In 1964 Ayn Rand wrote a post-mortem of the Goldwater campaign. She lamented:

“As it stands, the most grotesque, irrational and disgraceful consequence of the campaign is the fact that the only section of the country left in a position of an alleged champion of freedom, capitalism, and individual rights is the agrarian, feudal, racist South. The Southerners, undoubtedly, were voting on the basis of ‘tradition’; but it was hardly a tradition of pro-capitalism. This, perhaps, is the clearest indication of the extent to which Sen. Goldwater had failed to present his case.” (Published in The Objectivist Newsletter, December, 1964, “It Is Earlier Than You Think.”)

Ayn was saying the clearest indication Goldwater FAILED to explain his ideas wasn’t that he lost the rest of the country, but that he WON the old Confederate states. Consider what this means for the Republicans, from Rand’s perspective. Republicans have been winning these same states year after year. Trump even picked unreformed feudalists such as Sessions and Roy Moore to endorse and promote.

Rand was absolutely right about the problems with this Southern ethos. It is at war with the Enlightenment. Neo-confederate Tom Woods said as much in a piece he wrote, but has since scrubbed from the internet, where he praised the South as the “Last Stand” of Christendom rightfully fighting the evils of individualism. Wood’s spoke for Southern conservatism when he attacked,

“…the cult of the individual that has flourished since the Enlightenment, and which has celebrated man’s progressive emancipation from the various corporate bodies that once commanded his allegiance, can no longer claim the moral high ground; for what was supposed to have been mankind’s most progressive and enlightened century has yielded only disillusionment and alienation.

This kind of individualism coincides well with the designs of the omnipotent state. The central state also wants to liberate the individual from his traditional attachments — not because they infringe on his liberty — but because they compete with the central state for his allegiance. In order to attain absolute power, the centralizes seek to crush all competing sources of authority.”

Woods was horrified that classical liberalism advocated a concept that protected individuals such as “From family members (wives from their husbands, children from their parents), from churches, from communities. And it has done so by increasing its own power at the expense of these institutions.” He damns “radical individualism” embracing the herd of conservatism where all are alike, obeying the same hierarchy of “traditional” leaders such as the church. He claims the Constitution “makes hardly any reference to the individual at all” and that it’s all about states and their own tribal cultures with “traditions of their own.” Thus there are no natural rights, there are rights the tribe gives and which vary from state to state, thus I might add, making it impossible for the state to violate rights, according to this theory.

As Woods put it, “The states may do as they wish in these areas,” such as imposing religion on people and violating freedom of speech. He described precisely what it was about Confederate tyranny that Rand hated, “”Just as Northern radicals sought to make the individual the fundamental political unit, so also did they attempt to make him supreme in the moral and ethical sphere. This is particularly true in the case of the abolitionists, many of whom stated frankly that if forced to choose between their private beliefs on the one hand, and the Holy Scriptures on the other, they would be compelled to jettison the Bible.”

This wasn’t the last time Ayn took on some of the justifications of “Southern conservatism.” She did the same in her comments on George Wallace and his phony “states’ rights” agenda. In June, 1968 she wrote “The Presidential Candidates 1968” for The Objectivist.

Wallace presented himself as a Christian conservative, a harbinger of the nascent Religious Right now coalesced around Trump as if he were the Second Coming. Rand viewed Wallace differently: “George Wallace represents the emergence of an open fascism in this country — or, more exactly, the crude elements from which an explicit fascism is to come.” Well, that “explicit fascism” she feared was to come, is here!

She then described what she saw as the natural traits of fascism. Read it and keep Trump in mind:

“Observe the symptoms: racism (which he denies, but which is quite obvious in his own utterances and in his past record) — a primitive, undefined nationalism (not a rational patriotism, but nationalism in the form of a collective pseudo-self-esteem ) — militant anti-intellectuality (not an opposition to a specific group or kind of intellectual, but to all intellectuals. to the intellect as such ) — the constant appeal to “the little people” or “the plain people” or “us folks” (which, socially, is an appeal to the lowest elements in society, and, psychologically, an appeal to an individual’s lowest potential: to self-righteous mediocrity — and force, the explicit and implicit reliance on the “activism” of physical force as the solution to all social problems.

It is the fact that some of his statements — as apart from and out of his Context — are true and needed saying that deludes many people into the belief that he is a defender of freedom or capitalism. Quite obviously, he is not. He is merely paying occasional lip-service to the Constitutional tradition of this country, purely as tradition, which he neither understands nor supports. He is not a defender of individual rights, but merely of states’ rights-which is far, far from being the same thing. When he denounces ‘Big Government,’ it is not the unlimited, arbitrary power of the state that he is denouncing, but merely its centralization-and he seeks to place the same unlimited, arbitrary power in the hands of many little governments.

The break-up of a big gang into a number of warring small gangs is not a return to a constitutional system, nor to individual rights, nor to law and order.

Lacking any intellectual or ideological program, Wallace is not the representative of a positive movement, but of a negative: he is not for anything, he is merely against the rule of the “liberals.” This is the root of his popular appeal: he is attracting people who are desperately, legitimately frustrated, bewildered and angered by the dismal bankruptcy of the “liberals” policies, people who sense that something is terribly wrong in this country and that something should be done about it, but who have no idea of what to do. Neither has Wallace — which is the root of the danger he represents: a leader without ideology cannot save a country collapsing. It is the fact that some of his statements — as apart from and out of his context — are true and needed saying that deludes many people into the belief that he is a defender of freedom or capitalism. Quite obviously, he is not.

There is precious little Rand would find of virtue in the values of this merger of Southern culture, Christian fundamentalism and the supposed “free market” ideas of Republican Party. Chris Sciabarra, in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, argued it was Rand’s “antipathy toward racism” which “was a contributing factor in her rejection of political conservatism.” She argued conservatives were far worse than any other political movement because they combined free market rhetoric with hateful agendas. As Rand saw it, all they accomplished was to discredit capitalism by living up to the worst caricatures drawn up by critics.

By the 1980s Rand was thoroughly unhappy with Republicans. In 1964 she said Ronald Reagan’s speech on behalf of Goldwater was the high point of the campaign, but by 1980 she repudiated him because of his alliance with the Religious Right and his anti-abortion viewpoints. Someone like Trump would have her spinning in her grave. In fact, her very last speech before her death was to warn Americans of the “God, family, tradition swamp” that the Religious Right was promoting. Her prophecy about Confederate fascism reviving itself has come true.

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