The New Republic article about Rand, which we looked at in Part 1, stood out not primarily because of what it said about her, but in how it conveyed its message. The article put a tribal prejudice toward Rand above facts and logic. That same mindset is on display, even more starkly, in Amanda Marcotte’s Salon article, “Right-wingers finally got their Ayn Rand hero as president — and it’s this guy.”
Let me stress, again, that my goal is not to change your mind about Rand and her ideas, nor primarily to correct the many errors and misrepresentations in these articles (though I’ll point out some of them along the way). Instead, the point is to explain how the two articles are fundamentally uninterested in convincing any active-minded reader. Their aim, rather, is to affirm a preset narrative about Rand. These are worse than mere smears, because their tribal mindset represents the abandonment of rational persuasion as the goal of intellectual discussion.
Marcotte’s point is captured in the subtitle: “Conservatives finally have a leader who lives by Ayn Rand’s selfish philosophy, and he’s an embarrassing clown,” the clown being Donald Trump. But whatever you might think of Rand or of Trump, this is a claim that’s far from self-evident. It requires a real argument. Marcotte’s article offers no argument. It’s written for an audience that already partly or fully shares Marcotte’s preconceptions.
Photo by Rita Morais on Unsplash
Elan Journo 