Rand Paul, Ayn Rand

Rand Paul, Ayn Rand | The New Republic

Jonathan Chait


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Greg Sargent has obtained Rand Paul's college-era letters to the editor. Unsurprisingly, the current Kentucky GOP nominee was a huge Ayn Rand-head:

In a 1982 Op ed Paul published in the same paper, he wrote worshipfully about the "immortal words" of Howard Roark, the hero of Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead." Displaying a taste for ambitious prose that betrayed his tender years, he lamented that "man" had lost touch with the Roark-ian ideal, and decried rank and file human beings as a "mindless mob of mediocrity" that hates and tries to stymie the achievements of great men:

The new world man crawls on all fours, submits, acquiesces and seeks the security of the mindless mob of mediocrity.

Such are the masses that cower before knowledge, that condemn science, and seek to become one with the inanimate earth. This subspecie of man rises from among us, consolidated in their hatred of achievement, and their fear of the unknown...Their defeat, however, is still possible if the few who still possess originality, those men who still dare to think, speak out and show the mob the reflection of their premises, the impotence of the conclusions, and the lifelessness of their entire ideology.

To me, a candidate whose worldview was shaped by Rand is exactly tantamount to a candidate whose worldview was shaped by Karl Marx. It should be disqualification unless it's clear that the candidate in question has completely broken from his past. Ayn Rand was a total nut.