After hearing some buzz about Lisa Duggan’s Mean Girl, I decided to read it for myself to see what it was all about. Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed was published in May of 2019 by University of California Press as a part of the American Studies Now Initiative, an activist-oriented literary press whose main focus is the publication of a new series of “short, accessible books on Black Lives Matter, climate change, neoliberalism, BDS, the continuing urban crisis, indigenous politics, $#@! and trans issues, the crises in higher education and more. They are designed to provide timely, provocative analysis for teaching, for activism, and for engagement now.”
The author, Lisa Duggan, self-identifies as a “$#@! feminist and leftist journalist, activist, and Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University.” Although I didn’t research Lisa Duggan until after I finished the book, it didn’t take long for me to grasp where the author is coming from ideologically, attempting to link Rand to “our contemporary culture of greed” (Duggan 12). This is not a particularly novel tactic – nor is this a book based on new scholarship, or an in-depth analysis of Rand’s work. Rather, it’s a retread of all the various hackneyed accusations and misrepresentations of Ayn Rand.
Duggan herself concedes that her book “is not a biography of Rand. Nor is it social history based in original archival research, or literary criticism based in close readings of key texts. It belongs to American cultural studies, grasped through a global frame. It is focused on illuminating the ‘how did we get here’ questions” (Duggan xvii).
...Duggan continues the smear campaign throughout the pages of Mean Girl by presenting a vague, often malicious idea and then placing it next to Ayn Rand’s name. Duggan smugly assumes her audience will gullibly adopt her beliefs as their own.
...In the same vein, Duggan mashes libertarianism and Ayn Rand into one big mess, linking the two without clearly defining the political ideology. By not clearly outlining libertarianism, Duggan deliberately relies on her reader’s previous skewed definition of the word, which has real meaning as a political doctrine that values natural individual rights and freedom from the government.
...Without ever alluding to what libertarianism actually is, the author conflates the ideology with conservatism and classical liberalism. Perhaps Duggan fears were she to include legitimate definitions of prevalent terms and cited actual evidence, her readers would see through her nonsense. By keeping the reader confused, Duggan instead attempts to control the narrative. Because her words sound so similar to what Gen-zers and Millennials and Gen-zer’s hear constantly from media sources, they accept them as true.
The irony of Duggan’s entire attempt to link Ayn Rand with a false connotation of libertarianism, is that Rand was rather critical of libertarians....