In a dark corner of my house, where a built-in bookshelf curves out of sight and out of reach, near the ceiling, I keep a couple dozen books that I haven’t brought myself to get rid of but don’t want anyone to see. It’s a connoisseur’s collection of the writing of Ayn Rand and her disciples, assembled by teen-age me a long, long time ago. My first girlfriend, an older woman in her early twenties, introduced me to Rand. I had recently immigrated to the United States from Russia, come out, and dropped out of high school, and somehow Rand’s writing spoke to me, made the world appear simple and conquerable. My Rand phase was relatively brief, but, before it ended, I bluffed my way into my first job in publishing by talking Rand with my future boss, a trailblazing gay publisher who was similarly obsessed with her.

According to a new book, this is normal, sort of. In “Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed,” Lisa Duggan, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, notes that, although Rand’s brand of sexual liberation didn’t extend to homosexuality, her female heroines refuse to conform to feminine norms, and her male heroes are all in love with one another. I was certainly not the only queer teen-ager who was seduced by these books, which Duggan calls “conversion machines that run on lust.” The therapeutic value of Duggan’s book goes well beyond freeing me from shame for my teen-age lack of literary taste and political discernment; it also provides an explanation for our current cultural and political moment.

Part of American Studies Now, a series of slim volumes published by the University of California Press, Duggan’s book sums up Rand’s life and philosophy in under ninety pages—an affront to a novelist whose magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” came in at more than ten times that length. “How could a thousand-plus-page novel, featuring cartoonish characters moving through a melodramatic plot peppered with long didactic speeches, attract so many readers and so much attention?” Duggan asks. “Clearly, the fantasies animating the novel struck a deep chord.”

Rand’s novels promised to liberate the reader from everything that he had been taught was right and good. She invited her readers to rejoice in cruelty. Her heroes were superior beings certain of their superiority. They claimed their right to triumph by destroying those who were not as smart, creative, productive, ambitious, physically perfect, selfish, and ruthless as they were. Duggan calls the mood of the books “optimistic cruelty.” They are mean, and they have a happy ending—that is, the superior beings are happy in the end. The novels reverse morality. In them, there is no duty to God or one’s fellow-man, only to self. Sex is plentiful, free of consequence, and rough. Money and other good things come to those who take them. Rand’s plots legitimize the worst effects of capitalism, creating what Duggan calls “a moral economy of inequality to infuse her softly pornographic romance fiction with the political eros that would captivate a mass readership.”

Duggan traces Rand’s influence, both direct and indirect, on American politics and culture. Rand’s fiction was a vehicle for her philosophy, known as Objectivism, which consecrated an extreme form of laissez-faire capitalism and what she called “rational egoism,” or the moral and logical duty of following one’s own self-interest. Later in life, Rand promoted Objectivism through nonfiction books, articles, lectures, and courses offered through an institute that she established, called the Foundation for the New Intellectual. She was closely allied with Ludwig von Mises, an economist and historian who helped shape neoliberal thinking. When Rand was actively publishing fiction—from the nineteen-thirties until 1957, when “Atlas Shrugged” came out—hers was a marginal political perspective. Critics panned her novels, which gained their immense popularity gradually, by word of mouth. Mid-century American political culture was dominated by New Deal thinking, which prized everything that Rand despised: the welfare state, empathy, interdependence. By the nineteen-eighties, however, neoliberal thinking had come to dominate politics. The economist Alan Greenspan, for example, was a disciple of Rand’s who brought her philosophy to his role as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford and, from 1987 until 2006, as the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Duggan doesn’t blame Rand for neoliberalism, exactly, but she spotlights the Randian spirit of what she calls the “Neoliberal Theater of Cruelty.” This theatre would include players we don’t necessarily describe as neoliberal. Paul Ryan, the former House Speaker, is a Rand evangelist who gave out copies of “Atlas Shrugged” as Christmas presents to his staff and said that she “did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism.” When the Tea Party came out in force against the Affordable Care Act, in 2009, some of them carried signs reading “Who Is John Galt?,” a reference to “Atlas Shrugged.” Rand’s spirit is prominent in Silicon Valley, too: the billionaires Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, and others have credited Rand with inspiring them. The image of the American tech entrepreneur could have come from one of her novels. If she were alive today, she would probably adopt the word “disruption.”

