[00:00:00] Speaker A: With the Atlas Society. We're very pleased to have Atlas society senior fellow Rob Traczynski here today on the topic was Ayn Rand a liberal Democrat?
And after Rob's opening comments, we'll take questions from you. So please request to speak if you have a question, and we'll try to get to as many of you as possible.
Rob, intriguing title.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Well, thanks. Nice to see you, Scott. Well, this was deliberately a very click baity title. I'm hoping to draw people in that because, you know, was when you say, was Ayn Rand a liberal Democrat? Now, obviously, you could take that in the sort of partisan, 20th century sense of liberal and Democrat, you know, Democrat with a capital d, meaning a politician from the Democratic Party and a liberal Democrat being an advocate of the welfare and regulatory state. So, you know, this would imply Ayn Rand without supporting Hubert Humphrey, you know, in his campaign.
For those who don't remember, Hubert Humphrey was a politician from Minnesota who was very considered a radical liberal out on the left, an advocate of the welfare state. A tradition, by the way, that continues, obviously, to this day, as we've seen recently.
So it's actually interesting that my brief side comment here, because I just finished a, a newsletter talking about the choice of Tim Waltz for vice president for Kamala, under Kamala Harris. And I find an interesting choice because Minnesota is the one place where you can go where there's a very far left tradition that goes way, way back to the late 19th century. Their version, their local affiliate for the Democratic Party. If you go to the state level Democratic Party in Minnesota, it's actually called the Democrat Farmer Labor Party. And that farmer labor thing gives you a whole flavor for the sort of turn of the century, turn of the 20th century progressive movement that was very strong there. So I thought it was interesting because it's a way that she could normally, if you're talking about getting somebody who's fairly far left in his policies, who's going to be acceptable to the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is what Kamala Harris was clearly looking for, you get that person with all the baggage of a San Francisco or the college campuses, they'd be a radical marxist academic or, you know, a whacked out, you know, hippie who lives in a polycule, that that kind of whole culture would come along with them. It's only in Minnesota you could find somebody who's actually pretty far left in their politics, who looks like a saudi, middle aged, you know, inoffensive saudi, middle aged dad. So that, I thought that was a very interesting. But this goes, that's a long digression from Hubert Humphrey, but he was very much in that same mold coming out of that distinctive Minnesota tradition.
But anyway, Ayn Rand obviously was not a liberal Democrat in that sense. Right? She was not an advocate of the welfare or regulatory state. She was the advocate of the free market, of laissez faire. Not just free market, but laissez faire, radical free marketer.
However, what if we take that Democrat with the capital, with a lowercase d, and we use liberal in its proper sense, the sense that people are actually starting to use it again in the last couple of years? And that is liberal the way the political philosophers describe it. So that means pro freedom, the belief in a society that's based on freedom, a liberty, as its primary value. So that's liberalism in the political philosophers use more exact and valid meaning of the word.
So again, tying into current events, Waltz has this great little slogan I really liked. He said, mind your own damn business. And he says, the golden rule is mind your own damn business. And I'm like, yes, that's a wonderful idea. But then he says, oh, and that applies to your medical choices and your reproductive care. So basically means it applies to abortion, but it's pretty clear that it doesn't really apply to much of anything else. Right. So he's using it in this very sort of 20th century way of liberalism, applies to social liberalism. It applies to not banning books and being able to get an abortion, but it doesn't apply to economics. It doesn't apply outside of that very narrow context. Whereas liberalism in the wider sense is saying liberalism applied to everything, liberalism applied to your economics and liberalism applied to your personal life across the board. Right. So is Ayn Rand a liberal democrat in that sense? Well, I don't think anybody would contest the fact that she was a liberal in that, you know, more exact sense of the word, that she was an advocate of freedom of liberty. I mean, that's the whole essence of her philosophy, is arguing for individual rights and for the, for the individual to be set free from control and domination by the collective. That's the whole essence of her philosophy.
It's the democrat part that's kind of interesting. So was she an advocate of democracy?
Now, here, I think we have to also differentiate between, again, these, our political terminology has gotten beaten up and abused and misused so many different times in so many different ways. So what do you mean by democracy?
All right, so there's two ways you can use the term democracy. So democracy can be simply unlimited majority rule. So that is, you know, that if no matter what, the majority votes for whatever they want, they get.
And Ayn Rand had something to say about. She said democratic. And it's. I have a quote here from the letter, which she wrote.
Democratic, in its original meaning, refers to unlimited majority rule, a social system in which one's work, one's property, one's mind, and one's life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.
And this is actually somewhat in line with one of the things that I'm trying to remember. I think it is James Madison, father of the constitution, who said something along those lines of saying, you know, democracy throughout history has been as violent in their deaths that they have been shorting their lives or something like that. And there has been this tendency for democracies to consume themselves, because if you have unlimited majority rule, what happens is somebody gets to the majority, they get the majority to vote for all sorts of power to control people, and then pretty soon, you don't actually even have a democracy anymore. Democracy destroys itself because you have so much. You give a strong man so much control that then the whole process of voting, the whole thing of being democratic and people voting for their rulers and voting for the policies, that gets undermined because they voted so much power to a strongman that they don't get to vote ever again.
This is sort of. Sort of old democratic policy, a one man vote, one vote, one time, meaning we'll vote until my party gets in power, and then everything will just be imposed on you. And that has tended to be, you know, if you go to ancient greek democracies, you see all sorts of problems with that.
But that's where the term liberal democracy comes in. So now the usual thing is, the usual response to that is to say, we're not a democracy. We're a republic. And by republic, we mean, you know, we have representative government, but we don't have unlimited majority rule. We have various checks and balances that are meant and guarantees in the constitution that protect individual rights.
