When the Republican party struggles to determine its future direction, it often looks back to its intellectual and political leaders of decades past. And while we often hear about novel ways to think of those figures, we rarely hear much about what they thought of each other. Such inquiries can show us the historical fault lines visible in current debates between libertarian, small-government types and so-called “values voters,” conflicts that reach back at least to Barry Goldwater, who had no sympathy for the religious right in his heyday. Even in his old age, the conservative senator from Arizona was, for example, “pretty secure in feeling that discriminating against gays is constitutionally wrong.” In a 1994 interview, Goldwater resisted what he called the “radical right […] fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it.” “If that ever happens,” Goldwater said, “kiss politics goodbye.”
Thirteen years earlier, in 1981, another figure much-revered on the political right felt similarly about the rise of the “moral majority” after the election of Ronald Reagan. Asked what she thought of Reagan, Ayn Rand replied, “I don’t think of him. And the more I see, the less I think of him.” For Rand, “the appalling part of his administration was his connection with the so-called ‘Moral Majority’ and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling, apparently with his approval, to take us back to the Middle Ages via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.” Rand’s primary concern, it seems, is that this “unconstitutional union” represented a “threat to capitalism.” While she admired Reagan’s appeal to an “inspirational element” in American politics, “he will not find it,” remarked Rand, “in the God, family, tradition swamp.” Instead, she proclaims, we should be inspired by “the most typical American group… the businessmen.”
Rand made these remarks in her last public lecture, delivered in 1981 at the National Committee for Monetary Reform conference in New Orleans. You can see excerpts at the top of the post and the full speech above. She clarifies her position on the moral majority in the second clip in the top video, claiming that the lobbying groups and voting blocks of the religious right were seeking to impose their “religious ideas on other people by force.” Rand also supported abortion rights, stating unequivocally that a politician who opposes the right to an abortion is “not a defender of rights and not a defender of capitalism.” It’s not entirely clear how Rand saw religious legislation as a threat to capitalism, but there can be no doubt that she did. And though—as NPR political blogger Frank James writes—many people think that a good deal of “cherrypicking of her ideas has to be done to claim her as a modern conservative hero,” there are also obviously plenty of religious conservatives who can admire Rand without denying or excusing her hostility to their faith. Yet, as the applause she received for her forceful rejection of the religious right suggests, there may have been—at least in 1981—no small number of conservatives who agreed with her.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
“the unconstitutional union of religion and politics”
– Ayn Rand
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
– George Washington
Not really a rebuttal. Rand would just say that while the Founders were amazing thinkers, sometimes they got it wrong, often owing to the times in which they lived.
Also, the Founders tended to use the words “religion” and “morality” interchangeably (most of them being Deists or nominal Christians). And Rand would agree that morality is indispensable for political prosperity.
She might frown on the Appeal to Authority (unless she were the authority!)
I do not think you can reconcile the two sentiments I quoted. Perhaps Rand would have contended that “they [the Founders] got it wrong.” (She seemed to have no shortage of chutzpah.) Ultimately, however, there is a lot of history to show that the Founders got it right.
Nice piece and video. I hope that liberals as well as conservatives will make some effort to agree or disagree with what Rand actually believed, rather than what they read on the internet. And cherry-picking quotes from the 1950s isn’t helpful, either, unless you are playing “gotcha!”
I have both liberal and conservative friends, and they both just look at me like I’m crazy when I say that Rand was not a conservative. She must be! They heard it on cable news or read it on the internet. Sigh.
Reading this, it occurs to me that the difference between earlier stage “conservatives” like Goldwater and Rand, and later stage conservatives like Ronald Reagan and what we have now, is that the bosses of the right wing movement created the religious movement to pull religious working class people into their fold. And it worked! Now we can’t separate them. The republican party is actually amoral. But from top to bottom it identifies as Christian.
wow a woman who got it right and a dead white corpse who happily is still a corpse
The part of Rand’s philosophy that the right-wing today ran with was her claim of selfishness being a virtue, and altruism being bad as well as the reduction of the welfare, and administrative state. Interestingly Objectivism is most practiced by the Democrats today, while the Republican Party has completely abandoned that. What Rand seems to have never understood is that pure capitalism doesn’t work. All evidence points to the contrary. Those with the most wealth will tend to use that wealth to obtain more wealth, and power. This results in taking it away from the rest of society, and leading to an Oligarchy. This is why the State began to step in in the first place to mitigate what was happening during the Gilded Age, and then again after the Wall Street Crash, and a similar pattern emerged with the rise of Reaganism. In order for Republicans to get their system in place of helping the wealthy they needed to pull in the white working class and use the us v them culture wars to keep them in their party as their economic policies were harming them. Capitalism needs that system of checks and balances to be sustainable. Dismantling it through absolutism like what Rand believed leaves it too open to being corrupted.