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The collapse of the subprime mortgage market and the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 should have brought about the death of neoliberalism by making plain the human cost of deregulation and privatization; instead, writes Duggan, “zombie neoliberalism” is now stalking the land. And, of course, the spirit of Ayn Rand haunts the White House. Many of Donald Trump’s associates, including the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, have paid homage to her ideas, and the President himself has praised her novel “The Fountainhead.” (Trump apparently identifies with its architect hero, Howard Roark, who blows up a housing project he has designed for being insufficiently perfect.) Their version of Randism is stripped of all the elements that might account for my inability to throw out those books: the pretense of intellectualism, the militant atheism, and the explicit advocacy of sexual freedom. From all that Rand offered, these men have taken only the worst: the cruelty. They are not even optimistic. They are just plain mean.

The line for which the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is best known is also his ugliest: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” He was referring to a woman named Carrie Buck, her mother, and her daughter, in the case of Buck v. Bell, from 1927, which held that it was constitutional for a state to forcibly sterilize Carrie, a poor white woman who was deemed “feeble-minded,” for the greater good of promoting social welfare. Summing up the views of the eugenics movement, an avid cause of progressive reformers and intellectual élites at the time, Holmes explained, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” The opinion was joined by all of the Justices save for one, Pierce Butler, who was the Court’s lone Catholic at the time. Catholics, a population that many Protestants wished would reproduce less, vocally opposed eugenic sterilization as being an unnatural interference with procreation.

Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. In fact, the case was cited approvingly in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, for the proposition that one does not have “an unlimited right to do with one’s body as one pleases,” which meant that a state was constitutionally permitted to put some limits on the right to abortion announced in Roe. For some, the history of states’ forced sterilization of women—and the Supreme Court’s role in permitting it—might seem a sinister precursor to contemporary efforts to control women’s sexual and reproductive freedom by restricting access to abortion. For others, the history of eugenics in America might instead provoke a very different fear: that progressives today, much as in the past, may wish to prevent the unfortunate and disfavored from being born—this time by allowing individuals to abort certain fetuses, and doing so with a discriminatory tilt.

Concurring in an abortion case in May, Justice Clarence Thomas penned a lengthy and lurid polemic, warning that abortion rights are a form of racist eugenics revivalism. The statute at issue, passed in Indiana and signed into law, in 2016, by Mike Pence, the governor at the time, prohibited providers from performing an abortion if they know that it is sought solely because of the fetus’s race, sex, or disability. The Seventh Circuit invalidated the law as unconstitutional, under the Supreme Court’s precedents, because it was an “undue burden” on the abortion right. The Supreme Court declined to take up the case, expressing no view on its merits, and decided instead to wait until other courts of appeals weigh in on a handful of similar laws from other states. Thomas agreed with the Court’s denial of the petition, but he wrote separately to make clear that laws like Indiana’s “promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.”

Thomas connected a series of real dots: the “scientific” belief in black inferiority that informed the early-twentieth-century eugenics movement; the eugenicism espoused by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood; and Sanger’s promotion of birth control in poor black neighborhoods. Some mid-century arguments for legalizing abortion—including those made by Alan Guttmacher, who went on to succeed Sanger as president of Planned Parenthood—made eugenic appeals, saying that abortion was important to controlling the “quality” of the population. Thomas linked those facts to contemporary statistics on abortion. According to the New York Department of Health, in some areas of New York City, “black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive—and are up to eight times more likely to aborted than white children in the same area.” Thomas even called up the contested assertion, made by the journalist Stephen Dubner and the economist Steven Levitt in their book “Freakonomics,” that Roe v. Wade led, a generation later, to a massive decline in crime, because the availability of legal abortion meant that many people did not have the unwanted babies whose poor circumstances would have led them to grow up to commit crimes. Thomas discerned in all of this an echo of eugenicists’ racially inflected wish for society to be rid of the “unfit.”

