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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 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 · Herbert Hoover vs. Franklin Roosevelt“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]Eisenhower won. Rand commented on his presidency in 1969 during the Q&A period of her Ford Hall Forum talk “Apollo and Dionysus,” when Richard Nixon was president. She said that though she is not an apologist for the Nixon administration:
“I think Nixon is a great improvement over his predecessors, several of them, including Eisenhower.” [3]1956 · Dwight Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson
“... 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.Her emphasis on “at present” may have been with the Wendell Willkie fiasco in mind.
...
“... At present, he is the best candidate in the field.” [5]
“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?Into the campaign she expresses disappointment that Goldwater is softening his stand, in “The Argument from Intimidation” (TON July 1964):
“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.”By October 1964, in “Special Note,” she says Goldwater is headed toward defeat because of his campaign methods:
“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.”Finally, after Goldwater’s defeat, she laments in “It Is Earlier Than You Think” (TON December 1964):
“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.”She goes on to say that Goldwater attempted “to substitute the question of personal ‘morals’ for all the crucial questions of our age, and offer it as the cardinal issue of the campaign.”
“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.”That was over half a century ago.
“To the great credit of the American people, the polls taken immediately after the Democratic Convention showed a significant drop in McGovern’s popularity and a significant rise in Nixon’s. At this writing, Nixon leads by the enormous figure of 26%.In “A Nation’s Unity” (The Ayn Rand Letter October 9 & 23, November 6, 1972) she analyzes the Democratic national convention in even further depth, then says both Nixon and McGovern are hypocrites:
“I am not an admirer of President Nixon ... But I urge every able-minded voter ... to vote for Nixon – as a matter of national emergency. This is no longer an issue of choosing the lesser of two commensurate evils. The choice is between a flawed candidate representing Western civilization – and the perfect candidate of its primordial enemies.
“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.”She goes on to say that though she is not an admirer of Nixon, his flaws are nothing compared to the bald statism espoused by McGovern:
“It is against statism that we have to vote. It is statism that has to be defeated – and defeated resoundingly.”The last of the three installments of her article, though dated the day before the election, was apparently written and published after it – Nixon won in a landslide – for she goes on to say that the American public, in spite of the lack of intellectual leadership “knew when to say ‘No’ loudly and clearly.” In her next Letter, “The American Spirit” (November 20, 1972), she takes this as proof that the American people’s sense of life is still intact, that “when the chips are down, it will break through and proclaim to the world that this is still the country of freedom and self-esteem.”
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 Rand’s death.