Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

What makes old people cynical is listening to the exact same lies being propagated year after year—and seeing them be just as effective as they ever were. I grew up during the Vietnam War, and I never thought I’d live to see the same hollow rationales, the same shameless appeals to patriotism trotted out to justify another such fiasco.

But here they are in this campaign, looking just as fresh and lively as ever.

To be sure, they have company. Near the end of the vice presidential debate last Thursday, the lies from Paul Ryan were coming so fast and furious—Obamacare will cause 20 million people to lose their health care! 7.4 million seniors will lose theirs! It contains 21 tax increases!—that I feared he was about to morph into some kind of iconic, fabled trickster figure, the Coyote perhaps, or the Lying Choirboy Scamp. Befuddled by the sheer quantity of falsehoods, the mainstream media predictably rolled over like an obedient Labrador and started debating facial expressions, leaving any number of reasonable questions unanswered.

For instance, left unexplained, so far, is how the ever-evolving Romney-Ryan economic plan now can possibly work, even on its own terms. Originally, the plan called for a massive tax cut for the very wealthiest Americans, the “job creators,” who could be counted on to invest the extra income and, well, create jobs. Now we are told that any such cut for the wealthy will be “revenue neutral,” thanks to all the loopholes they plan to close. But if that’s so, if the rich are not going to get a real tax cut … then where is all the extra investment income going to come from?

Or how is it that no one picked up on the old switcheroo involving just why it is that we need to attack Iran before it develops a nuclear weapon? For months now, we’ve been told that the mullahs in Tehran are so crazy they are liable to launch a suicidal nuclear attack on Israel or even the United States the moment they have such weapons.

Yet last Thursday, when moderator Martha Raddatz dared to ask the question no one else in the media seems capable of putting to a candidate—“let me ask you what’s worse … another war in the Middle East, or a nuclear-armed Iran?”—Mr. Ryan merely mentioned Iran’s hatred of Israel, repeatedly emphasizing a whole other argument for war:

“[I]f they get nuclear weapons, other people in the neighborhood will pursue their nuclear weapons as well.”

Say what?

Not 10 years after the neocon excuse for going to war with Iraq pirouetted effortlessly from rooting out “weapons of mass destruction” to building a model state to inspire the Islamic world, Mr. Ryan and his party are now talking up an exponentially bigger war … to maintain the regional balance of power?

Ms. Raddatz then failed to elicit any discussion of the fearsome costs of an invasion or even an air strike against Iran, despite asking directly, “Can the two of you be absolutely clear and specific to the American people [about] how effective would a military strike be?”

Crickets! Though at least Vice President Biden did blurt out, “The last thing we need now is another war.” Nothing on this Earth was going to compel Congressman Ryan to touch an actual fact or figure—just as nothing has compelled Gov. Romney to give us any hints about what a potential invasion of Iran is likely to cost in terms of blood and treasure.

Instead, the Republican strategy is once again to take a number of recent events and anxieties and wrap them together in a grand narrative of Democratic iniquity. To this end, the right’s spin machine has been working shamelessly to exploit the assassination of our ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans in Benghazi. They have done their level best to inflate this tragic incident into a classic non-scandal scandal, insisting that the conflicting initial reports about just what happened show that the Obama administration is somehow weak, or incompetent, or covering something up, or even anti-American.

These wild and often contradictory charges came fast and furious last Thursday from Rep. Ryan, who on at least three different occasions accused President Obama of apologizing or not standing up for “our values,” in the Middle East—thereby somehow empowering the mullahs to alter the laws of physics: “They’re spinning the centrifuges faster.” He went on to castigate Vice President Biden for failing to convince the Iraqis to let thousands of American troops remain in that wonderful country for years to come, while charging the administration with endangering the lives of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan and “los[ing] the gains we’ve gotten” there. Excusing his running mate’s own precipitous charges about Benghazi, he insisted that, “We should always stand up for peace, for democracy, for human rights.”

Standing up for peace, democracy and human rights might safely be described as a stunning policy reversal for the party that flayed Democrats who tried to do just that during the Cold War.

Much more alarming is hearing the same Big Lie of that era trotted out to justify still more endless and unwinnable wars. Ever since the end of World War II, it comes around every time we fail to bludgeon our way to victory: If only we had the will.

