Guessing on a Puzzle

Ayn Rand is more than controversial. She is  hated – both in her lifetime and now thirty years after her death. The hostility is so intense, and the efforts to  ignore or misrepresent her so vigorous that it is interesting to speculate on why she inspires them. Some reasons seem obvious. Her ideas were unconventional, challenging, and threatening to powerful people and organizations. She enjoyed shocking readers and listeners with the apparently incongruous or outrageous -  not surprising for someone  who grew up on Nietzsche and Hugo but still disconcerting to some.  She did not  tolerate disagreement very well, and her criticisms of and attacks on opponents could be brutal. Particularly in her later writing, she often did not just call a spade a spade, but, as the old joke goes, insisted on labeling it a goddamned shovel. All of this can explain a lot of the hostility, but by no means all of it.  After all, one could say most or all of the same things about any number of thinkers and writers who are not so despised.

I think a part of the rest of the answer may be that she is dangerous in a particular way. The enlightenment ideas of liberalism and scientific rationality have a great many enemies, chiefly because they leave no room for the state as anything more than a limited organization of human beings or for transcendental knowledge or beings.  Historically, antagonists have found comfort in the belief  that, however valid these ideas might be, they are too dry and  analytical, and too lacking in stirring imagery and emotion  to appeal to too large a number of people. (This sort of criticism was one basis of the romantic reaction against the enlightenment  - with romanticism’s  focus on feelings, symbol, and passion, its fascination with primitive life, the Middle Ages, and the experience of myth and religion, and its glorification of the experience of a person’s being swept up in something greater than himself.) Then along came  Ayn Rand changing the game by presenting many of  those ideas in a manner unprecedentedly passionate and emotionally vivid and compelling. That could be worrisome to people.  Since fear and hatred often go together, it  could also explain a few things.