While the eugenics and abortion movements may have disquieting intersections, the notion that abortion rights are the direct heir to our history of eugenic sterilization is unfounded. Nobody is advocating forcible abortion, for eugenic or any other reason. A state forcibly sterilizing women from disfavored groups bears little similarity to a state allowing individuals to make decisions to terminate their own pregnancies—even in cases in which they may do so because of the fetus’s race, sex, or disability. The former eliminated a person’s ability to decide whether to reproduce, whereas the latter enables it.

But it is important to understand that the alarm over abortion as eugenics is a decoy of sorts. A deeper, more troubling argument that is now gathering force is tucked more quietly into Thomas’s invocation of legal anti-discrimination norms. If the right to be free of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability can be made relevant to a fetus, then fetuses are figured as entities with anti-discrimination rights—like people. This move imbues the fetus with rights that the pregnant person—and, by extension, the abortion provider—might violate. What is really at stake is an idea of fetal personhood.

It is not coincidental that in the same case, last month, the Court upheld part of the Indiana law, which prohibited abortion providers from disposing of fetal remains as they would surgical waste. Keeping the law in place, the Court reasoned that how fetal remains are disposed of after abortion doesn’t affect access to the abortion itself. But it does transform cultural practices surrounding the treatment of fetuses, through gestures that suggest they are person-like entities, and point at their rights. Indeed, in defending the law, Indiana asserted an interest in the “humane and dignified disposal of human remains.”

Writing in 1990, the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe called abortion “the clash of absolutes,” referring to the clash between the fetus’s development and the pregnant person’s liberty. On one side, the belief that a fetus is a human being would mean that abortion is a form of murder, which makes the idea that it is a woman’s “choice” callous or nonsensical. On the other side, the belief that the abortion decision belongs in the domain of individual autonomy rests on the assumption that, whatever it is, abortion is not the killing of a human being. Tribe observed that “solutions that split the difference—denying some fetuses life and some women liberty—hardly offer a solution.” But splitting that difference has been our legal solution for half a century. During this time, the interest of neither the fetus nor the pregnant woman has been treated as absolute.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court explicitly refused to “resolve the difficult question of when life begins.” From there, over multiple decisions a scheme emerged of weighing the state’s interest in protecting the fetus against the woman’s limited right to abortion, which lessens through the pregnancy in relation to the fetus’s increasing age. In holding, at different times, that states may not act on the belief that human life begins at conception or plant a “substantial obstacle” in the path of someone who wishes to abort a fetus before “viability”—a line that is constantly shifting along with improvements in medical technology—the Court has discreetly drawn its own limits around the big question it said it wasn’t resolving.

The abortion fight we are gearing up for departs from the realm of uneasy compromise and reëngages the clash of absolutes. For decades, conservatives have sought to overturn Roe. Yet simply getting rid of Roe would leave each state legislature free to choose its own approach to abortion, from liberal abortion access in Northeast states to outright or near-total bans like the “fetal heartbeat” bills recently passed in several states, which ban abortion as early as the sixth week of pregnancy. But, for anti-abortion activists, that goal may no longer be enough. Last month, when the Alabama legislature passed an extreme, near-total ban on abortion, Republican lawmakers explicitly rejected exceptions for victims of rape or incest. If you truly believe that a fetus is a person, then it shouldn’t matter how the fetus was conceived. Its rights as a human being are the same.

When Republican lawmakers consider the fact of rape or incest irrelevant to a decision to terminate a pregnancy, and when Thomas invokes the spectre of discrimination against a fetus, they are making the same point—that every “unborn child” is entitled to the same dignity as you or me. And, if fetuses are thought to have basic rights as persons do, then a future ruling might reach beyond overturning Roe. It might hold that it is unconstitutional for any state to allow abortions at all. This position—the constitutionalization of abortion abolition—would go far beyond what either liberals and conservatives have imagined possible, but it is where the ambitions of fetal personhood now entering the legal mainstream are headed.