If only those un-American types in the Oval Office, or the Reds in the State Department, or those bums on the college campuses who don’t understand “our values” would just get out of the way. If only they would “unleash Chiang Kai-shek” from Taiwan. If only they would let Douglas MacArthur drop the “30 to 50 atomic bombs” like he wanted, to create a “cordon sanitaire” across the YaluRiver. If only they would let us invade Cuba, or stay the course in Vietnam, or in Afghanistan, no matter how corrupt and irascible the Karzai regime proves to be, or how many more young Americans are killed by the very Afghans they are trying to train, so that “we don’t lose the gains we’ve gotten” in that godforsaken rockpile. If only we can plunge into Iran!

Always and forever, it seems, there’s another mad scheme waiting—and suddenly this campaign has become about the next one, as much as it is about budget deals, or the economy. Here’s a good rule for a democracy: if we can’t discuss, fully and openly, just how a military adventure will work and what it will cost, we shouldn’t do it.

Our thoughts exactly. (Agenda Project/Action Fund)

Don't worry, it's SFW: The Agenda Project Action Fund—you know, that fun progressive policy organization behind those very popular Granny Off the Cliff and Romney Girl videos—is back with more YouTubes! This time, it is taking on Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's pro-life agenda with a little something it calls "My Country, My Choice," but could be accurately described as a "big ol' tease."

http://youtu.be/XeY6gGQZ5_E

According to president Erica Payne:

"One of America’s two political parties has publicly stated its intention to strip women of their most basic freedom – the right to exercise dominion over their own bodies. There is no greater assault on freedom than the control of another’s physical being. The Republican Party’s official position is that they have the moral right – and should have the legal right – to physically control 51% of the population. Neanderthals believed that too. Now Neanderthals are extinct. Politicians who hold this view should be as well."

Unfortunately, we didn't really pay attention to what Ms. Payne was saying because we were watching the video frame by frame to see if there was a possible nip-slip.

You go, Paul Ryan. (TIME Magazine)

– Just in time for the vice presidential debates, here's Paul Ryan looking like Zach Morris's stand-in during a TIME Magazine photo shoot that teased him by saying it was considering naming him its man of the year. Yeah, right!

– The reason Lindsay Lohan was fighting with her mom on Tuesday? Apparently it had something to do with a $40,000 loan Ms. Lohan gave to her mother to keep her Long Island home from being foreclosed on.

– Last night was the New York premiere of Seven Psychopaths. Watch Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Colin Farrell reenact a scene from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo last night.
http://youtu.be/NzIsz3fU9xQ

– Here's how you know you've been hanging around brooding British vampires too much ... you start referring to yourself as a "miserable c**t." In Marie Claire of all places. Oh, K-Stew!

Ms. Obama and the girls. Photo Courtesy of AP/WWD.

Word has gotten out from publicists and fashion news authority Women’s Wear Daily that first lady Michelle Obama has endorsed yet another one of Barbara Tfank’s ladylike designs for a heavily monitored public appearance. It is said to be the fifth time that the first lady has donned a Barbara Tfank frock. She wore the ravishing outfit at a meet-and-greet in Gainesville, Fla., for a young girls’ after-school program called Girls' Place on September 17.

"A friend, who Tfank had shown the unusual fabric to, spotted the dress on C-SPAN and called the designer to tell her the news,” reported WWD.

According to our perhaps inaccurate tally, this means that Ms. Obama has worn Tfank to more public appearances than any other high-end American fashion designer, which leads us to ask: Is Barbara Tfank Ms. Obama’s new designer of choice? Has Ms. Tfank overtaken the feminine and playful aesthetic of Jason Wu?

With the election fast approaching, this would come as no surprise. Back in February, during New York fashion week, Ms. Tfank told The Observer, “It really interests me that the people who gravitate towards my clothes ... they’re women that are communicators—they have very strong opinions. I think that my clothes allow for women to show themselves, their power.”

Barbara Tfank at her New York Fashion Week presentation on September 10.

While Ms. Tfank would not comment specifically on her working relationship with the first lady, respecting her privacy, she did tell The Observer in an email today that “she represents all that is good about America.  Her inherent luminosity and warm personality can only enhance the quality of any designer’s work.”

The cerulean, marine and sky-blue mosaic print dress was reported to have been made of vintage fabric from Bianchini-Férier and is silk twill, according to WWD. The newspaper stated that the print fabric was created by artist Raoul Dufy and that Ms. Tfank had purchased the material at auction.