And by the way, I did a little search around that. I said I didn't find anywhere where Ayn Rand used that argument, we're not a democracy or a republic. I did find one from one of the philosophy of objectives in lecture series where I know she was involved at supervising, where Leonard Peacock makes exactly that argument. He says, the quote here is, the american system is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic.
He says, it's not unlimited to majority rule.
It's a constitutionally limited republic restricted to the protection of individual rights. So that's the idea. You have majority rule to choose your leaders. Majority rules pass laws, but where there are strict protections for individual rights that prevent the majority from oppressing minorities. All right, so that's the usual way you put the term, is it's a republic. Now, the. I have two problems with. With that is that one is, I think, functionally, in terms of how people use their words, liberal democracy, that phrase is used the same way. So I don't want to get hung up on the technique on the terminology here. And actually, my. My own thinking of this was changed when I look back to some of the early Jeffersonians. You know, the people around Jefferson and Madison in the 1790s, when America was first founded, and they called themselves the republican party, but a bunch of them also called themselves the democratic republican party. And this was during this season before Jefferson was elected in the 1790s, they were doing this. So democratic used in the way not to imply unlimited majority rule, but to imply a constitutional system like we have, was actually used. So the terminology I'm less committed to, and I think, like I said, functionally, in terms of, if you ask what do people actually mean when they mean this term, what we say as a republic, where you have representative government, you have majority role, but with strict protections for the rights of individuals. That's the term now that the most common, if you want to make yourself understood to the average person, the most common term for that is liberal democracy, where the liberal part is there at least equal with the democracy part. So liberal democracy means a system of majority rule, but with protections for individual rights. And one thing I want to point out that I think you'll find that's kind of fun, is that in practice, I find that hardly anybody actually believes in unlimited democracy. And this was brought home to me somewhat forcefully a couple years ago when I was it last year or the year before, when it was two years ago, when the Supreme Court issued its ruling on abortion, where they overturned Roe v. Wade, and they sent abortion as an issue back to the states, and they sent it back to be a matter of democratic vote. Whatever the majority in your state votes for, that's what your policy on abortion will be. You could ban it or not ban it, depending on the will of the majority.
And I found it very interesting that a lot of capital D democrats, a lot of people on the left who would normally be shouting about democracy, suddenly decided, no, that shouldn't be up for a majority vote that should be protected by the by, that should be protected by the constitution, that should be protected by the bill of rights, that should be protected by the Supreme Court. So they were, you know, everybody is in favor of democracy when they want the power to be able to do something, but they're against democracy when they discover an issue where their freedom, where they think freedom is important and they want to protect it for the majority. So my sort of general statement on this is everybody's a democrat in the majoritarian sense, on the issues that they favor, and a Republican in the limited protections for individual rights sense, on an issue where they don't think they're in the majority and they think they're getting a steamrolled. So getting away with the terminological issue, the question is, was Ayn Rand an advocate of democracy in the sense of representative government, voting for our leaders, but with projections for individual rights? And I think she was, and I think it's kind of interesting, one of the things that makes it a little hard to see is she did not emphasize that issue. So she tended to emphasize the idea that the liberal part is the important part, the pro freedom part is the important part, and democracy, the representative given part, the voting part, is secondary. She emphasized that very strongly. So here's a quote from, and again in the Ayn Rand letter, this would be the early, early to mid seventies. She just said things like, the right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system, and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters power. Unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.
Or she said elsewhere, this is the 1960, she said, this is the, in the objectivist newsletter, she said, oh, wait, sorry. This is, yeah, I think, the same objectives newsletter. She said, individual rights are not subject to a public vote. A majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority. Now, why was she making this point strongly about sort of saying voting is secondary? Well, okay, so you're talking about liberal democracy. You can emphasize the democracy part or the liberal part. And she definitely wanted to make sure the liberal part comes first, that the purpose of the society is to have a free society. And what she didn't want is to create the implication that, look, it's okay to limit people's rights so long as it's done by a majority vote, so long as it's done through the right procedure and process of voting. And this is partly, I think, a legitimate response on her part to the context out of which she was coming, which is she came to America and got involved in politics. She came to America in the 1920s, got involved deeply in politics, starting in the 1930s during the middle of the New deal. And the New Deal was very much the idea of tyranny, basically of tyranny of the majority of an extremely heavy handed and intrusive government with the sort of excuse of it being democratic put on top of it.
And this is FDR, right? So this is him voting for, okay, we have massive new taxes, government controls, government spending, all these different places, but we're also going to be fighting for democracy. And that's what you're in World War Two. We're going to fight for democracy against the totalitarians, against the Nazis and that sort of thing. But we're going to do, we're going to do this all the name of democracy, and we're going to have elections. You're going to be elected every year. He's going to be elected every four years for as long as he likes.
But at the same time, we're going to have government take over all this tremendous power.
And even more so during World War Two, he took on this tremendous power of propaganda, of nationalization, of industries, et cetera.
So it's kind of interesting that we're fighting for democracy at the same time that we were taking along a lot of the characteristics of the kind of totalitarian society we were fighting for. And that's what she had in mind is the context for that, of saying, of wanting to fight against the idea that, look, democracy is the most important thing and that liberty can give way to majority vote.
