[WS:] An interesting thought, but I think it is the other way around.
Impressionable minds are attracted to Plato, Rand & Co. because they find in them the confirmation of the conclusions at which they have already arrived - about their own special place in the universe. I think Joanna was right on the target when she called it juvenile - part of adolescence is a discovery that one can think for oneself rather than being told what to think by parents and teachers. Some get carried away with this realization, especially when it gets reinforced with cultural tropes celebrating individual creativity, which btw have a particular appeal to adolescents.
One interesting school of thought on the social impact of mass media is the "uses and gratifications" theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_and_gratifications_theory emphasizing the active role of the audience in creating the actual media content. In other words, its is not the media telling audience what to thing but rather the audience finding in the media what they want to find.
I think the same applies to the classics, philosophy, etc. Their popularity lies mainly in the fact that for centuries different people were finding in them what they wanted to find and reproduced that for their contemporaries. Or stated differently, there is no such a thing as the "original classic" - only contemporary reproductions labeled as "classic" - which as the Old Man tells us is "conjuring up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language."
-- Wojtek
"Modern conservatism is just a neoliberal gloss on medieval domination."