“I am honored that she chooses to wear my designs,” Ms. Tfank concluded in her email.

We’ll have to wait and see what else comes from this dynamic design duo. Best keep your eyes on the red-white-and-blue podiums.

(Photoillo by Scott Dvorin)

The blue-collar success stories piled up so fast at the Republican Convention in Tampa that one would have been forgiven for assuming that the party was made up entirely of the sons and daughters of garage mechanics, fruit pickers and removers of rotting animal carcasses from the nation’s highways.

Over and over again, speakers informed us of how they came from families of hard-working strivers, with parents who fought their way up from nothing. Such tales were almost de rigueur, especially if they involved “starting a small business.”

Before telling us how little girls now approach her with reverence and awe, Susana Martinez, the runaway egomaniac who is the governor of New Mexico, informed us that her mother and father started their security guard business by handing her—then an 18-year-old girl—a “Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum,” and posting her in the parking lot of a church during bingo games. There are those who might assume that this accounts for Ms. Martinez’s decision, as a prosecutor, to specialize in child abuse, but never mind.

Rick Santorum told us that he was a first-generation American and the grandson of a coal miner. (He didn’t mention that he was also the son of a clinical psychologist and an administrative nurse.) John Boehner told us he was “a regular guy with a big job,” whose father and uncles had first put him to work “mopping floors, waiting tables” at the bar they owned. Paul Ryan assured us that when he “was waiting tables, washing dishes or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life.” No doubt, that optimism was at least partly inspired by the trust fund he would inherit, thanks to his family’s enormously successful construction company (founded in 1884), and confirmed by his marriage to his millionaire wife, a Washington lobbyist and scion of a family of wealthy trial lawyers—not exactly the social familiar of your average dishwasher or lawn boy.

By the time Marco Rubio told us on the last night of the convention that his father “stood behind a bar in the back of the room all those years, so one day I could stand behind a podium in the front of a room,” this trope had reached the level of self-parody.

What could be next? “My father played piano in a whorehouse, so I could play on the stage at Carnegie Hall?” “My mother scraped gum off the sidewalk, so one day I could scrape the Iranian mullahs’ fingers off their nuclear-enrichment cyclotrons?”

Tim Pawlenty made sure to tell us that he was the only one of the five kids in his family to go to college, about the sweetest personal anecdote told by a Republican since the days when Supreme Court aspirant Clarence Thomas used to go around the country regaling audiences with tales of what a lazy no-account his sister was.

All this poor-mouthing of origins, family finances and siblings served a dual purpose, as both a reaffirmation of rugged, Republican individualism, and to support the convention talking point that the press and the Democrats must stop seeking to “demonize success” in general, and that great “businessman,” Mitt Romney, in particular ... with their demands that he release his tax returns.

Before the convention was over, Mr. Romney had been transformed—in his own words—into the son of a Mexican immigrant, whose family were “war refugees” from the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17, and who “never made it through college and apprenticed as a lath and plaster carpenter,” before becoming the head of a great automobile company and governor of Michigan.

In fact, Mr. Romney’s family had fled to Mexico from the territorial U.S. to avoid federal prosecution of the Mormon practice of polygamy. (The Mormon “Mexico colonies,” as they were called, were uprooted following the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz by local rebels who had bought their weapons in the U.S.) George Romney was indeed a remarkable man, almost a great one, but he was already an affluent auto executive by the time Mitt was born—able to provide his newborn son with “a few thousand dollars” in birthday gifts, according to Mitt’s wife, Ann.

This money was in turn invested by George in American Motors stock, which, under his dynamic leadership and that old-timey liberal prosperity thing, increased exponentially in value. Earlier in the convention, Ann had described her early married years with Mitt as a time when they ate “tuna fish and pasta” off an ironing board pressed into service as a table, and had to walk to graduate school classes. (The horror. The horror.) But if you believe her earlier accounts of the nest egg George had hatched for his son, they were scraping by on at least several hundred thousand 1969 dollars-worth of investment windfall.

Even by the standards of political bio exaggeration, all this comes off as a rather nervy piece of family revisionism, but never mind. The bigger issue here is that nobody in the Republican party seems to remember what a good job or a true businessman is anymore.