But the other thing I find interesting, though, is she does have in her books, and it's a little subtle. You have to look for it. She has a warning about the fact that, and this, again, comes out of this experience from the New Deal and from World War Two, censorship and propaganda, this tremendous amount of control seized by the government in the thirties and forties, early forties, she has a warning. And Atlas shrugged especially, she has a warning about how if you have a quote unquote democratic system that seizes more and more control, you actually destroy the quote unquote democratic parts of it. You could destroy the ability to have voting and to have political debate. And so she puts little hints in there, and she puts it very much in the background of Alistruck, because again, she's focusing on liberalism. She's focusing on individual rights and specifically the rights of the producers, economic freedom. She's focusing on that in terms of the literary theme of the book and the basic message philosophically that she has. But in the background, there's all these little hints about how this increasing government control over the economy is getting rid of freedom in the political sense and freedom in the good democratic sense for representative government. So there's hints about, at one point, somebody's talking about how the legislature has passed a law. But one subtle thing she does in there, by the way, is when she first two parts of the United States government did that. It's like a future dystopian United States. So when she refers to parts of the United States government, they all had some different names, you know, so the, it's not the predominant of a president. You have the head of the state and you don't have a congress, you have the legislature. Every refers to the legislature. I think that's their subtle way to letting us know we're not in Kansas anymore, right? That something has changed in the system. The words being used are different because it's not the same system we have.
But she has a hint there about the legislature passing a sort of enabling act similar to what was done with Hitler, where they passed this ability to give, to issue decrees. Another parallel to that, by the way, was done in Venezuela. I think it was 1999 under Hugo Chavez that the legislature in Venezuela gave, the president gave Hugo Chavez the power to issue decrees. So basically they're getting, it's the Congress getting, or the legislature basically abandoning their own legislative powers, giving legislative power unlimited to the. To the executive. Well, that's mentioned as part of the background of Atlas drug that this happens. And so you start seeing all decisions are made not by people debating laws in the legislature, but by the top coordinators, her big sort of top bureaucrat in the government issuing decrees. And then another hit we get later on, too, is, you know, we start to see that there's a. A government propaganda and censorship regime that pops up occasionally. And we also, there's a .1 point at which a young reporter sort of goes off script and says something he's not supposed to say, and somebody demands to see his work permit. So we have, and this is something she knew very well from Soviet, from the soap, from her experience in the Soviet Union, that one of the ways that a government that seizes lots of power, especially power over the economy, one of the ways that controls people is that, you know, if you have to get permission to work from the government, then you will say what the government wants you to say, because otherwise you're going to be out of a job.
So, you know, reporters will, will repeat the party line, or else they won't be reporters anymore. Their work permits will be, will be revoked. I think it was, I very ironically, it was Trotsky who said he, that one of the communist was he who does not toil, shall not eat. He says, when the state becomes the only employer, that becomes he who does not obey shall not eat.
And it's ironic because, of course, Trotsky helped build that whole system.
But anyway, so that's, that's some of. So you can see that she actually has a regard for this system of political freedom. And she was absolutely an advocate of the constitution and the american system as constituted by the founders. So in that sense, she was an advocate of individual rights and voting. And I'll just end with the most intriguing thing she said. I guess that she doesn't talk about this a lot because she's, partly because she's subordinating the issue of voting and representative government to the liberalism part of it, to the pro freedom part, individual rights, the individual's freedom against the claims of the collective. But it's also because at the time she was writing, it wasn't really contested, right? Especially in the 1950s and sixties, there was no authoritarian party. I think she saw the dangers of bigger and more domineering government taking away our freedoms. The way that it happened under FDR began to happen under FDR, but there was no outright authoritarian party. Association wasn't a live issue. Are we going to have a democracy or not? So I think it was not important to her. But she does say there's one part in there where she talks about. She's talking about collectivized rights, and she has an article called representation without authorization. And she has one thing she says, really, that's clear about this. She said, the theory, and this is the quote from, this is the Ayn Rand letter, sort of an early 1970s.
The quote is, the theory of representative government rests on the principle that man is a rational being, that is, that he is able to perceive the facts of reality, to evaluate them, to form rational judgments, to make his own choices, and to bear responsibility for the course of his life politically. This principle is implemented by a man's right to choose his own agents, that is, those who he authorizes to represent him in the government of his country. To represent him in this context means to represent his views in terms of political principles. Thus, the government of a free country derives its just powers from the consent of the government. So you can see at the end that she's quoting from John Locke and from the, well, she's quoting from the declaration of independence, which in turn was quoting from John Locke, the great liberal philosopher. So this idea that, but I find it interesting that the foundation of her political system is individual rights, which is why she emphasizes the liberal, pro rights, pro freedom aspect of the agenda. But beneath that, the foundation of her whole philosophy is a regard for reason. And so she places on the basis of reason the need for representative government that we're all capable of being reasoning individuals, capable of controlling the course of our own life. So therefore, we should not be subordinated to somebody else's, some strong man's idea of what's best for us. We should be able to decide for ourselves what's best for us. And the way to do that is we get to choose representatives who will reflect our political views in the government over the government of the country. So she grounded her case for representative government on reason as a value and the idea that, and I think there's a lot more that can be said to expand on that. But I think I'm expanding on what she said and have a lot of my own ideas on that. So that's why I think that it's actually a more fundamental value in a way, in her philosophical system that leads her to be an advocate of representative government and political freedom.
But in the context that she was writing, she wanted to be very, very sure that this is liberal. If you want to use the term democracy, this is liberal democracy, that the purpose of all this is to have a free society and that individual rights should supersede on key issues, should supersede the will of the majority. All right, so I think I've said enough. Well, let's open it up for discussion. Questions, disagreements, debate.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Great. And I want to invite other people to come up with questions as well. I have my own.
I guess a main concern is that there is really the conflation between classical liberal and the liberal that means progressive or small d democrat and partisan democrat. That might make, hesitant to use the term herself.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: I think that was, well, certainly that was part of it in her time.
