Why Ayn Rand Would Have Despised a President Trump – New Ideal

Two years ago, a very prominent national newspaper asked the Ayn Rand Institute to write a piece describing what Rand (who died in 1982) might have thought about President Trump. In the end, the newspaper decided not to publish it, likely because our viewpoint was too radical for their readership. However, they encouraged us to publish it ourselves, which we did on November 6, 2017, on the Institutes blog. Because evaluating Trump accurately is as important today as it was then, we are presenting an updated and lightly edited version here on our journal, New Ideal.

No one can speak for the dead. But as an expert on Ayn Rands philosophy, Im often asked what Rand would have thought of President Trump, especially because there are periodic attempts to link Trump to Rand and her ideas.

My wager is that were Ayn Rand alive today, almost three years into Trumps presidency, she would condemn the whole Trump phenomenon. Far from seeing him or his administrations actions as even partially influenced by her philosophy, she would see Donald Trump as the kind of political figure whose rise she had foreseen and warned us against.

To appreciate why, we need to know something about her view of the countrys state. From the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957 to her death in 1982, a constant theme in her writings was that we as a nation were in a state of intellectual and cultural bankruptcy.

Rand held that the Democrats, liberals and political left had abandoned the intellect. Marx, although evil, was, Rand thought, the last intellectual voice worth confronting. When the Marxists entrenched in academia gave way or morphed into the likes of B. F. Skinner, John Rawls, Herbert Marcuse, and a sundry list of postmodernists preaching ethnic determinism, egalitarianism, the impossibility of objectivity and the alleged evils of industrialization and the need to go back to nature, the pretense to intellectuality of these anti-Enlightenment figures was at an end.

This created an opening for the true heirs of the Enlightenment, the advocates of reason, freedom and capitalism, to pick up the discarded banner of the intellect. They refused.

A few months before her death, Rand told an audience of her fans, no doubt to the surprise of many, that she didnt vote for Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter, even though she regarded Carter as a small-town power luster. There is a limit, she told them, to the notion of voting for the lesser of two evils.

Rand did welcome Reagans strong language toward Soviet Russia and his promises to cut spending and taxes. But she warned that his invitation of the so-called Moral Majority into the halls of power would be a long-range disaster. By tying the (supposed) advocacy of freedom and capitalism to, in Rands words, the anti-intellectuality of militant mystics, who proclaim that aborting an embryo is murder and creationism is science, Reagans presidency would discredit the intellectual case for freedom and capitalism and embolden the countrys anti-intellectual, authoritarian mentalities.

Enter Donald Trump.

Trumps salient characteristic as a political figure is anti-intellectuality. Because Rand saw this mentality as on the rise (she called it the anti-conceptual mentality), she had a lot to say about it, and its illuminating how much of it fits Trump.

Trump makes no distinction between truth and falsity, between statements backed by evidence and statements unsupported by any evidence. This is why you cant catch him in a lie. He doesnt care.

This is a demanding responsibility. To be intellectual requires real independence of judgment and enduring honesty and integrity.

Its not just that Trump lacks these virtues; in comparison to, say, Jefferson, Washington or Madison, most of todays politicians do. Its that Trump projects disdain for these virtues.

For years now, news outlets have cataloged Trumps lies. But to call them lies misses the point.

A liar retains some respect for the truth: he tries to conceal his lies, weave a web of deception and make it difficult for his victims to discover the facts. Trump does none of this.

He states, for instance, that his inauguration crowd was the largest ever when photos of his and past inaugurations are easily accessible. He declares to a national audience that nobody has more respect for women than I do, nobody when the Billy Bush tape of him boasting that he grabs women by the pussy is fresh in everyones mind. In defense of his Saturday Charlottesville statement, he says that unlike others he waits for the facts to come in before making judgments when his Twitter outbursts are read by millions.

Trump makes no distinction between truth and falsity, between statements backed by evidence and statements unsupported by any evidence. This is why you cant catch him in a lie. He doesnt care.

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The phrase, of course, in this context is hollow. By his own admission, Trump was part of the swamp, a master at playing every side of a corrupt political system. To drain the swamp would be to get rid of people like him not elect them to the presidency. But somebody suggested to Trump that he use the phrase. I said, Oh, that is so hokey. That is so terrible. And I said, all right, Ill try it. So, like, a month ago, I said, Drain the swamp, and the place went crazy. I said, Whoa, whats this? Then I said it again. And then I started saying it like I meant it, right? And then I said it I started loving it, and the place loved it.