A previous version of this piece incorrectly described the abortion legislation in Alabama.

It might have begun with “Borat.” In that Sacha Baron Cohen mockumentary, from 2006, which was subtitled “Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the protagonist has a particular way of saying “my wife,” which, after the film’s release, became an inescapable catchphrase. For a while, it lived alongside Austin Powers one-liners about being horny as a ubiquitous cultural artifact that made most people wince. But then, several years ago, it circled the Möbius strip of asinine humor and landed on the amusing side: “my wife” was somehow funnier than ever. It was funny to imagine Bob Dylan saying “my wife,” or Al Pacino. It was funny to imagine saying “my wife” so many times that your actual wife divorced you. It was funny to insert the phrase “Borat voice my wife” into pop songs. There was something about the word “wife” itself. It seemed perfectly suited to a man like Borat, who named his son “Hooeylewis” and didn’t believe that women should be allowed to drive. (I haven’t watched the movie in years, but I suspect that it would not entirely hold up in, as they say, the current climate.)

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Though I’m a straight woman who has—you hate to see it—organized her life around long-term, monogamous partnerships with men, I’ve always held the word “wife” at a distance. So much so that, though I have been with the same man for the past ten years and hope to spend the rest of my life with him, I do not want to be his wife. (Me? I find myself thinking. A wife? In this economy?) The very word is freighted with a history that I would prefer not to join, one in which women have been asked to conceive of their systemic subservience to men as a pleasure and a calling—to make a badge of honor out of a badge of woe, as the Stanford historian Marilyn Yalom suggests in her book “A History of the Wife,” published in 2001. According to the doctrine of coverture, which developed in the Middle Ages but aspects of which persisted into the twentieth century, “the very . . . existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband,” as Sir William Blackstone put it, in 1765. Women responded in part by carving out their own forms of soft power, and thus the word “wife” took on additional valences. Structurally speaking, the wife was controlled by her husband, but, culturally, the joke was that she controlled him. In the nineteen-sixties, a survey reported the most common joking terms used by men to refer to their wives. “Battle-axe,” “boss,” and “ball and chain” were all close to the top.

Now, decades after the suffrage movement, and women’s lib, and the sexual revolution, the abstract idea of “the wife” still looms large in our cultural imagination—and sanctimony, loyalty, and resentment orbit her like moons. For a stretch, late in the last century and earlier in this one, literary fiction was overrun with titles that featured wives: there was Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Diane Ackerman’s “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” Amy Tan’s “The Kitchen God’s Wife,” Paula McLain’s “The Paris Wife,” Téa Obreht’s “The Tiger’s Wife,” Anita Shreve’s “The Pilot’s Wife,” and, of course, “The Wife,” by Meg Wolitzer, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Glenn Close. “The Wife” is about Joan Castleman, the long-suffering helpmeet to Joe Castleman, a famous author who builds his legacy by leeching off Joan’s literary ambitions. In public, Joe lavishes praise on Joan as compensation for erasing her. Wife-veneration tastes a bit like imprisonment, even today.

A lot of young people use familial terms non-literally. Around the same time that “my wife” became funny again, teens started calling their favorite celebrities “Mom.” Hot men became “Daddy.” This way of speaking is indebted to queer communities and the informal family structures that ball culture invented and provides. There is, I think, a low-level longing, in this era of atomization and instability, for that kind of kinship. There is also pleasure, often of an ironic sort, in calling someone by a name that connotes indelible connection. The word “wife,” charged with the frisson of a lime-green mankini, quietly exaggerates our dependence on fixed ideas of one another. It highlights a ludicrous aspect of both heterosexuality and our more general desire to possess those we love. And, once you’ve been around it enough, it is fairly irresistible. Four of my wives are coming to see “The Fate of the Furious” with me, I think, selecting a block of seats at the theatre. At a bar, watching a male friend flirt with a stranger, I observe that my cursed father has found himself a bride. Sometimes, out of contextual necessity, I’ll call my boyfriend my partner; more often, in a Borat voice, I call him “my wife.” (The word “husband” has so far proved too stuffy—and the word “hubby” too gross—to really enter the pop-cultural lexicon. There’s never been a wave of husband-based book titles, for instance, although there is a 2016 novel by Jane Corry called “My Husband’s Wife.”)

