



Presidential Elections – Ayn Rand 1932 to 1980

When Ayn Rand arrived in New York at the age of 21 in 1926 Calvin Coolidge – “The business of America is business.” – was president. Herbert Hoover, a Progressive, won the next election (against Alfred E. Smith) in 1928. Listed below are Ayn Rand’s positions on the presidential contenders after she became a U.S. citizen in 1931. The order is Republican vs. Democrat, the eventual winner is in bold type.

1932

1936

1940

1944

1948

1952

“You should vote only so long as you think a candidate has more virtues than flaws. But if you regard both candidates as evil, do not choose a lesser evil. Simply don’t vote. For instance, I abstained in 1952 and 1956; I didn’t vote for Eisenhower or Stevenson. Despite everything you hear to the contrary, abstaining—particularly by people who understand the issues—is a form of voting. You’re choosing ‘none of the above.’ ” [2]

“I think Nixon is a great improvement over his predecessors, several of them, including Eisenhower.” [3]

1956

1960

1964

“... it appears, at present, that Senator Goldwater may become very much worth supporting ... most particularly because he seems to be our last chance to preserve two-party government.

...

“... At present, he is the best candidate in the field.” [4]

“If a candidate evades, equivocates and hides his stand under a junk-heap of random concretes, we must add up those concretes and judge him accordingly. If his stand is mixed, we must evaluate it by asking: Will he protect freedom or destroy the last of it? Will he accelerate, delay or stop the march toward statism?



“By this standard, one can see why Barry Goldwater is the best candidate in the field today. ...



“In an age of moral collapse, like the present, men who seek power for power’s sake rise to leadership everywhere on earth and destroy one country after another. Barry Goldwater is singularly devoid of power lust. Even his antagonists admit it with grudging respect. He is seeking, not to rule, but to liberate a [that is, our] country.



“In a world ravaged by dictatorships, can we afford to pass up a candidate of that kind?”

“Let us hope that the pressure of his enemies will not tempt him to compromise (in regard to the party platform, for instance) and thus to commit political suicide.”

“Those who are active in the campaign should urge him to raise some essential issues, instead of the secondary matters and vague generalities he has been discussing. He has not presented a case for capitalism; he has not demonstrated the statist-socialist trend of his opponents.”

“There was no discussion of capitalism. There was no discussion of statism. There was no discussion of the blatantly vulnerable record of the government’s policies in the last thirty years. There was no discussion. There were no issues.”

“I would still say even now that of the two candidates Senator Goldwater was by far the best. ... he attempted, and that’s the best one can say for him, he attempted, he tried, to stand for free enterprise. But as I’ve also said many times before, a political campaign is not the cause of a country’s intellectual state or intellectual trend, a political campaign is the last result. In a political campaign one cashes in on the state of political or philosophical knowledge in a given society. And Senator Goldwater’s campaign illustrated perfectly the disastrous state of the political knowledge in America, not only in the choice that the electorate made but in the way that Senator Goldwater conducted his campaign.”

1968

1972

“If there were some campaign organization called ‘Anti-Nixonites for Nixon,’ it would name my position. ¶ The worst thing said about Nixon is that he cannot be trusted, which is true: he cannot be trusted to save this country. But one thing is certain: McGovern can destroy it.”

“Both have paid tributes to Americanism (i.e., free enterprise) and to altruistic statism. But here is the difference between them: Mr. Nixon, though not a champion of free enterprise, yearns in that direction, and does not mean his tributes to altruistic statism. Mr. McGovern does not mean his tributes to Americanism.”

“It is against statism that we have to vote. It is statism that has to be defeated – and defeated resoundingly.”

1976

1980





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That concludes our review of how Ayn Rand saw the presidential candidates during her lifetime, her “practical politics.” Given the known facts at the time, she implemented the principles she expressed during Barry Goldwater’s campaign of 1964 – see the long quote above, from “How to Judge a Political Candidate.” Elsewhere (I don’t have a reference at hand) during a race between about equally bad candidates she said it was desirable that the President and Congress belong to opposite political parties, which might introduce a little gridlock to the growth of government.

In the next parts of this series we consider how Leonard Peikoff and ARI treated the presidential candidates since Ayn Rand’s death.