Closely connected to this disdain for the truth is a complete amoralism. The normal pattern of self-appraisal, Rand observes, requires reference to some abstract value or virtue, such as I am good because I am rational or I am good because I am honest. But the entire realm of living up to abstract principles and standards is unknown to an anti-intellectual mentality. The phenomenon of judging himself by such standards, therefore, is alien. Instead, Rand argues, the implicit pattern of all his estimates is: Its good because I like it Its right because I did it Its true because I want it to be true.

Rand argued that in a period of intellectual and cultural bankruptcy, if the anti-intellectual mentality is on the rise, tribalism will be ascending culturally and, politically, a country will drift toward authoritarianism and, ultimately, dictatorship.

The self-centeredness that an amoralist exhibits, Rand holds, is centered on self-doubt; he therefore exhibits a constant and pathetic need to be loved, to be seen as a big shot and as the greatest ever. Observe Trumps steady refrain that hes accomplishing feats no other president has or could, Washington, Madison and Lincoln included. One suspects that the fake Time magazine hanging in Mar-a-Lago with Trump on the cover was as much to assuage Trumps anxieties as to impress the gullible and sycophantic among his guests.

The place that loyalty to abstract standards occupies in a moral persons mind, Rand argues, is typically replaced in an anti-intellectual mentality by loyalty to the group. Observe Trumps special focus on this. Loyalty is desirable if it has been earned. But Trump demands it upfront. As former FBI Director James Comey and others have remarked, a pledge of loyalty was among the first things Trump asked of them.

The wider phenomenon this demand for loyalty represents is a profound tribalism, a world divided into the loyal and the disloyal, insiders and outsiders, us versus them. To get a flavor, listen to any Trump rally.

Rand argued that in a period of intellectual and cultural bankruptcy, if the anti-intellectual mentality is on the rise, tribalism will be ascending culturally and, politically, a country will drift toward authoritarianism and, ultimately, dictatorship.

Political authoritarians rely on scapegoats, who are said to be responsible for all the countrys troubles. The Communists demonized the bourgeoisie, the Nazis demonized the Jews, and the Socialists demonized the owners of private property. Hand us the reins of power, they said, and well get rid of these undesirables.

Unless we are ready to radically rethink our cultures fundamental ideas, our long-term trajectory is set and will play out. But the choice is ours that is the message of Atlas Shrugged.

Sales of Atlas Shrugged soared during the 20078 financial crisis, in part because people wondered how Rand could have foreseen Americas economic collapse. Sales should be soaring again because the book is not primarily about economic collapse, but about cultural and intellectual bankruptcy.

At the novels start, we witness a crumbling world, with posturing intellectuals who have long ago abandoned the intellect but who continue to preach irrational, shopworn ideas, which everyone mouths but no one fully believes or dares challenge. Part of the point of the story is that these pseudo-intellectuals will eventually be replaced by their progeny: people who more openly dispense with the intellect and who are more explicitly boorish, brutish and tribal, i.e., anti-intellectual mentalities.

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The only way to prevent this kind of political and cultural disintegration, Rand thought, was to challenge the irrationalism, tribalism, determinism and identity politics at the heart of our intellectual life, propagated by the so-called left and right and by too many others as well. We need to realize that whether the appeal is to ethnicity or gender or faith or family or genes as the shaper of ones soul and whether the demand is to sacrifice the rich to the poor, the poor to the rich, the able to the needy, whites to blacks, blacks to whites, individuals to the nation or sinners to God all of it is corrupt. We are rational beings, who are capable of choosing a logical course in life and who should be pursing our own individual happiness. We must learn to say the oath taken by the heroes in Atlas Shrugged: I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Unless we are ready to radically rethink our cultures fundamental ideas, with the same intensity of thought our Founding Fathers exerted in rethinking government, our long-term trajectory is set and will play out. But the choice is ours that is the message of Atlas Shrugged.

Thus I think Rand would have said that a President Trump is a predictable outcome, but not an inevitable one.

Image: Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock.com

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Why Ayn Rand Would Have Despised a President Trump - New Ideal