Oceania Has Never Been at War With the Cato Institute

In the second excerpt of Deep Galt’s communique, my source schools me on how Ayn Rand Institute Objectivists, who had for years denounced libertarians, can suddenly do a 180 and send one of their top guys to run the Cato Institute.

“What you have to understand about the ‘orthodox’ Objectivist movement, the ARI wing of it,” wrote Deep Galt, “is that it is essentially authority-based. Something is true and consistent with Objectivism if the top authorities in the movement say so. Everyone down the line is expected to step in line.”

DG disagrees with me on one point: “I wouldn’t call it a ‘cult.’ It’s a narrow, insular little establishment. Pretty commonplace, but certainly not the kind of place [Fountainhead hero] Howard Roark would have wanted to hang out.”

The authority-driven nature of Objectivism, says DG, “explains how Objectivists can condemn Libertarianism for 20 years, and then without warning or explanation, one of ARI’s top guys turns around and becomes president of the biggest Libertarian organization, and hardly anybody pipes up. It doesn’t matter if it’s intellectually consistent. All that matters is that Yaron Brook, John Allison, and Leonard Peikoff approved it.”

This feels almost novelistic to DG, but not an Ayn Rand novel: “It all has a weird sort of ‘Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia’ feel to it.”

In the next installment we’ll get into one very troubling case that everybody should perhaps pay closer attention to.