I think that's actually oddly becoming less so in some ways. I mean, I think the term. So I've been one of these people who's been, I've been the, well, actually guy who's been since 40 years ago saying, well, actually liberal means. And then, or classical liberalism is a belief in freedom. And so being that advocate, and it's always felt very much like shouting into a void and getting people to use the word in any other way. And one of my greatest frustrations with the political right in this country, like the biggest mistake there were conservatives ever made from the very beginning, from back in the 1920s, was accepting the term liberal as a term for the, for the left right. What's liberal about them? I mean, now they have their liberal aspects in that they, you know, they will talk when it suits them. They'll talk about free speech or they'll talk about not banning books, not even that consistently as we've seen in recent years, or they'll talk about, you know, the right to an abortion or medical decisions, that kind of thing. So they'll talk about it in limited spheres.
But, you know, on as an agenda overall, they are, liberalism does not define their, the actual essence of their viewpoint. And the biggest mistake conservatives ever made, and I think they made it for a reason. And we're seeing that now because there are a lot of conservatives right now who are saying, well, see, we're against liberalism. And, you know, 40 years ago was more contradictory that they say, you know, during the Reagan era, you have a lot of people said, we're against those liberals. Now here let me explain why freedom is good. And it's like, well, don't you know the meanings of these words? Haven't you thought through the meaning of these words?
But now with the nationalist conservatives, you're getting a lot more people who are saying we're against those liberals. And now here let me explain why freedom is a bad thing and freedom explains all the things we hate about the left. And they'll go, you know, even things that I hate about the left, you know, they'll sometimes like gender insanity and the subjectivism and big governments and all that. They'll say, well, let me explain how that's really because they believe in individual rights and they believe in the individual, whereas we believe in the supremacy of society and tradition over the individual. So that those, that terminology has led the conservatives and the political right to a very bad place. But on the other hand, what I do see is, so, for example, there's the unpopulous that I occasionally write for, which is there's a new group of people sort of advocating for liberalism but meaning it in this broader sense. And so the word is starting to get used to being basically advocacy of freedom. And then we argue amongst each other over how broad does that freedom go? We should, we all know if we have freedom in one area, do we have to have freedom in all the areas? I'm hoping we can reconstruct a pro freedom political movement out of that. We're not there yet.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: Okay.
Again, if you'd like to request to speak, we're glad to take your questions. Just to take the other side. I mean, some definitions of small c conservative include a person favoring free enterprise and private ownership. And you could argue Rand wanted to go back to the days before the Sherman Antitrust act. I mean, could you argue she was a conservative Republican?
[00:27:16] Speaker B: Well, I think. Well, you could argue she was a Republican in the small r sense. Absolutely. That part, that, that part is not in a dispute now. Republican in the capital r sense is a different thing.
But was she conservative? Well, I think she. You know, I guess that I. My beef with the, with the, with the right is they accepted the term liberal to refer to the left, which doesn't earn the term liberal.
Well, I think for that same reason, for that consideration or precision of words, she really did very openly reject the term conservative for her viewpoint because she didn't want it. She did not want to leave the implication. I think she was looking at the conservatives of her time. I mean, this is a time when William F. Buckley was sort of reconstituting the conservative movement. And a huge part of that, for Buckley, at least a huge part of that, was reviving the religious right. There were, you know, he started out by writing God and man at Yale, and the big problem in his turn, in his viewpoint, was too much secularism, too much atheism. We have lost our belief in God. We have to go back to belief in God. And so she really did not want to be associated with the idea of conservatism as simply returning to the past for the sake of tradition, you know, returning to the past for the sake of the past. So she would call herself a radical for capitalism, right? So she.
And this isn't, there's a book by, I don't know if he's objectivist or at least strongly objectivist symbols. A guy named Tim Sandifer wrote a book called Freedom's furies, which is about Ayn Rand, Isabel Patterson, and Rose Wilder Lane, who were considered the sort of three founding mothers of libertarianism. And one of the things that got out of that book is the extent to which these people were very countercultural in their era. You know, that in the 19, starting out in the 1920s and thirties, these were modern women, right? These were modern, liberated women taking advantage of all the freedoms and opportunities that they had. So these were not traditionalists in any important respect. And so I think Ayn Rand had this idea of freedom is a, not a traditionalist value.
And I think she saw a problem with equating, if you equated free markets and individual rights with going backwards to the past, to tradition, that you were actually saddling it with things that would, that would limit and drag down the principle of liberty. So I would say she, I don't think you could make a case that she was a conservative now.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: Well, she wouldn't like libertarian either.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Well, you know, I think that the word isn't bad because liberty is there at the basis of it. But the, the movement itself had problems. And I think, well, we can, that's a whole other topic if anybody wants to break up. But we're seeing some of the problems they're having right now that I think come from some of the things that she was criticizing. And the libertarian movement, I think, got better than she had in mind for a while, and now it's gotten worse again. So anyway, that's a whole other can of worms.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Okay. Well, I do, I did have that quote that you had about democratic earlier, and I also have one that she did about liberals. This is from conservatism and obituary.
She says the majority of those who are loosely identified by the term liberals are afraid to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They do not want to accept the full meaning of their goal. They, while destroying the cause. And they want to establish statism without its necessary effects.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: Oh, that's a, that's a really good quote. Go ahead.
[00:30:57] Speaker A: They do not want to know or admit that they are the champions of dictatorship and slavery. So using that, I could argue she may not want liberal applied to her.
