Huh?

Ross Douthat's piece in the NYT takes a crazy U-turn. Writing about Dan Brown's Catholic fanfiction that is The Davinci Code and Angels and Demons, he brings up Ayn Rand? 

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots,he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

Ah, so Rand's an idealogue now. So, aside from being a crank, a cult-leader and such, she's also now compared with Dan Brown while lumped with Deepak Chopra. Seriously? 

Rand isn't for everyone, because her works take effort to read and they challenge assumptions most people have about the way the world works. The only thing Dan Brown has in common with Rand is that his novels sell in the millions. To lump her in with a hack writer of Catholic fanfiction and two spiritualist nut-jobs is, well, expected, I guess. That Rand was an atheist who glorified Capitalism while eschewing almost all metaphysics is beside the point. 

Whenever possible, dump on Rand. It'll get the commentariate going.