Rand presents a world in which self-reliance is easy and pure. And her work depends on an understanding of self-reliance that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny once you’ve had to, you know, actually self-rely. She is an absolutist about things that are clearly socially conditioned, which can give her world a kind of taxidermic feel. She celebrates capitalist enterprise while ignoring the communal and moral frameworks that it presupposes in order to function. Her fiction is almost entirely about the world of adult workplaces—architecture firms, boardrooms—but it seems to have a purely aesthetic view of what work is all about. There are many moments in Atlas Shrugged (1957) and The Fountainhead (1943) in which the fun house version of capitalist society presented in these books comes into gorgeous, bizarre focus. Consider the moment when the all-powerful architecture critic (yes, you read that right) Ellsworth Toohey, who is a Marxist and also in league with monopoly capitalists and also beloved by the populace, schemes to take over Gail Wynand’s newspaper, the Banner, on the strength of (and I’m not making this up) his writing a column in it. The right pieces are there, but they hang together in baffling ways—like an economic system dreamed up by Borges.

Again and again, Pixar indulges the tropes of flip-flop-wearing Northern California but ends up with something that sounds a lot like Ayn Rand. For a big-budget Disney production, Wall-E gets pretty brutal in its takedown of consumer capitalism. Thanks to the efforts of a giant corporation, Buy n Large, humanity has been reduced to large indolent blobs, driving around in jazzy chairs in a Carnival Cruise–style spaceship, waited on by subservient robots. But you get the sense that the film doesn’t direct its anger toward the big, bad corporation behind it all—instead, it spends most of its time lampooning the consumers who allowed themselves to be brainwashed by it. The cultural critic and blogger Mark Fisher has called this the film’s “gestural anti-capitalism,” and it is characteristic of Silicon Valley Randians: they are disgusted not so much by the manipulators as by the manipulated. This is how tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel manage to be both vocal opponents of elites and hugely elitist: if you’re dumb enough to buy what I’m selling, he seems to think, you really shouldn’t be voting.