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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Ayn Rand and Libertarianism

July 27, 2018 by Scott Timberg

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FOR most of my life — I was a kid during the Reagan Revolution — I’ve been puzzled by otherwise smart people falling for Libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s brand of freedom snake oil. Everybody likes the idea of freedom, but for the Fountainhead crowd, the notion acquires cartoonish dimensions, and their definition of the term seems to tilt toward rich businessmen and other Uber-menschen.

If you live in a more-or-less urban, blue-state, college-educated world, you probably don’t overlap a great deal with conservatives who come from an evangelical, agrarian, or even (depending on your generation) neo–con point of view. But you’re likely to have a bunch of friends or colleagues who are or were Randians or Libertarians.

The American conservative movement and the Republican party in particular has been through a series of love affairs and breakups with the Randtites. There are always an array of right-of-center groups, rearranging and reforming. The current political situation is as confusing and unstable as the current occupant of the White House, so it’s easy to find observers who see the Libertarians’ day as being over, as Southern  evangelicals, say, or law-and-order conservatives push them aside. But Ayn Rand fans in finance, the alternate universe of think tanks, and Silicon Valley exert a huge influence on 21st century politics.

In any case, here is my essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, which looks at two newish books and, briefly, an older one. 

Filed Under: books, indie, literary, Los Angeles, west coast Tagged With: Los Angeles Review of Books

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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