Objectivists Are on the Right
The Ayn Rand Institute was my Charlie Kirk. They were a bastion of fresh air in my suffocating college experience. I have said this multiple times, but here I am saying it again: The Marxist rhetoric emanating from American University was palpable. American University, ironically, was the most anti-American place I had ever been. I was taught that everything I knew was wrong and that the world was upside down. I went from A is A to A is B there.
In comes this place that welcomes me to their internship, a place where I fled to like I was looking for some kind of asylum status. And I found it in Yaron Brook’s wonderful speech on capitalism, in Onkar Ghate’s beautiful defense of selfishness, and in the many other employees who gave me life through the words of Ayn Rand, my spiritual role model.
However, this ugly divide has been starting to grow ever since Donald Trump appeared on the world stage. ARI is giving off this sense that before Trump, America was functioning normally as opposed to how abnormal the left-leaning system was before then. The leftist grip on nearly every aspect of American life is the reason so many even voted for a man like Trump. In all fairness, I will say that I have not talked to any of these intellectual leaders in person for about a decade, but I regularly listen to their podcasts, namely Ayn Rand Institute Live!, The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, and The Yaron Brook Show.
Since my father handed me Atlas Shrugged when I was fifteen, I have always considered her to be a kind of “conservative atheist.” Although through the Institute, I have learned that she distanced herself from being called a conservative, preferring to be called a “radical for capitalism.” However, I heard on a relatively recent episode of The Yaron Brook Show that Ayn Rand did consider herself to be on the right. But Yaron was talking about how frustrating that was because he does not want her name to be associated with either the Left or the Right. He wants her to be in her own distinct category. This comment shocked me because we live in a two-party system. A third party never ends up winning, no matter how vibrant its constituents are. Independents don’t make the difference needed to take this country back from the Marxists. Rand even says, “As to the middle or ‘center,’ I take it to mean ‘zero,’ i.e., no dominant position, i.e., a pendulum swinging from side to side, moment by moment.” So, to me, that means you have to pick a side: the Left or the Right. And the “leftists,” in Rand’s words, are “the views of those who are predominantly in favor of government controls and socialism,” while the “rightists” are “the views of those who are predominantly in favor of individual freedom and capitalism.”
I have always thought Rand was on the right and wanted them to be better, not in a category totally separate from them. Objectivism, to me, is a more specific group under the umbrella of “the Right” and within the Right, she was fighting specific points, like abortion and immigration, which were controlled by more of the religious Right’s ideas, but the Left was always her enemy. There are bad ideas on both sides, especially on what I’ve heard Shapiro call the “horseshoe Right.” Having various branches on each side is fine because you are talking about two large groups of individuals, and having agreement on anything within each side is already quite a feat. Just because Yaron read Peikoff’s DIM Hypothesis and now believes everyone on the right is a religious theocrat is just as ridiculous as saying that everyone on the left wishes for a Stalin-type to take charge of America. There are extremists on both sides, but that does not make you this special fringe group that makes enemies of the side you’re supposed to be on. You have civil debates within each side in order to push for what you believe is right. Personally, I would have preferred Rand Paul as president over Donald Trump; and, in my view, there is the pro-life Right and the anti-life Left. The good versus the evil.
Lately, this distinction has not been made clear by the Ayn Rand Institute. Here, their hosts are reading The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and all the other “mainstream media news.” Perhaps there is a generational divide going on because the younger generations do not go to the legacy media for news anymore. They have not proven themselves to be trustworthy sources. Yet, the hosts get caught up in the media web, including reading and engaging with the latest “scholarly” texts. I feel like they are lost in scholarship, talking with complete Marxist idealogues as if they are worthy of engaging with. Ayn Rand would have never accepted their works and nitpicked at the little things she disagreed with, like a new student; she would have rejected them outright.
Aside from an occasional lecture from Shoshana Milgram, the Ayn Rand Institute lacks the literary, romantic quality and passion that Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff had. Their podcasts feel too scholarly and, at times, unemotional. The sense of urgency is just not as strong as it used to be, set in a fight for good and against evil. I have to say that I regularly get that need fulfilled now by Ben Shapiro, the renowned conservative talk show host of The Daily Wire. He seems to be on a more reality-oriented path than ARI has been lately. I find that sad because Shapiro somehow believes that religion gives you “objective morality,” which, being an Objectivist, makes no sense at all to me. However, he does use his reason to come to conclusions that align with reality in his show, using the spiritual passion that is all but absent from ARI’s podcasts.
All the ARI podcasts lately have been about Trump censoring companies. But I believe that taxpayers should not have to fund a left-leaning organization with their hard-earned cash. Also, they continually attack the Right way more than the Left, only giving half-hearted “shade” to them at the very end of their episodes, like, “Yeah, the Left does this too though.” They have caught this notion of “bothism,” where both sides are bad.
Then the Charlie Kirk assassination happened, and both ARI and Yaron responded with their own take that both sides are becoming more violent. But when did ARI become some pacifist organization? I saw a commenter calling them “milquetoast” in their response to his death, and I have to agree. Ayn Rand had passion, and I’m sure she understood that at a certain point a country must defend itself with force. Then Yaron says that Marx did not create “oppressed” and “oppressor”? The “exploited” and “exploiter” are exactly the same thing! Of course, Marxism lives today in the Left. Yaron keeps defending the Left. Why are Yaron and ARI trying to stick so literally to the Nazi and Communist time and place? Knowledge involves context. Just as ARI discussed environmentalists as using the environment as a kind of new religion, so Marxists are using transgenderism to fight against the “colonialist West” in order to bring down the capitalist system. They are not wearing brown SS uniforms, although they are still calling each other “comrades” online, but the ideology has not changed.
I actually watch these conservative talk show hosts, and I have never heard them say some of these things that Yaron finds or picks out simply because he is relying for his information on biased news sources, like The Washington Post. Of course, I disagree with the Israel is behind everything or that actual demons control people. I do worry about the religious Right being taken too seriously by the general public, but they have not been in charge since who knows when, the 1950s, maybe?
I never thought I’d say that Ben Shapiro, who seems to believe that atheists cannot be morally good people, is making a lot more sense right now than the Ayn Rand Institute and Yaron Brook. It makes me sad because they were the place I called my intellectual home throughout college, but now I feel the intellectuals there are losing their heroic spark.
To those at the Institute, all I have to say is that sometimes dramatic, non-ivory-tower actions are needed to take the country from the leftist brink of ruin back to the middle or, at least, more reality-oriented Right side of the political spectrum, which we have not seen since the 1950s in this country. Many Americans believe that Trump is the right man for the job because he does not cower in the face of authority but stands up against the very bullets aimed at his head to give voice to what “We the People of the United States” are all thinking.
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Links: https://fee.org/articles/the-political-compass-test/; https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/rightists_vs_leftists.html; https://www.amazon.com/Dim-Hypothesis-Lights-West-Going/dp/0451466640
Views Expressed Disclaimer: Please know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand's philosophy visit: aynrand.org.