Does anyone know how truly evil Ayn Rand was? I once tried, a long time ago, to get through Atlas Shrugged, but gave up pretty quickly, on the grounds that life was too short to spend a chunk of it in the company of a wicked lunatic who can't write "bum" on a wall. So I missed this bit, summarised here by Thomas Frank, who has read the book so we don't have to: at one point, in what would appear to be the most clunking symbolism, a train crashes because  this is always happening on trains  a powerful politician insists on the crew driving into a dangerous tunnel.

"And then, in a notorious passage, the narrator goes through all the other passenger cars on the train and tells us why each casualty-to-be deserves the fate that is coming to him or her. One of them, she points out, received government loans; another doesn't like businessmen; a third is married to a federal regulator; a fourth foolishly thinks she has a right to ride on a train even when she doesn't personally own the train in question."

I am going to trust Frank's precis; it certainly does not contradict what I already knew of Rand's opinions, even though it seems improbably extreme. (But it's not. It really is in the book, and our own George Monbiot was recently denounced by a Randian  frighteningly, former ambassador George Crawford  for taking issue with the passage. The problem with Rand is that she is still hugely popular among Americans of certain political convictions. This is also our problem, too, as Frank, in his astute assessment of her, shows.

The title and subtitle of his book give you a pretty good idea of what to expect: a horrific catalogue of the Tea Party's hijacking of populist outrage at the crash of 2008, when audiences were invited  in true Randian fashion  to save their pity and their sympathy for the very architects of that crash. There are also plenty of revealing asides. Because we are nice herbivores on this paper, we have been sheltered from, for example, the spending advice given in a 2007 edition of Trader Monthly, which gave as one compelling reason for buying a $300,000 turntable, the opportunity to give "a huge middle finger to everyone who enters your home".

Frank does not pussyfoot around the implications we can draw about the soul of such a person. "A trader was not just an überconsumer but a bullying, self-maximising, wealth-extracting he-man: a lout, in full."

It is, for some chapters, an extremely depressing read, but a very compelling one, and useful to place the otherwise mystifying ascendancy of the Tea Party movement, and its subsequent near-takeover of the Republican party, in context. Frank has a breezy way with comparative history: his description of the differences between how Roosevelt managed the 1929 crash, and how the 2008 disaster was handled, is concise  and enough to make you weep. As, too, is his explanation of how it came about that the Democrats have become so removed from what should have been their grass-roots support. (This, admittedly, is not a phenomenon we are unaware of over here.)

There is hope  the Occupy movement, the reclamation of some level of proper populist outrage (the 99% v the 1%), and  although Frank's book came out too early for this  the astonishing stupidity and crassness of just about everything Mitt Romney has said during his election campaign. Then again, when you have people claiming that universal healthcare is tantamount to communism or euthanasia, or both, or that Europe, in its adoption of "socialism" after the second world war, became, in its entirety, a stranger to freedom of speech and thought ever after; and when you have any number of flat-earthers and Fox news ranters who peddle similar distortions  you really have to worry. This is a deeply troubling book, and at times I felt like the Jewish kids in Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights, with their fascination for books about the Third Reich; but as a clear picture of the problem, it's important.