History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.
[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]
Okay, readers of my blog know I have some serious disagreements with Ron Paul too. But, um, lordy. This is a bit psychotic.
And doesn’t this mean that the Randians are giving Paul the same treatment that Whittaker Chambers gave Rand? All this story needs is the line “to a gas chamber – go!” to complete the irony.
Well, it seems that one thing that unites the ARI crowd and the "more tolerant" Kelleyites (what are they calling IOS now?) is a fearful and bellicose foreign policy?
Could someone who follows the Objectivist movement more closely than I explain this?
Yes, Rand was inconsistent. She made some bellicose statements and she believed to much in american exceptionalism for my taste.
But she was clearly a noninterventionist herself, who decried use of the word isolationist as a smear against those who advocated noninterventionism.
So why are her heirs united in smearing modern noninterventionists? How did the bellicose part of Rand's thought come to crowd out the rest?
Which only goes to corroborate what many of us have known for years: that the only difference between the Randroids and old fashion Tories like L. Brent Bozell is that the Randroids substitute a watered down version of Nietzsche for Paul.
I read Robert Bidinotto's appended essay How to Judge Political Candidates with interest. It struck me as a sensible analysis that deserves a wider readership until, and this is the crucial proviso, he gets to discussing Ron Paul. There he displays mainsteam Objectivists' ugly American nationalism, which reflects Ayn Rand's own version of American exceptionalism founded on a quite startling ignorance of U.S. and world history, and which is quite divorced from a peaceful American patriotism.
Perhaps a cryogenically defrosted Ayn Rand herself?
Seems silly. Do they prefer someone else?