Almost all work is noble, of course, but not all of it is ennobling, and not all of it brings any multiplying or lasting value to an economy, a society or a family. The ambitions of Susana Martinez’s hardworking parents are nothing to mock, but hiring a teenaged girl to tote a .357 Magnum around the parking lot of a bingo game reflects the increasing desperation of the American working class, more than it does the traditional American dream. So is shoveling liquor into drunks, then making your kid clean up around the place. One does what one has to in this world, but the reality that those of us who don’t have that trust fund or “a few thousand” shares of prime stock awaiting their maturity are indeed more and more likely to be stuck mopping floors and waiting tables seems lost on this party. For Republicans, manual labor has become a weird sort of fetish, like Marie Antoinette’s fake pastoral village at Versailles, where she could play at running a working farm before returning to her glittering palace.

For that matter, Mitt Romney himself was hardly a “businessman” in the tradition of his father. He was, at best, a “venture capitalist,” at worst a “leveraged buyout artist”—and it’s not clear that, in a career of endlessly chopping up and restitching existing companies, he really created any net jobs at all, much less invented, produced or marketed anything. In the incredibly lazy, outdated hack job that is his campaign biography, No Apologies, Mitt makes his greatest success story—backing the expansion of Staples—as momentous as Andrew Carnegie developing a process for the mass production of steel.

Sorry, but putting some of your vast inherited wealth behind a company that has found a way to distribute office supplies more cheaply is not the same thing as, say, running Chrysler. Republicans are trying to make the case that Mr. Romney’s vaunted business experience will save the country. Unfortunately, what he has told us of his plans seems all too likely to reflect that experience. That is, taking apart and selling off the majestic constructions of our past.

Kevin Baker is covering the conventions and the election for harpers.org.

Sarah Palin won't get to talk about John McCain tonight. (Facebook)

Well, at least she can't claim it was a liberal news bias this time: Fox News contributor Sarah Palin took to Facebook today to kvetch about being bumped from the interviews (plural?) she was slated to give tonight about her BFF, John McCain. Whose birthday it is, apparently.


Okay, let's be honest: it is weird that Sarah Palin isn't going to be on Fox tonight, seeing as it's Paul Ryan's speaking engagement at the RNC. The former VP candidate weighing in on the next conservative to run for the spot?

Either way, one thing we do know is that it's not a good idea to send pouty little messages like that out on Facebook. We expect this to blow up in five ... four ... three ...

How our newscasters talk about rape (CNN)

Abortion has come back to the forefront of the political race after Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, who is currently running for a Senate seat, made a very stupid remark about women not getting pregnant in cases of "legitimate rape."

The damage is done: Republicans are treating Akin like a leper; he's been asked not to attend the RNC and to drop out of the race by no less than Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, and it's doubtful his campaign will ever recover from this gaffe.

And while it's good that Todd Akin's comments have gotten people talking about an issue that has been mainly pushed aside this election, some of the outraged responses to the Congressman's statement are in (almost) as poor taste as the original remark. Here's how we shouldn't be talking about the issue of "legitimate rape."

1. Making jokes about rape
We know you think you're helping by pointing out the insanity of someone telling you that you haven't been violated because you didn't get pregnant, but adding in lines like "magical rape-identifying uterus," as in the confusingly-titled "Have I Been Legitimately Raped?" (turns out it wasn't a quiz, like we originally thought) makes you sound flippant and snarky. Which is just fodder for the people who do believe nonconsensual sex isn't rape, because why would someone who claimed to have gone through the experience be making jokes about it?

Exception: While joking about rape is never funny, satirizing the logic behind people like Daniel Tosh and Congressman Akin can be. It's a slight but crucial distinction, and not recommended unless you are positive you know the difference. For examples of how to do this correctly, check out Lindy West's Jezebel piece, "How to Make a Rape Joke," this Onion headline, and Taylor Ferrera's "Legitimate Rape" song.

2. Automatically assuming that this is the moment to come out with a first-person confessional about being the victim of rape
We don't mean you shouldn't EVER write about your experience. Just don't write about your deeply personal trauma just to prove that Todd Akin is an idiot. We already know his remarks were out of line, and the deluge of "I was raped" stories in response undermines the horror of the act itself, increases the power/attention of a guy running for senator, and adds very little to the conversation.

3. Being an asshole to other media outlets over issues that are only marginally related to the rape comment
See the ouroboros-like media feud between Newsweek’s Tumblr, The Huffington Post and comedian Rob Delaney over a photo of a coat-hanger HuffPost used to accompany the Akin story. Way to turn attention away from the actual problem, people. And miss the point entirely.

