Mean Girl

“Lisa Duggan does a deep dive into Ayn Rand so that we don’t have to. Instead, we can read Duggan’s impassioned, insightful, sometimes terrifying, sometimes humorous account of Rand’s philosophy and influence. Calls to understand and reject the allure of cruelty rarely feel as lucid and timely.”—Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

“The self-described ‘man worshipper’ Ayn Rand titillated generations of strivers with her gospel of free-reign capitalism as the apex of human achievement. As that fiction yields ever more wreckage and despair, Mean Girl provides urgent insight into how Rand converted readers to her credo of self-flattery, pious greed, contempt for those in need, and obliviousness to history. Exalted are the profit-driven for they will inherit the earth? How could anyone come to embrace smug indifference to the suffering of others as worthy of admiration? Read this luminous account to find out.”—Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

“Lisa Duggan’s wry and wise Mean Girl is the Ayn Rand primer we’ve been waiting for, an inquiry into how a narcissistic cult became a national creed. Duggan’s short history neatly reveals the deep affinities between Randianism and Trumpism, and will, if we are lucky, serve as a requiem for both.”—Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

“With Mean Girl, Lisa Duggan offers readers a history of how greed and capitalist accumulation were made cool and sexy. In a historical moment in which billionaires have been refashioned into super-beings, Duggan’s history of this libertarian matriarch provides a necessary and eye-opening intervention.”—Roderick Ferguson, author of One-Dimensional Queer