Rand never indicates the American masses (your word, not hers) are stupid parasites, nothing even remotely of the sort in fact. She describes the masses as being devoured and harmed by the parasites, which are feeding off of them. This is true in Atlas Shrugged, Anthem, We The Living, and in her ~60 years of non-fiction writings. If you've read her books, it's impossible to have missed this, she's extraordinarily clear about it and goes to great lengths to spell it out for the reader step by step, both in terms of ideology and in real world effects.