4. Trash-talking an empty chair and pretending like that is totally what you'd say to Todd Akin if he had, in fact, showed up on your news show.

Hint, hint, Piers Morgan.
http://youtu.be/78wpVQsvbnk

Is this really the time for ridiculous stunt journalism? Though we all know how effective it is to reduce a serious national debate about abortion and rape to petty name-calling. Come on, what would Will McAvoy do?

5. Being Paul Ryan
While the Republican VP candidate adamantly doesn't support what Rep. Akin said, he also doesn't want to get into "rape semantics." Isn't the entire problem that someone people think the problem with rape is the word choice?

"Rape is rape," said the man who once tried to parse the difference between regular rape (no federally subsided abortion) and "forcible rape" (possibly subsided abortion, but you have to prove it). Now that Mr. Ryan has changed his tune and all rapes are actual rapes, he can denounce Akin without anyone noticing that under this logic, no abortions would be subsidized by the government because forcible rape doesn't exist anymore.

Illustration: Drew Friedman

To many people, the name Ayn Rand is a punch line, an occasion for a little eye-rolling, a superior cackle or a dismissive tweet (crazy Russian bag lady/right-wing hypocrite/home-wrecking lunatic, etc.). When Rand was alive—a small, feisty woman who chain-smoked and spoke in a thick Russian accent—she was condemned by intellectuals across the spectrum. To the left, she was a reactionary, a fascist, a capitalist pig who advocated for a complete separation between government and economics, limitless individualism and the virtue of selfishness.

To the right, she was an atheist; to moderates, an absolutist. Her books were often dismissed as over-the-top, Nietzschean romance novels for alienated adolescents, and her philosophy, Objectivism—which Rand described as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”—is ridiculed to this day.

Not that any of it made a dent in her legacy. Before her death in 1982, she declared, “I will not die, it’s the world that will end.” Turns out she was onto something. Unlike a great many of her contemporaries (e.g., James Gould Cozzens), who scarcely register today, Rand is still selling books—more than 800,000 a year, on average, for a total exceeding 25 million.

A surprising number of people will tell you “Ayn Rand changed my life.” Parents name their kids after her fictional characters. Ronald Reagan, who filled his administration with Rand devotees, claimed he was a fan, as have Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Clarence Thomas, Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, Ted Turner, Barry Goldwater, Melanie Griffith, Frank Lloyd Wright, Sandra Bullock, Simon Le Bon, Madonna, Rob Lowe, Rush Limbaugh, Sharon Stone, Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Billy Beane, Christina Ricci, Kurt Russell, Jim Carrey, Cal Ripken Jr., Marc Cuban, Eva Mendes, Hugh Hefner and numerous Playboy centerfolds.

Jerry Lewis once said that he carries a copy of The Fountainhead everywhere he goes. Steven Spielberg loves the 1949 movie version starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The Canadian rock band Rush based a concept album on Rand’s novel Anthem.

Hillary Clinton said she went through “an Ayn Rand phase,” as did Lesley Stahl, Ron Paul, Rand Paul and Hunter S. Thompson. Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle.

According to a nationwide poll by the Library of Congress, the 1,168-page Atlas Shrugged is the second most influential book in the country, after the Bible.

Every few years it’s announced that Ayn Rand is “having a moment.” In the 1990s, Newsweek declared “she’s everywhere,” a documentary about her life was nominated for an Academy Award, and the U.S. Postal Service came out with a stamp commemorating the “controversial but respected author.”

Between the centenary of her birth (2005) and the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged (2007), the moments have turned into more of a boom. The Libertarian Party owes her a major debt. Silicon Valley loves her. CEOs take refuge in her pro-capitalist ideas. Starting with the bailouts and TARP, book sales went through the roof, and since Obama took office, over 1.5 million copies of Atlas Shrugged have been sold.

For decades there has been talk about a movie version of the novel; Godfather producer Al Ruddy, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway are among those who have failed to pull it off. In 2006, there was speculation that Angelina Jolie might play the beautiful, brainy, powerful railroad executive Dagny Taggart, and that Brad Pitt was circling the role of John Galt. The deal fell through, but on April 15, 2011, investor John Aglialoro (who had optioned the novel in 1992) released Atlas Shrugged: Part 1. Despite efforts by Tea Party groups and Fox News personalities to promote it, the movie was a flop. Nonetheless, a sequel, starring Samantha Mathis as Taggart and D.B. Sweeney as Galt, is being prepped for release in time for the 2012 election.

