Ayn Rand was a Russian Jew born to a family in the drug business. Her high-church acolytes today include among them a former Israeli spy, and their perspective is, without exception, resolutely Zionist.
Her philosophy, such as it is, is meant to allow the privileged a psychological justification for pluming themselves, and an interest in violent sex. If its adherents convince themselves they’re really brilliant ubermensch geniuses, they work even better as fronts.
If you’re engaging with the ideas, you’re missing the point. It’s a spotting operation for the Israelis, and probably the Russians too, given that the Russians have riddled the Israeli security state like Swiss cheese. The way educated people recoil from objectivism is the response of people defending their civilization. It feels foreign because it is.
Among other things objectivism isn’t really meant to contemplate the possibility that Muslims are people, and indeed everything Rand wrote on the subject suggests she didn’t think they were. Rand was fiercely anticommunist, but there is nevertheless something very Russian about someone like this telling the goyische elites that treating Muslims badly is OK.
Her ethic of war is famously evil, according to which one can hold a civilian population accountable for not overthrowing their wicked government—they consider it immoral to worry about civilian casualties. More napalm, more nukes; glass ‘em. After 9/11 they took out an ad that said “end states who sponsor terror,” whose accompanying article they recently republished. The social function objectivism plays in libertarianism is to provide bizarre intellectual justifications for neoconservative policies, which are always in Israel’s favor.
But I’ll do them the courtesy of taking their ideas at face value: today Israel is a state sponsor of terror based on their prime minster’s longstanding support for Hamas, and it has a wicked government. By the objectivist philosophical position, our aircraft carriers should turn around and turn Tel Aviv into a blazing inferno post-haste, because the protests there haven’t so far succeeded in removing the Netanyahu regime. The reality is America would be in a stronger strategic position if we did—in other words, it would be in our self-interest. I think it would be wrong, but I would like them to explain why they think so.
If you ask me there is no flavor of Nietzschean Zionism that really washes—the world’s goodwill toward Jews has a lot to do with being seen as plucky underdogs. The problem with teaching people that there’s something immoral about rooting for the underdog is that even when a Jewish state exists, there’s always a bigger dog.
We are all Randians now.