Some admirer’s of Ayn Rand have concluded that the political values of her philosophy, Objectivism, and the values of Bush conservatives are fundamentally the same. They claim, for instance, that Objectivists and conservatives both value freedom, even though the conservatives are inconsistent in the actions they take to preserve it. In this view, Objectivists should actively support President Bush, while urging him to act more robustly to defend
They claim that Mr. Bush’s military aims are good; we simply need to expose the practice of sending Americans overseas to die for others. His espousal of the free market is good; we only need clarify that a half-trillion dollar deficit and an exploding budget are contradictions. Respect for American founding values is good; we simply need to oppose the religious foundations of their reverence and promote a secular agenda.
We could of course say similar things of the New Left, which claims to support freedom by opposing aggressive wars, censorship, political secrecy, religion in government, poverty, anti-abortion laws, attacks on privacy, etc. But New Left liberals do not in fact support freedom, because what they are pursuing is not a free society. The actual results of their actions–not their claimed intentions–are what matters. What they are pursuing, in fact, is a massive welfare state, increasing taxation, government control over our lives and military timidity. These are their values, and these are what must be repudiated.
So it goes for Mr. Bush. His “forward strategy of freedom” means exactly what he has done in
Objectivism recognizes that the meaning of an idea is the facts it refers to in reality. A value is a fact that is understood in relation to human life. “A value,” said Ayn Rand, “is that which one acts to gain and/or keep”–it is not an idea divorced from action. For example, men are free when the government protects their rights; this is what freedom means. Freedom is a value because the facts of man’s nature will not allow him to live under coercion.
But this view of values contrasts utterly with the views of the neoconservative team behind Mr. Bush. They see values as ideas from a higher reality, whether religious or secular, and then applied imperfectly to this world. This is Platonism, so called after the philosopher Plato, who implanted it into western thought. “Freedom” becomes an idea from intuition, or a dictate of the almighty, that can be applied only imperfectly in the real world. This is not necessarily religious faith, but also “common sense”–stuff that all of us just know, as I was once told by a conservative atheist.
The chasm is not between their values and their actions to preserve them, but rather between their values and reality.
The neoconservative movement is the explicit inculcation of Platonism into American politics. The main figure here is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the intellectual force behind the neoconservatives and founder of the only serious conservative academic movement. Straussians include Paul Wolfowitz, William Bennett, Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, Richard Perle, and Abram Shulsky, Director of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. Within ten years of Strauss’s death the neoconservatives had attained national prominence in Ronald Reagan’s administration.
The neoconservatives have become the philosophical alternative to the religious right in the Republican Party. This is precisely the danger that support for Mr. Bush represents. His re-election will strenthen their attempts to fill the void created by the nihilistic left. This will hasten the spread of ideas antithetical to a rational world-view, and close off any opportunity that exists for Objectivism to offer a rational alternative.
Followers of Strauss are united by the notion that ideas–especially political principles–are in essence pure theory, and cannot be directly applied in reality. As Strauss wrote in his book Natural Right and History, “Prudence [“practical” reasoning, how you deal with the world of men] and