The timing is auspicious. In the run-up to next year’s 70th anniversary of the publication of The Fountainhead, another Rand revival appears to be underway, recently goosed by Mitt Romney’s selection of Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate. In a 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, Mr. Ryan said he grew up reading Rand’s work, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” He added, “There is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism than through [her] writings and works.” He also confessed that he got involved in public service because of her, and that Atlas Shrugged still informs his views on monetary policy.

Mr. Ryan began backpedaling in April. Rand, after all, was an athiest who considered abortion a “moral right.” The congressman recently told Fox News’s Brit Hume that he was no Ayn Rand disciple, and that although he’d “really enjoyed” her novels, he “completely” disagrees with her atheistic philosophy. “She came from Communism,” he continued. “She showed how the pitfalls of socialism can hurt the economy, can hurt people, families and individuals.”

The transformation of Ayn Rand from a novelist into the founder of a philosophical movement was the work of Nathaniel Branden, the “most significant last living link” to the author, as he put it. Mr. Branden probably knew Rand as well as anyone. “I think she was a very troubled woman, who had incredible virtues and incredible vices,” he said. “I admired her beyond words,” he added. “Jesus, it was a great adventure. We became soul mates. Or so I thought.”

LIKE MR. RYAN and millions of others, I fell under the spell of Ayn Rand, briefly, during my sophomore year of college, when my friend Kris Gottschalk, having failed to interest me in Tom Robbins, gave me her paperback copy of The Fountainhead. The first sentence (“Howard Roark laughed”) was intriguing. Ten pages later I was hooked or, some might say, infected. By page 50, I was burning with so much ambition I tossed the book aside and never picked it up again. Why bother? I’d already been transformed into a maverick clearly destined for greatness.

A decade and a half later, I was having lunch with the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. I’d come in hopes of understanding the enduring mystique of the eccentric novelist and philosopher and asked why she was still around.

Looking up from his plate of Mexican food, Dr. Yaron Brook fixed me with a serious, bespectacled gaze. “I think she’s one of the greatest people of all time,” he said. “Ultimately, in philosophy, she’s going to be one of the giants. I mean, she’ll be up there with Plato and Aristotle.”

Dr. Brook then went on to demolish such vaunted minds as Kant (“bad,” “corrupt,” “evil”), Hegel (“nonsensical”), Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre (“I mean, Jean-Paul Sartre?”) and Wittgenstein (“garbage”).

Mankind, he told me, is at a crossroads. “Unless Ayn Rand changes the direction of the world, we are doomed to suffer another dark ages.” If that happened, he said, “the next renaissance will begin when her books are rediscovered after 1,000 years of darkness.”

Dr. Brook was a socialist until age 16, when a friend lent him a copy of Atlas Shrugged, which “challenged every idea that I had,” he said.

After a stint in the Israeli army, he attended the University of Texas, then taught finance while organizing Ayn Rand conferences around the world. In 2000, he was tapped to take over the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), which was formed in 1985 to help preserve Rand’s legacy and spread the gospel of enlightened self-interest.

He’s done a good job. “Her presence grows,” one ARI employee told me. “It has always been there; it’s been subterranean. But it’s coming out all over the place, from high and low. Sometimes trickling, sometimes exploding and sometimes all of a sudden you’re surrounded.”

AYN RAND (née Alice Rosenbaum) was born in Russia in 1905 and raised in an upper-middle-class St. Petersburg household. Shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Rosenbaums moved to Crimea. In high school there, Alice read about American history, and when she was 16 she saw her first film, which included a shot of a skyscraper, an image she never forgot.

Alice graduated from the University of Petrograd and then went to film school, where she fell in love with Hollywood. After obtaining permission to leave Russia by saying she was going to visit relatives in America to learn the film business, she left in 1925 with no intention of returning.

She spent six months in Chicago, where she changed her name to Ayn Rand, then moved to Los Angeles. On her second day there, she bumped into her favorite director, Cecil B. DeMille, who hired her as a script reader and cast her as an extra in a movie about Jesus Christ. On the set, she met an elegant young actor named Frank O’Connor. In 1929, they were married.

