So the columnist becomes the image of what is despised -

the GOP and the 'right' are not all objectivists nor do they easily fit that mold.

The question of what animates objectivists is a valid one; so is the question of what part of the truth was found and exagerated by objectivists; and also, how does that truth play out in people who are lean that way without being full-fledged objectivists. However, to imagine that the right, or republicans, or moderates, or capitalists, are all objectivists is nonsense spouted to make it easier to feel good about being a liberal democrat, most useful at a time when liberal democrats are running everything (into the ground).

The right and the republicans, which are not one and the same and in fact aren't uniform or coherent, either, include all manner of people. There are evangelicals and fundamentalists (which are not the same, and are not all conservative, or on the right, on all republican) and there are neocons, hawks, economic conservatives, objectivists, fascists, traditionalists, social conservatives... the list goes on, for a very long time.

What truth did Rand describe that appeals to many of them? The idea that people who aren't providing for themselves via honest labor shouldn't be allowed to parasitize people by the coercive power of the state. Further, that people who feel bad about themselves shouldn't be allowed to soothe their consciences by coercing others into a substitute for charity - 'welfare.'

Of course, the balanced lessons are about our obligation to act and live with charity; for those who are well-off and work hard to not only encourage people to work, but to fill in the gaps at times when nature deals them a bad hand - and to do so voluntarily. This is the nature of virtue; objectivism misses this.

Keeping truths in tension is a difficult task. It is always tempting to grasp at simple truths, to see an imbalance and answer it with extremism. That leads to a bad place in due course. Setting the balance and using only good means to a good end is a difficult, tedious, seemingly losing battle - it always seems easier to get there via crude means, rough methods, but that leads to a place that looks only like a pale imitation of the place one meant to go. This is what Ayn Rand teaches in the end; that as the columnist said, she ended up preaching a new form of horror, in reaction to the abuses she suffered.

Unfortunately, the columnist does pretty much the same.

Except that this column is primarily about Ayn Rand and her influence, not the right.

It's not at all unreasonable to associate Ayn Rand with today's rightwingers. And the Republican Party has CHOSEN to identify itself with those same rightwingers. Sure, you can argue that those Republicans are only trying to do what appears to them to be politically smart, that they're not "true" Objectivists. So what? This is what Objectivism has become in America -- perhaps it's what Objectivism always has been. Certainly, nobody from Rand's inner circle has been able to strain out a workable, realistic social view from that stew of solipsism and self-pity that Rant passed off as "philosophy". And one of her disciples, Alan Greenspan, DID steer America's economy right into the dumpster. (To give Greenspan some credit, he did have the intellectual courage to publicly say he'd been wrong after events had proved him wrong).

As for "grasping at simple truths"... come on! Rand's whole technique was to reiterate ad nauseum truisms like "contradictions don't exist. A cannot be not A." Well duh!

For you Rand devotees, I recommend Barbara Brandon's "The Passion of Ayn Rand.". Brandon was the wife of Nathaniel Brandon, the young man Rand took for a sex partner in her later years. Barbara Brandon, in her book, still shows the signs of a True Believer. But, relating the story of her husband's infidelity with Rand, she reveals what "rationality" really meant to Rand. The scene where Rand and Nathaniel Brandon explain together to both their spouses how it is a "logical necessity" for them to screw several times a week is both funny and pathetic. It makes me wonder how many other of Rand's young clique tried that line on their spouses.

Ayn Rand denounced the religious right as "theocrats." In particular, she would be appalled to see that some libertarians are anti-abortion. Because, as she put it, "The enemy of abortion is no friend of capitalism...or freedom."

cassandra:

Ayn Rand denounced the religious right as "theocrats." In particular, she would be appalled to see that some libertarians are anti-abortion. Because, as she put it, "The enemy of abortion is no friend of capitalism...or freedom."

That's also why Ayn Rand despised William F. Buckley Jr.--because, unllike herself, he was a true conservative who dealt in treality. She also split with Murray Rothbard, the Libertarian Party founder, over his support of churches as non-governmental institutions that helped society. But unfortunately with Buckley's passing too many "greedocrats" are abandoning conservatism for self-justifying fantasy.