And I mean it.
-Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand’s tome, Atlas Shrugged, is often credited for changing people’s lives with its cautionary tale of business colluding with government to destroy freedom and prosperity. The novel, which has sold about seven million copies, has seen its influence grow under the Obama Administration. Writers like Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal have noted how Pres. Obama’s aggressive socialist agenda mirrors Atlas’s fifty year old plot. It is no surprise, then, that Atlas is selling better than ever, over half a million copies in 2009 alone. Even the movie industry, anything but a friend to liberty and capitalism, could not ignore this, so Atlas is in production as a three part epic. Atlas is a plot labyrinth climaxing in a fifty page diatribe on everything Rand, so simply creating a watchable movie is a challenge. Fortunately, the trailer looks slick and entertaining, but the Atlas movies’ real challenge is changing the world.

Movies do sometimes change the world. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 crippled Pres. Bush’s reputation by painting his 9/11 response as moronic. V.P Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth galvanized leftist views on global warming. Even though the entire movie was akin to Atlas’s fifty page diatribe in its monotony and strident dogma, no Democrat can now question global warming without being excommunicated from the church of Gore. Both Bush’s competence and global warming had been editorialized on the left for years, but hearts, minds, and votes crystallized around movies depicting these views. From Leni Riefenstahl to James Cameron (i.e. tall blue environmentalists), movies have an uncanny ability to bypass the mind’s thinking filter and reach into imagination.

Even though Moore, Gore, and Cameron have used movies for evil, there is no reason the Atlas movies cannot work the same magic for the individual. The US, as demonstrated by the Wisconsin budget protests, is at a tipping point. While some States like Illinois chose the tax and spend solution, most are poised to cut back their oppressive governments. Wisconsin is the template for leftist resistance to this movement. The full weight of the White House and its union masters is being applied in Wisconsin to stop even moderate anti-statist policy, yet the battle’s outcome is uncertain. Considering the precarious balance, a movie like Atlas can have unprecedented influence.

While documentaries like The Cartel and Waiting For Superman are fine, the Atlas movie is a vivid depiction of the individualist ideal. Atlas is a story with characters that are surprisingly relatable after fifty years. The Atlas movie is a tool to speak to the hearts of independents who would listen but for the tedium of libertarian obsessions with economics and the US Constitution.

Just as An Inconvenient Truth forced reluctant Dem pols to pledge themselves to global warming in 2006, the Atlas movie can force GOP pols to commit to liberty, capitalism, and to keeping government as a servant to these ideas. The GOP has long given lip service to individualism and capitalism, but has almost never delivered. The GOP’s slow march to socialism is due entirely to an ill informed and unmotivated base that has not been clear about its values and priorities.

Even in 2008′s leftist perfect storm, and running against a hapless Sen. McCain, Obama only won by 9.5 million votes. By 2010, despite record union spending, the leftist wave evaporated. 2012 will be a vote for the survival of the US because 2013 is the last year in which Obamacare and Frank-Dodd realistically can be repealed. The timing of the Atlas movie could not be better. If the Atlas movie convinces just one million people that individualism and capitalism are moral values that must be defended, the balance of power in the US will be shifted in 2012, and yes, Atlas Shrugged will have changed the world.