[00:31:08] Speaker B: Well, I think that, you know, you can see there, there are a lot of contempt in her mind for the term being used. You know, that this is very loose fake. I mean, she was, among all other things, she was a great advocate of, as an advocate of reason, she was also an advocate of actually having some sort of precision and consistency in our use of terms. And american politics has never, never been like that. We're always been very fast at loose with our terminology.
I find it very interesting, by the way, that, you know, and it's a uniquely american thing, too, because overseas, if you have a liberal party, it is, 90% of the time it is the pro free market, often usually considered right of center, or it's the, it's the pro free market party. So liberalism is everywhere else but the United States. Liberalism is used, and it's in a more proper way. I'm not saying those, I'm sure those parties are not all consistent about it, but they're more consistent than using that term than we are. So everywhere else in the world, I actually, I asked the british writer to say, could you ask them to make an argument on behalf of liberalism on something? Oh, but I don't know. I'm not that much of a free marketer. I'm like, okay, let me explain how we use these words in this weird little, this weird country that we have.
So, you know, it's a case. Again, Americans are unique in screwing up this terminology.
But I wanted that I do emphasize, one emphasize there, that one of the things she was warning about consistently was, you cannot have a free society while having government be in control of more and more and more things.
One thing I'm bringing about, by the way, is how when I give sort of dire warnings on some of the things that I think Donald Trump would be planning to do to have a more authoritarian system, most of it is by using things like antitrust laws and other various government powers that other people, that people on the left have been crusading for years to expand. So one of the great, you know, one of the great rules that I have is, you know, when we're proposing a law or proposing a new power for government, I want, you have to imagine that the person you despise most in the world will get elected and be able to use that power. Right? And this is something that the left has consistently failed. Democrats, Democrats in this capital d, that people, you know, in the partisan sense that they have consistently failed to do year after year after year, they keep giving more and more wider power government. And then they're absolutely in panic when a guy like Donald Trump gets elected. And no, we didn't expect that power to be used by somebody like him.
So again, it's the thing that you have to imagine that, you know, you are not always going, people that you agree with are not always going to be in charge of the government, that every power you give to government can be used against you by somebody you don't like. And that's why we limit the power of government.
[00:34:03] Speaker A: Fair point. Let's go to Matt. Matt, thanks for joining us.
[00:34:08] Speaker C: Hey, can you hear me?
[00:34:09] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:34:10] Speaker C: All right. Yeah. I was going to say, you know, I proclaim myself as an objectivist, but also, like, right wing. And people always ask me like, oh, how are you an objectivist and also right wing? And it's like, well, to me, Ayn wanted us to have our own thought processes, right? So when she says objectivity. You could apply that to anything. So for me, I look at the world objectively, the way it is now and the way that is changing. When she was around, the world was completely different. The technology was completely different. So in my opinion, she would also be analyzing the world objectively in modern times. So her views could possibly change. So it's kind of sad we don't have her around anymore, so we can't, it's hard for us to predict what she would have said now. And as was pointed out, liberals meant entirely different thing when Reagan was president. Now it's completely changed. But that was a good point, though, that, you know, that's the marxist way of doing things. We let them socially define liberal, and conservative is always going to lose to that because it sounds like we, you know, we want to wear, like, you know, what, dresses to your heels and want to go to church and make you dress up. It's like conservative just has that connotation to it now. So. But yeah, I consider myself an american nationalist, but also an objectivist, because to me, you can't have a laissez faire society if the world around you isn't laissez faire. Right? If that makes sense. So, like, if you have a nationalist country or like, let's say Mexico is federalist and you're laissez faire, that's not really going to work out. They can come and conquer you if you don't have a strong, like, national identity.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: Okay, well, that's a whole other can of worms you just brought out that I want to address a little bit. So what I would say is, as someone who I was, I was alive when Ayn Rand was alive. So I remember the world. I have a little more connection to the world as it was when she was around. So I don't think it's changed that radically.
What has happened is that the, you know, so I can personally remember politics back to the 1980, eighties and a little bit in the seventies, not much, but I'm closer to that world and sort of have more of a sense of what things were like back then. So I don't think things have changed that much, radically new technology and all that.
But what does change over time is what are the main political issues? I think the primary change that's happened from the 1980s to today is the fall of communism because the fault communism. You know, I mentioned William F. Buckley trying to get to revive the conservative movement. How he was able to do that had to do with everything to do with the Cold War because he could get. His whole idea is we're going to get the religious traditionalists, the secular free marketers and the Hawks, the foreign policy hawks, the national defense people. We're going to get all those people together. We're going to. Those are the three wings of the conservative movement. We're going to unite them all together and we'll stand shoulder to shoulder. And that was a realistic thing to do because all of them hated the communists, right? The religious people hated them because they're. Because they're atheists and they persecuted christians. The pro formarchers hated them because they were communists and the war hawks hated them because they were the enemy.
They were trying to create their own soviet empire, taking power and threatening security, United States. So we can all work together. Well, that all comes apart by the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And there's this point where things kind of drift along and 911 comes along. We try to try to get that group back together with fighting islamic terrorism to be the common thread. But by the 2010s, that's fallen apart completely. And the big thing that's happened is that the east bloc, the old Russia, Vladimir Putin has gone to Russia and he's reconstituted russian dictatorship, but in an authoritarian form that's based on Christianity, on making the thing of, oh, I'm here to protect traditional society and Christianity and the family and all this stuff. Now Russia as it actually exists lives up to none of those things. And his actual system is complete and, you know, kleptocracy.
