Yes, she was beyond "hard-minded" in her assurance that she was right about everything, all the time. She actively culled members of her "inner circle" for disagreeing with her about even the most trivial of things, but also about more important things, such as the link between smoking and lung cancer. She believed that non-smoking was "anti-life." In her later years, she hallucinated as well, and would take people to task for contradicting what she thought she saw. So that's fun.

Her essays tended to be quite abstract--because she saw herself as a philosopher, and that's how philosophers write, staking out grounds for principles and leaving the particulars to be imagined by her readers. She was reacting against the philosophical ideas that were most prevalent in her day, which is what surely prompted this quotation:

"Today, however, when people speak of 'compromise,' what they mean is not a legitimate mutual concession or a trade, but precisely the betrayal of one's principles--the unilateral surrender to any groundless irrational claim. The root of that doctrine is ethical subjectivism, which holds that a desire or whim is an irreducible moral primary, that every man is entitled to any desire he might feel like asserting, that all desires have equal moral validity, and that the only way men can get along together is by giving in to anything and 'compromising' with anyone. It is not hard to see who would profit and who would lose by such a doctrine."

It is a very old question: do cases alter principles? Almost everyone else who dared to pen a philosophical note would likely say, yes. She said no. But the underlying thought in this quote is an interesting one. Rand seems to be sticking up for the weak or politically powerless here, at least by my reading.

Heathcliff said: "One can see the virtual straitjacket the teaparty is obliged to operate within. Their intransigence in Congress will carry over into this convention. Or they blaspheme their goddess.

"Irrational" to Ayn Rand is any idea opposed to hers."

Yep, and that is what makes this political struggle (or this political ease, depending how you look at it) so interesting to me. The Ayn Rand people have come of age and are asserting political influence now, whereas in the past they merely shouted from the sidelines. (It's true Alan Greenspan was a devotee, and even writes of his association with her in his recent memoir, but until now very few politicians or political appointees have even acknowledged that they'd read her work.)

What I find charming about it all is that the Neocons of the past thirty+ years have worked so hard to capture politics for their conception of Christ, and now are faced with a party that idolizes someone who repudiates not just the idea of there being a "son of god," but even the ideas that the deity stands for.

Can the republican tent really shade all of those people? Or will there finally be a lasting split, pitting non-religious people who want constitutional government against extremely religious people who want the constitution to include their conception of god?

Can you really have your gold and your Christ at the same time?

Tune in tomorrow.

Herring405