Throughline

The past is never past. Every headline has a history. Join us every week as we go back in time to understand the present. These are stories you can feel and sounds you can see from the moments that shaped our world.

Subscribe to Throughline+. You’ll be supporting the history-reframing, perspective-shifting, time-warping stories you can’t get enough of – and you’ll unlock access to our sponsor-free feed of the show. Learn more at plus.npr.org/throughline Are most modern problems caused by selfishness or a lack of it? Ayn Rand, a Russian American philosopher and writer, would say it’s the latter — that selfishness is not a vice but a virtue — and that capitalism is the ideal system. Everyone from Donald Trump, to Alan Greenspan, to Brad Pitt have sung Ayn Rand’s praises. The Library of Congress named her novel Atlas Shrugged the second most influential book in the U.S. after the Bible. Ayn Rand wasn’t politically correct, she was belligerent and liked going against the grain. And although she lived by the doctrine of her own greatness, she was driven by the fear that she would never be good enough.

In this episode, historian Jennifer Burns will guide us through Rand’s evolution and how she eventually reshaped American politics, becoming what Burns calls “a gateway drug to life on the right.”