But again, that rhetoric starts to appeal to more and more conservatives. You actually have some pro russian conservatives out there, an increasing number of them. And again, it breaks apart this coalition that we had because we don't have a common enemy to unite us anymore. And the big complaint I started hearing in the 2010s is you had the religious conservatives saying, well, look, you free marketers got what you wanted, which makes me laugh, because we didn't get what we wanted. We didn't. We couldn't get one 10th of what we wanted. But they say, oh, well, you got tax cuts and you got some deregulation over here and there. But what did we religious people get? We have declining amounts, declining levels of religious belief in country. This country. We have gay marriage. You know, this thing's a blow to our religious traditional religious convictions, a repudiation of them. We've been. You've been winning and we've been losing. So therefore, we've gotten the shorts to in this partnership, and so therefore, we're going to kick you out. And we're going to demand dominance. We're going to demand to get our part in this partnership. And that's how you had the conservative movement change from being sort of a mixture of classical liberals and religious traditionalists to now being much heavier on the nationalist traditionalist. Now, you mentioned nationalism, big can of worms. We did a whole session on this one other time. I don't call myself a nationalist because it's the ist part of that. Right. I believe in America as a nation, but the national ism can become this idea of another form of collectivism. It can be another. It can if interpreted the wrong again, it's one of these political terms that has different meanings. The political philosophers and political scientists use it in a different way than the, than is used in politics. They use it in a better way. It basically just means a belief in the nation state as a political organization in a very neutral way. I mean, you know, under their things, you know, Sweden and Norway, and, you know, think of the most sort of non countries that aren't very nationalists in the sense the politicians use it. Those are still nation states. So that's perfectly fine under the nationalism, the way the political scientists use it. So it's. But where I find to be a problem is the way the nationalist conservatives use it is they use it as saying the needs of the nation take precedence over your rights as an individual. And so that's why I would not call myself a nationalist in the current context where what that tends to mean is, you know, the impasse, basically using the power of the state to impose our values.
But that gets us a whole can of worms. We could do a whole session on that. And we have Richard Salzman and I did one on nationalism that you can look up.
Yeah.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: And this somewhat alludes to that. I don't know if you wrote this or not, but in the intro, it said, would rand be a liberal Democrat or would she be tempted by free market authoritarianism?
[00:41:27] Speaker B: Ah, yes.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: Can you flesh that out a little bit?
[00:41:30] Speaker B: All right, so, and this, this comes to my, one of my, I don't want to mention, put too much on Richard Salzman. He's not here to defend himself. I don't think he's here, but he's. There are some people who I have in mind, and I think that there's a sort of a tech bro, Silicon Valley attitude on this, that there's a certain sympathy for the idea that, look, what if we could have an authoritarian strongman? But he believes in free markets and deregulation and he wants to let us not have as much environmentalist controls, and we could build more things. And wouldn't that be great?
And I think it's an illusion. I think it's an illusion for a number of different reasons. The one example there's only part of, the reason I think it's an illusion is there's only one example I can think of of this actually working out, and that is Lee Kuan Yew, who was the.
For 50 years, he was the strongman in charge of Singapore. And the amazing thing about Lee Kuan Yew is he was, like, the great historical exception in that he was an authoritarian strongman who, like, kept a very strict control on official corruption.
Now, that is massively an exception to the historical rule, because normally, when you have an authoritarian system, the system exists because of corruption in order to achieve corruption. Right. That's why. That's why the authoritarian wants his power, so he can use it corruptly to enrich himself and enrich his friends.
And that tends to be how authoritarian systems tend to work. And I've done some looking at how it works in Hungary, is you have the system where the needs of a third authoritarian regime, the need to stay in power to maintain political control, then becomes a need to say, well, we can't have independent businessmen who have their own ideas.
This is a big thing that Putin did in the two thousands, especially in Russia, is, oh, I can't have these oligarchs. I can't have this guy who has an oil company who's supporting political organizations and political activism that I don't approve of. So I got to shut that guy down. I have to come up with a trumped up charges and a fake prosecution and throw him in jail. And so what it becomes is what authoritarians actually tend to do is. And Matt, I see you have your hand up. So I'm going to have. We'll get back to you. I just wrap up in a minute, and then I see you got a question.
What authoritarians tend to do is say, well, in order to stay in power and do all the good things I want to do, I then have to have more control over the society and make sure that people, that the wrong people don't become rich, can't have George Soros, who's hungry here, right? And Victor Orban can't have George Soros, with all his billions, funding things. So we have to shut that all down. We have to make sure that all the newspapers and all the television stations are under the control of friendly businessmen. Who will support the regime? And by that means, you go from free market authoritarianism to more like cronyism, where, you know, the only way anybody can do business is by having a political sponsor. And then they use that power against rivals and keep them out and down. And it becomes almost like a revival of royalism, where you need the, you know, a patent from the king toward her to do business. So that's, I'm going to end that. And if somebody wants to talk, go ahead.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: That sounds as bad as the system. Soros setup. Just kidding.
Go ahead, Matt.
[00:45:12] Speaker C: Yeah, I was going to say, I was pondering that myself lately because it's like, you know, I think the republic is the best form of government that could really stave off authoritarianism, but it will always eventually, you know, fail into, like, that cyclical nature. So I was thinking too, myself, it's like, what if you did have authoritarianism, but it, like, it forced capitalism on society? Like, forced it, and like, how would that work? And that, that's what I was kind of pondering, too, like what you were talking about. It's like, I don't, how, how would that work? You know, like, is free speech too free? Because if we have free speech, we can have Marxists in the street or, you see, communist protests. What if we just made, what if we just shut down all communism in the country? Is that, that's not free speech. But we know communism is bad objectively, so why allow it, you know?
