2. Ayn Rand Institute Objectivists are glad that Tucker Carlson was fired by FOX. See here (James Valliant) and here (Yaron Brook). Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I find it curios that the ARI seems to have an odd dislike of right-wing populists such as Trump and Carlson. They don’t get so worked up over the main stream left wing media.
Sunday, April 30, 2023
Objectivist Round-Up, April 2023
1. The Great Debate on Open versus Close Objectivism took place in mid-April at the Ayn Rand Centre Europe between Craig Biddle and Steven Hicks. I’ve been shaking the trees but can’t find why the video hasn’t been posted.
2. Ayn Rand Institute Objectivists are glad that Tucker Carlson was fired by FOX. See here (James Valliant) and here (Yaron Brook). Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I find it curios that the ARI seems to have an odd dislike of right-wing populists such as Trump and Carlson. They don’t get so worked up over the main stream left wing media.
2. Ayn Rand Institute Objectivists are glad that Tucker Carlson was fired by FOX. See here (James Valliant) and here (Yaron Brook). Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I find it curios that the ARI seems to have an odd dislike of right-wing populists such as Trump and Carlson. They don’t get so worked up over the main stream left wing media.
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I don't think it's so strange that ARI dislikes especially those right-wing populists: after all, these constitute serious competition for them in the market for ideas and politics, and are, as far as I can see, in that regard also much more successful. Rand herself disliked especially those libertarians - philosophically close to her own ideas - while these were her competitors by supposedly "plagiarizing" her ideas. Or think of those various "Objectivist" groups fighting each other fanatically, about who is the Only Real Representant of Rand's ideas..
Dragonfly
Rand and her followers have gone out of their way for decades now popularizing her ideas. Apparently it never occurred to them that they can't control what other people would do with those ideas. I guess the Rand obsessives don't see the contradiction between their rhetoric about respecting the individual's sovereign mind versus getting upset when those sovereign minds express their own thoughts about Rand's ideas which differ from the true believers'.
They don't like populism. To ARI types, and even to people in the "libertarian-ish" space more broadly, populism is cancer. It equals Nazism in their minds. If forced to choose, many of them would prefer a Stalin to a Pat Buchanan or a Donald Trump. After all, accepting that the U.S. has a border is but the first step on the dark road that ends in Auschwitz, yes? "Trump=Hitler" seems to be a key point of agreement along a specific spectrum that runs from Yaron Brook to antifa.
Some of it is that Tucker's and Trump's sort of populism explicitly appeals to intuitions, what they call gut feelings, rather than to reason. I think they are right in this matter and for the right reasons. This is despite their positions not being anywhere near as rational as they think they are.
There are two strains current in what passes nowadays as "populism." One strain seeks to create a broader populist consensus among anti-elites across the entire political spectrum on the assumption that the most important political division in the country is between the power elite and the mass of people outside the power elite. The other strain is made up of factions within populism that are unified by some kind of particularly dogmatic ideology---usually one that doesn't (ironically) have that much appeal. Such factions tend to be small but often exhibit a keen jealousy, verging toward outward hostility, of other populist factions, which are often regarded as "controlled oppostition." The dissident right is full of such factions, as is the more holier-that-thou libertarian types. And even ARI Objectivism could be regarded as a "populist" faction of this sort ("populist" used here in the sense of not part of the ruling elite).
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