altruism or the moral obligation to act in the interest of others. She said the purpose of a moral code was instead to provide the principles that enabled people to survive and further their own interests. Rand promoted selfishness, and rejected empathy and kindness. Moreover, she held that everyone had an inalienable right to act in accordance with their own judgment. This was no different from the “lifestyle choice” moral relativism of social liberals. Many who are opposed to left-wing orthodoxies have latched on to Rand, believing collectivism is the evil to be fought and liberty is the antidote. This is one reason conservatism has so badly lost its way. By embracing libertarianism, so-called conservatives went down the rabbit hole of a reductionist viewpoint that reduces all relationships to hyper-individualism and materialism.

They failed to grasp that individualism doesn’t promote and protect a culture but unpicks the social glue that keeps a society together. That glue consists of bonds of duty and responsibility, which are created by moral codes that should matter to anyone wanting to conserve what is valuable in Western culture. These include taking personal responsibility for your actions, upholding justice and equality under the law, promoting compassion and putting the welfare of others first, as well as intangibles such as trust, truth-telling and kindness. Libertarianism, by contrast, took conservatives on to the same hyper-individualistic ground as the left. The only difference was that they promoted self-interest in materialistic and economic programs as opposed to the left’s cultural and social agenda. Failing to articulate what should be conserved, conservatism itself fell apart.

Films both reflect and create a culture. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hollywood celebrated courage and heroism, love of America and optimism about the future. These were values reflecting the public mood, creating myths and legends in celluloid that fixed those attitudes in the public imagination. As the culture changed to become brittle, cynical and nihilistic, films changed with it. In recent years, however, there have been signs that both the cultural and movie winds have been changing again.

Sound of Freedom, a 2023 thriller about a mission to rescue children from sex traffickers in Colombia, grossed $US250m ($387.2m) worldwide to become one of the most successful independent films of all time. And despite poor reviews, the biopic Reagan pulled in $US30m last year – nearly doubling the take of The Apprentice, a hit job on Donald Trump. Films change direction because the culture does. One ideological viewpoint must not be replaced with another. Ayn Rand should be dumped by conservatives and filmmakers alike.

The Times