[00:46:06] Speaker B: Well, one of the things I would point out is that we won the Cold War without ever. Well, okay, there were a couple of times where they tried to jail communists, but for the most part, the ACLU formed in. It protected the rights of communists to speak. And we won the cold war not by shutting down all the communists and telling them they couldn't speak. We won by discrediting their system. And one thing you will see is that I think it helps the purveyors of an authoritarian or totalitarian ideology to have the status of being victims of having been forbidden, knowledge that can't, you know, that can't be discussed. I think we should be discussing the heck out of it because, of course, it's wrong and it's very easy to refute and also because you don't. So what happens is authoritarian regimes that impose themselves, again, if you impose Lesnar fair on everybody, which is a strange thing to talk about, precisely because it would be imposed on people, would not be accepted by them, it would then come to be much more resented than it is now. And the moment you lose control, they would be much more inclined to turn against freedom, to turn against economic freedom because it would be associated with the old regime. And we see that dictatorships are overthrown and the old regime is thrown down and anything associated with the old regime is then viewed negatively and is disparaged. And, oh, my God, we can't have that anymore. And people who are attached to the old regime are discredited. And I think that's one of the dangers.
Now, of course, the other danger, again is I think it's an illusion that somebody would come in saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to impose capitalism. And then over time you'd say, well, in order to have this power to impose capitalism, I need to have friendly people running the media companies and the newspapers and the television stations, and pretty soon you'd have this crony system. And in fact, I mentioned Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. You're seeing more and more. So he's been dead for about ten years, I think ten or 15 years, maybe a little longer. One of his sons is now running the system, and you're starting to see that the system is breaking down. It's becoming more corrupt. There's more trouble with it. There's all sorts of other aspects to that that I won't get into, where it was never quite as free market as it seemed. But what you're seeing, what's going to tend to happen is you have that illusion. And that's the basic problem with authoritarianism. And one of the basic reasons we need government voting and political freedom, the right to debate, and the fact that you have votes, majority votes, and they can remove a leader from office is that that's the only way we have to stop somebody from doing things we don't that he, that we didn't want him to do. So, you know, the thing is, once an authoritarian, an authoritarian can get into the office by saying, I'm going to do x. But once he gets that authoritarian power, you know what he actually does? He does whatever he wants to do because nobody could stop him from doing it. Right? Once he has that power, he might do the thing he initially promised to do, but then he'll get ideas of saying, well, I should also do this and I should also do that. And by that point, he's surrounded by a group of yes men who were used to saying, oh, of course, whatever you want, supreme leader. And he's eliminated criticism. I mean, you know, a great example of this is, again, Vladimir Putin. There was nobody around him who could say, you know, I don't think this ukrainian venture is going to work out as well as you think it will. I don't think we're going to topple their government. Before four days, there was nobody around him who could say that. That was my favorite right before. One of the things I cited right before that invasion is that somebody saying, oh, he would never be crazy enough to invade Ukraine. And I said, well, look, I was watching this thing. And he had, he went to Belarus with this sort of mini, mini me dictator in Belarus. And they played a hockey game against these, like professional hockey players and they scored seven goals each. You know, Putin is this like 60 something guy who has a desk job and he's playing hockey against these big professionals and he gets a bunch of goals. And it's obviously they're letting him win. And I said, a guy who, a guy who lives like that where he can't play hockey without everybody saying, oh, you're the greatest hockey player ever. He has lost all touch with reality and no sense of limits or the fact that he can be wrong. Right? So he's going to make a big mistake like this. You can't say he wouldn't do something, this stupidity. And that's what tends to happen with authoritarians. Once they have the power, they don't do the thing they promise to do necessarily. They do whatever they feel like doing, whatever crazy idea comes into their head. And they often get, you know, arrogant and flush with power. And they have, yes, men around them and they come up with crazier and crazier ideas. So that's, that's why I think it's the illusion of sort of liberal authoritarianism or, you know, pro free market authoritarianism. I do think you can have illiberal democracy, and that's the system that Viktor Orban literally calls it, that in Hungary, you can have a system where we're not going to recognize individual rights of freedom, but we're going to have an element of democracy and majority rule. But typically even that is democracy in this distorted form, in that, like, we'll have the vote, but we also control the media and we control the tv stations and we control the newspapers, and we control everything that everybody hears. So we will use that to try to shape people into, you know, push people into voting the way we want them to. So that's a whole other issue. So I think you get, you can have, quote unquote, authoritarian, illiberal democracy. But the illiberal part necessarily erodes the democratic part. All right.
[00:52:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And Matt, we will try to get to you if we have time. There's at least one or two. I wanted to ask Rob, are there any of Rand's views that are not consistent with classical liberals?
[00:52:14] Speaker B: Ooh, good question.
[00:52:19] Speaker A: Maybe rational self interest.
[00:52:22] Speaker B: No, but that's totally consistent, too, with classical liberalism. Um, rational. So this is something that I've, I've come to fairly recently, is it's a tradition, traditional for objectivists to talk about rational self interest as a radical idea of Ayn Rand's, a complete departure from 2000 years of philosophy. I've grown to realize more recently that that's not entirely true, that if you go back 200 years or so, uh, really like 150 to 250 years, rational self interest. Now, they didn't use that term. They would use, like, self interest, properly understood, or enlightened self interest. And, you know, it didn't, philosophically, it didn't mean exactly the same thing, but something close to what object, what Ayn Rand would describe as rational self interest. It actually was kind of the official moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, and it was widely accepted. Tocqueville says this doctrine of self interest, properly understood, is universally accepted in America. This is 1832. And he says, you hear it as much from the poor as from the rich. So I think that, you know, that was totally consistent with classical liberalism. No, I don't think Ayn Rand departs from classical liberalism. I think she is maybe more consistent than various forms, philosophically consistent, and, you know, consistent in the policies than most forms of classical liberalism were.
