Trump as Howard Roark and the start of the Second American era

Ayn Rand's novel 'The Fountainhead' showed us the ideal of man as one who refuses to compromise and whose noblest activity is productive achievement

As we look to the inauguration of Donald Trump tomorrow, I can’t help feeling that we are living in one of those great last scenes from a movie or a great novel, where the hero, after suffering what should have been crippling adversity, emerges triumphant, finally welcomed onto the great stage of life and lauded as a leader among men.

But even many of us who have supported Trump since the beginning haven’t begun to grasp the enormity of what is happening, how significant Trump’s triumph is, how significant for our country and for the world that he’s returning as president of the United States.

On election night, what came into my head was a novel that many of us have read: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I can’t help thinking about it again now.

The scene I’m thinking of is the last scene in the book. Dominique is riding up the elevator on the outside of the building that is being built by Howard Roark — a skyscraper that will be taller than anything ever built in the city of New York. It’s a building that represents the greatest expression of human creativity and a refusal to compromise or conform either to popular opinion or powerful interests.

From the book:

“Flat roofs descended like petals pressing the buildings down, out of the way of her flight. She went past the cubes of glass that held dining rooms, bedrooms and nurseries. She saw roof gardens float down like handkerchiefs spread on the wind. Skyscrapers raced her and were left behind. The planks under her feet shot past the antennae of radio stations.”

That Dominique had come to see the building was a second triumph and affirmed the triumph of Howard Roark’s brilliance over the mediocrity of the masses, for it’s only in this scene, when Dominique comes to the building site, do we find out that she is now the wife of Roark.

“The hoist swung like a pendulum above the city. It sped against the side of the building. It had passed the line where the masonry ended behind her. There was nothing behind her now but steel ligaments and space. She felt the height pressing against her eardrums. The sun filled her eyes. The air beat against her raised chin.”

Then she looked up.

“She saw him standing above her, on the top platform of the Wynand Building. He waved to her.”

“The line of the ocean cut the sky. The ocean mounted as the city descended. She passed the pinnacles of bank buildings. She passed the crowns of courthouses. She rose above the spires of churches.”

“Then there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark.”

Ayn Rand was born into a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905.

She and her family were witnesses to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution that followed it. To escape the violence of that second revolution, she and her family fled to the Crimea, where Rand finished high school.

In her last year of high school, Rand studied American history and came to think of the United States as a model of what a nation of free men could be.

She came here in 1925 at the age of 20 after getting permission from Soviet authorities to visit relatives in the United States. She never left, getting a job as an extra and then a writer, hired directly by the legendary filmmaker Cecil DeMille.

She struggled for years as a writer before finally getting her first novel published. It was called “We the Living.”

She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935.

Leonard Peikoff, her close associate, said the following in the afterward at the back of The Fountainhead:

“In the character of Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as ‘he could be and ought to be.’”

Rand developed a philosophy that she called Objectivism.

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

That Trump is a builder is tremendously convenient for any comparison to Howard Roark. You could organize a symposium comparing the buildings Trump has built to Roark’s vision of the ideal architecture. But to do this would be to miss the point.

“The book is not about architecture, it’s about Roark against the world and about the workings of that thing in the world which opposes him,” Rand wrote in her notes for The Fountainhead.

We’ve seen the workings of that thing in the world that opposed Trump. What is that thing? Envy, vanity, mediocrity, convention, stasis, political power, financial leverage.

And we’ve seen the man who rose through it all, until all these things were far below him. And now he stands above it all, atop this tower of achievement. And the best thing about it, is that we stand there with him.