I’ve been browsing Anne Heller’s biography of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand and the World She Made came out last year, and I am late to the discussion.
I was stuck by this line about the New York City that Rand lived in while she was writing Atlas Shrugged. Heller writes:
“New York was such a politically liberal city in the 1950s that Saul Bellow described it as an intellectual annex of Moscow” (245).
Moscow at the time was the capital of the Soviet Union, one of the most brutally totalitarian nations of all time. The communists killed 62,000,000 of their own people, many in forced labor camps, and made life miserable for tens of millions more across many decades. Like the national socialist regime in Germany and the international socialist experiments in China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, the Soviet Union is a disgusting stain upon human history.
But we call its apologists in the West liberals.
I am sure that historians a century from now will look back on our political language with puzzlement.