[00:53:46] Speaker A: Well, I think of John Stuart Mill being more utilitarian, support some degree of social responsibility when it enhances the overall society.
[00:53:57] Speaker B: Well, he even endorsed, he endorsed altruism and socialism. Now, he modified altruism into a less extreme form than he actually knew. The originator of the term altruism, Auguste Comte, and helped to popularize his ideas. But he tried to moderate a lesson saying form.
So, but I would say John Stuart Mill is the example of that, is, he's the transition there, the transition from where liberalism goes to mean enlightenment liberalism, which is, you know, limited on government to encompassing altruism and socialism in some form. And I think what happens after mill, because he actually was quite a liberal in the way we'd re we liberal in the legitimate sense that we would recognize in his actual specific views. But he introduces a bunch of these philosophical elements that then end up eating liberalism. And that's, I think that's how the 20th century liberals get to come around to saying, look, we want big government, we want technocrats managing everything we want, limiting strict limits on individual rights. But we're liberals. That's how they get there is that they were, it was John Stuart Mill sort of introducing these ideas that are destructive to liberals. But that's, I got, we could do a whole session on that.
[00:55:13] Speaker A: So when Republicans weren't challenging that, they should have been, I guess, to some extent that what was a phenomenon that was going on, you're saying there was almost a kind of confluence of liberal and social small l, small s views.
[00:55:33] Speaker B: There was a transformation of liberalism by bringing in this contradictory element and then muddling a bunch of intellectual terms and positive freedom versus negative freedom, this idea that while freedom means you have to be given free stuff by the government or else you can't really do anything. And of course, that means that, nope. That you end up with having to encroach on other people's freedom but to take away their goods in order to get free stuff. So there's, all this is there was basically the late mid to late 19th century was a concerted attempt to undermine classical liberalism by corrupting all the terminology. And this often happens that you'll have a term like liberalism and ideology and a viewpoint that becomes so widely and universally accepted that people need to present its opposite under the same label. Now I argue, by the way, that a bunch of the nationalist conservatives are doing that with, quote unquote, the right and conservatism and republicanism.
They're doing that to the republican party. They're saying they're substituting completely different ideas, but saying, oh, no, it's the same thing. It used to be.
But this technically tends to happen when you have something that's universally accepted, like Immanuel Kant, who, who I regard as the enemy of the enlightenment in very fundamental ways, also presented himself as an Enlightenment philosopher, and, you know, is often accepted as a great philosopher of the Enlightenment. Well, I think he's the last philosopher of the Enlightenment because he killed it off. But again, the ideas of the enlightenment were so widely and universally accepted in his time that the only way to get your ideas across was to present them as if they're enlightenment ideas, even if you're confusing and muddling and undermining the idea. And I think that's what happens to liberalism as a term, especially in the United States, at the end of the 20th century. Sorry, at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century. But that gets a whole other topic we can get into.
[00:57:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that also explains some of modern conservatism being against the enlightenment, because they're pointing to Kant and saying, I'm against that, or they're pointing to.
[00:57:45] Speaker B: Various things that came out of that. You know, they imagined that, for example, Marxism is not scientific in any realistic sense of the word, right? But they presented themselves as, this is scientific socialism. And because they were trying to ride off of the reputation of science and of the enlightenment. And so conservatives, being often philosophically naive, which sort of accepted that, say, oh, sure, well, if that represents what the enlightenment leads to, well, then we're against the enlightenment.
But in fact, Marxism is a repudiation of the enlightenment on a number of important respects, is the view of reason, the view of the individual, the view of individual rights, the origin of government, all these things Marxism is completely opposed to. So it was, it was, it was part of this result of the overturning of the enlightenment philosophically. But again, if you don't, if you're not attuned to those philosophical, if you're not, if you don't haven't defined those philosophical ideas very exactly in your own mind, you're going to buy it. You're going to buy into the rebranding, as it were.
[00:58:56] Speaker A: Quickly, any other free market authoritarians you can identify in history?
[00:59:01] Speaker B: Well, I would say also historically, the more so somebody tried to tell me that Lee KuAn Yew in Singapore, this free market authoritarianism was the asian model. Well, historically, the actual asian model is something we saw in South Korea and in Taiwan and in a couple of other places, which is you had an authoritarian ruler who creates free markets or relatively free markets, at least. And then over time, that creates a middle class that asserts its independence and says, well, look, you know, we have the ability, we should have the ability to control our own fates and make our own decisions, and who begin to demand more democracy or more, more representative government. And then what you have is, if all turns out well, is you have a system. Chile is another example, is you have a system where eventually they oust the, or they, they reform away the authoritarian system and they transition to a relatively pro free market democracy, democracy or representative government. So that's actually the more realistic historical, that's the more benevolent historical premise.
So I think that's, you know, that's actually what happens to, if you actually had a contest where you have, when I have authoritarianism and freedom, if you want to keep the freedom, eventually it will get rid of the authoritarianism that these two things don't, you know, can't exist side by side. They're too contradictory of the principles.
[01:00:31] Speaker A: All right. Great. Well, thank you so much for doing this, Matt. Thank you for your questions. Thanks to everyone who joined us and listened. If you enjoyed this or any of our other materials, please consider making a tax deductible
[email protected]. and we'll look forward to seeing you next time.
[01:00:51] Speaker B: Thanks, Rob, and thanks a lot. Thanks to everyone.