The figure of the wife has also become an important trope within a specific, baroque type of Internet-based humor, and this isn’t accidental. Like Borat, the online world is profane and disorderly and constantly agitated; the wife, on the other hand, is imagined as sacred, eternal, controlled. When these two things connect, the idea of the wife starts to glitch. It now takes just a minor breeze of Internet attention for a wife to catch fire as a meme. An early example of the phenomenon dates to 2013, when a mysterious photo emerged on the Internet of a suburban garage door on which someone had spray-painted “STOP NOW! don’t e-mail my wife!!!!” (The image is one of the first things cited in an essay by the poet Patricia Lockwood about her experience of the Internet; in a recent piece about “the online wife,” the writer Miles Klee identified it as “patient zero of contemporary wife content.”) Another important wife meme entered the lexicon a few years later, when a man sent a message to a Facebook account shared by a married couple. “—DAVE DO NOT READ THIS—,” it began, and then, after a block of blank space, “Tara…hello.” In 2016, a man tweeted a screenshot of an outrageously confident e-mail he had sent to his “girlfriend’s husband,” insisting that he and this man’s wife had been “bowled over” by “a deep wellspring of powerful emotions” and saying that he was moving to somewhere in their vicinity so that he could be close to her. He added that he hoped she would be able to “grow and explore in other ways that she can share with everyone she loves.” Soon, there were song parodies. (“Is this the real wife / Is this just fantasy,” etc.)

If you want to avoid becoming a meme on the Internet, it is a mistake to display exorbitant possessiveness over a romantic partner. In 2017, a man named Robbie Tripp went viral when he posted a picture on Instagram of himself and his swimsuit-clad wife, which he captioned with two hundred and sixty-eight words that were intended to prove his enlightenment but came off as howlingly sanctimonious. “I love this woman and her curvy body,” he wrote. “As a teenager, I was often teased by my friends for my attraction to girls on the thicker side.” People began attaching the text to any picture whatsoever. In January, a rumor made the rounds on Twitter that there had been a falling-out among a group of men who ran a popular meme account called Da Share Z0ne, one of whom had angrily removed everyone else from the account because another member had been “talking to his wife.” In February, a minor Twitter personality who used a female avatar confessed that he was not a woman but a man pretending to be his own wife, who also happened to be in the process of divorcing him. In May, a popular YouTube gamer announced that he was separating from his wife, a professional elf cosplayer. His wife then tweeted that he had been cheating on her for months with another gamer—and that she had not been able to read whatever announcement he had made, because he had blocked her on Twitter.

It is getting increasingly absurd to observe intimate relationships filtered through the machinery of social media. (Imagine a married couple sitting meekly in therapy, the husband vowing to interact more intentionally with his meme account’s Twitter D.M.s.) Late last month, a Snapchat celebrity who goes by Shonduras earnestly tweeted, “i watched my wife fall off a cliff,” appending a nineteen-plus-minute video in which he and his wife, whose name is Jenny, tearfully discussed the aforementioned fall off a cliff, which can more accurately be described as a tumble down some rocks. Shonduras never stopped filming: he captured her fall and her tears, and put it all on the Internet. On the Internet, Jenny became Cliff Wife and achieved instant memedom. (“It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, I watched my wife fall off a cliff.”)

In all of these Wife Events, as Tom Whyman termed them, at the Outline, the Wife Guys had actively taken steps to embarrass themselves and their life partners. These stories, in other words, ultimately revolve around the needs and neuroses of men. And yet they are, nonetheless, a gratifying pleasure to behold. The wife as she has historically been understood isn’t made to exist in a world of Wife Events. She will have to change—and she is changing. The online wife is unbiddable, like an escaped llama or a trickster god. She cosplays as an elf; she tweets that her husband blocked her. You can e-mail her if you want to. The wife, as you read this, is gently rolling off a cliff.