Rand sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn, in 1932. Her first play was produced on Broadway in 1935. The next year, We the Living, her first novel, about man’s struggle against the state, came out. H.L. Mencken called it “a really excellent piece of work.”

Rand spent the next seven years writing The Fountainhead, which was rejected by 12 publishers before being published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. Nobody took much notice, but the Times gave it a rave, saying Rand wrote “brilliantly, beautifully, and bitterly” and assuring readers that “you will not be able to read this masterful book without thinking through some of the basic concepts of our time.” There were many more dismissive reviews. “Anyone who is taken in by it deserves a stern lecture on paper rationing,” Diana Trilling wrote. But after two years of slow, steady word of mouth, it really started selling. Soon, Ayn Rand was famous, and to celebrate she bought herself a mink coat.

At the time, Nathaniel Branden (né Blumenthal) was a 14-year-old atheist living outside Toronto. He read the novel numerous times before leaving home to study psychology at UCLA. In 1950, he wrote his hero a few letters. To his surprise, she called one night and invited him to her ranch outside Los Angeles. He arrived at 8 p.m. and they talked philosophy until dawn. A week later, he brought along his girlfriend, Barbara Weidman, who was also a big fan. Rand and her husband liked the brainy youngsters right away and kept inviting them back. “The first period was simply magic,” Barbara told me.

“We were learning so much. We’d stay all night and talk, go to our classes straight from Ayn’s, and fall asleep during class. How we ever passed I don’t know! But it was just magical.”

Rand encouraged the young couple to get married and served as the matron of honor at their wedding. But a year later, when Rand was 49 and Nathaniel 24, she decided they would have a part-time affair and called a meeting with Barbara and Frank O’Connor to break the news. The stunned spouses reluctantly agreed. O’Connor began to drink heavily; Barbara became depressed.

“You know what?” she said. “If Ayn and Nathaniel had been really kind, they would have lied their heads off and not told us.”

In his memoir, Mr. Branden, who later became a psychotherapist, author and life coach, wrote at length about the affair, including the time Rand asked him to make love to her on her mink coat. “What’s happening to me?” she asked him. “You’re turning me into an animal.” When he confessed to feeling guilty about the affair, she would yell at him: “How dare you worry about Barbara when you’re with me! This is loathsome!”

I asked him about sex with Ayn Rand. Was it good? “Yes,” he said. “We got on very well.”

I pushed for details. “I ain’t about to answer that,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Brandens recruited Rand disciples and formed what became known, at first humorously, as “The Collective.” One member was Alan Greenspan, whom Rand nicknamed the Undertaker. “How’s the Undertaker?” she would ask the Brandens. “Has he decided he exists yet?”

On Saturday nights, the Collective would meet at Rand’s apartment to read typed and handwritten pages of her masterpiece-in-progress, Atlas Shrugged, then discuss philosophy into the night. Mr. Branden recalled a brunch with Mr. Greenspan in 1999 at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., where a portrait of Rand hangs on the wall. He asked the then-chairman of the Federal Reserve if those early years with Rand had wrecked them all for a normal social existence, since nothing that followed would ever be as much fun. “Absolutely true,” Mr. Greenspan replied, according to Mr. Branden. “He said, ‘There was a kind of marvelous quality of intellectual passion to those Saturday nights.’”

Rand spent 14 years writing Atlas Shrugged, two of which were devoted to John Galt’s climactic 30,000-word ode to individualism.

Published 55 years ago, the book was an instant best seller, despite reviews that were uniformly negative, even vicious. “Is it a novel or a nightmare?” asked Time magazine. “This book is written out of hate,” claimed The New York Times. Other critics called it “execrable claptrap,” “longer than life and twice as preposterous” and “the worst piece of fiction since The Fountainhead.”

In a letter to a friend, Flannery O’Connor gave her verdict: “The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction.” In National Review, Whitaker Chambers called it “sophomoric” and “remarkably silly.” Quipped Dorothy Parker: “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

No serious minds took it seriously. “It was her great disappointment,” Mr. Branden recalled. “All of her biggest fans were young people.” To cheer her up, he started the Nathaniel Branden Institute and in 1958 began teaching classes on Objectivism.

A movement was born. After a few years, however, Rand, at the age of 63, decided it was time to resume her sexual affair with Nathaniel, then 38. She was constantly telling him he was her god, her “lifeline to reality,” and that she couldn’t survive without him. He did his best to dodge her. “Is it my age?” she would ask.

