Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

By Jennifer Burns

(Oxford University Press, 459 pp., $27.95)

Ayn Rand and the World She Made

By Anne C. Heller              

(Doubleday, 559 pp., $35) 

I.

The current era of Democratic governance has provoked a florid response on the right, ranging from the prosaic (routine denunciations of big spending and debt) to the overheated (fears of socialism) to the lunatic (the belief that Democrats plan to put the elderly to death). Amid this cacophony of rage and dread, there has emerged one anxiety that is an actual idea, and not a mere slogan or factual misapprehension. The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.