Jenny Turner finds Ayn Rand As Astonishing as Elvis — but not in a good way:
Objectivism is at least modern, with no harking back to thatched cottages or yeoman militias; and it does claim a horror of political violence, and nationalism and racism, the last denounced as ‘collectivism of the very lowest sort’. You can see, in a way, how it might offer a sense of life’s grandeur, coupled with a thrilling disdain for guilt, duty, service and so on. One can just about see how such ideas might have struck small-town 1950s teenagers — as astonishing as Elvis, in their way.