It was. In a letter, he told her the difference in their ages “constituted an insuperable barrier, for me, to a romantic relationship.”

Rand went berserk and excommunicated him from the movement; Barbara was given the boot too.

It became known as “the break,” and it was serious business. “We were out of our minds,” Mr. Branden told me. “Obviously, I was in a state of shock that this woman that I’d idolized since I was 14 was really hellbent on my destruction. I’m speaking literally, not poetically. She wanted me dead. She even put a curse on [my] penis, saying, ‘If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health, you’ll be impotent for the next 20 years! And if you achieve any potency, you’ll know it’s sign of still worse moral degradation!”

After escaping with his mistress to Los Angeles in 1969, he began writing books on self-esteem. “I felt totally free, unencumbered, out of prison,” he said. Barbara Branden spent two years doing “absolutely nothing” except trying to figure out the past 20 years. In 1986 she published The Passion of Ayn Rand, a fascinating biography that presents her former mentor as a great woman with a flawed personality. It was a national best seller and was made into a movie for Showtime starring Helen Mirren as Rand, Eric Stoltz and Julie Delpy as the Brandens, and Peter Fonda as Frank O’Connor. Nathaniel Branden thought it was “trash,” but it made him laugh.

“It was a horrible book and a horrible movie,” said Dr. Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute. “Dishonest. Corrupt. It’s unjust.”

Ms. Branden dismissed the critique. “They’re absolute fanatics,” she said.

WHATEVER THE DIFFERENCES between her former acolytes, there’s little doubt that Rand has found a new relevance today. David Kelley, who ran the Objectivist Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and is now the founder and chief intellectual officer at the Atlas Society, pointed out that the bank bailout of 2008 had eerie similarities to the plot of Atlas Shrugged. “Both the late Bush and early Obama administrations reacted to the crisis with the mix of panic, pragmatism and power-lust that Rand captured so well 50 years ago,” he said. “The government bailouts of banks and homeowners took funds from prudent, competent, responsible people to rescue those whose plight was often the result of imprudence, incompetence and irresponsibility.” That sparked what he called a “revolt of the producers.”

The term, he said, reflects a conceptual shift from “haves vs. have-nots” to “makers vs. takers,” adding, “It’s the distinction that Rand hammers home in Atlas. And that spirit seems to me the core of the Tea Party rallies.”

As for today’s leading politicians, Mr. Kelley figures Rand would have “credited Ryan for at least trying to frame political issues in terms of principles, but would have seen a contradiction between his religious views and his desire to promote individualism in politics—especially his pro-life stance.” As for President Obama, she “would have recognized Obama as a deep-dyed collectivist.” What would she have thought of Mr. Romney? She would have disapproved of his “pragmatism,” he said—“the absence of a clear and principled political philosophy.”

“He’s a middle-of-the road Republican who’s neither here nor there,” Dr. Brook agreed. “I think he’s from the pragmatic wing of the Republican party who will move where the wind blows him.”

Although Dr. Brook noted that he is not allowed to endorse candidates (ARI is a nonprofit), he added, “I can say I hate Obama. I think Obama’s the most anti-American—in terms of American principles, what America was founded on—president in history.”

While he thought Rand might have liked Paul Ryan, he was quick to point out that “he’s not an Objectivist.” Compared with Rand, he said, Ryan is moderate. “But the fact that he respects her and the fact that she had a positive influence on him, I think those are wonderful.”

DURING THE LAST DECADE of her life, Ayn Rand continued to lecture and appear on Donahue and Tom Snyder’s Late Late Show, but she spent most of her time in her Manhattan apartment. She worked on her stamp collection, read Agatha Christie novels, and watched Kojak and Charlie’s Angels. She wanted Farrah Fawcett to star in an Atlas Shrugged miniseries, but it never went into production.

Barbara Branden had one last visit with her, in 1981. “I was amazed,” she says. “It seemed to me then that she must have missed me. I think I was the one close woman friend she’d ever had. I walked in, and we both put our hands out and held each other’s hands. And then she twirled around and said, ‘Look at how thin I am? I weigh what I weighed when I came from Russia!’”

Ayn Rand died of heart failure less than a year later. At her funeral at Frank E. Campbell’s on Madison Avenue, a six-foot neon dollar sign stood next to her coffin.

editorial@observer.com