Ayn Rand absolutely hated Ronald Reagan: “He opposes the right to abortion”
As I’ve admitted on this website before, I was a teenage Ayn Rand fanatic.
I owned all of her books, cassette tapes of her lectures and every single issue of The Objectivist, The Objectivist Newsletter and The Ayn Rand Letter. I’m not exactly proud of this fact, but what can I do? Thankfully, it didn’t take me that long to outgrow this nonsense, but for good or ill, I still to this day have a pretty good working knowledge of her philosophy and life’s work.
To many people, Rand was less a philosopher and more a cult leader with a typewriter. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg, she fled Soviet Russia and spent the rest of her life obsessed with stamping out collectivism like it personally insulted her at a dinner party. Her novels—The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—read like Rand’s extended revenge fantasies against anyone who didn’t appreciate her genius. To her fans, she was a prophet of individualism and reason—one I was a part of for a while. And while she famously preached self-reliance, she also cashed her Social Security checks under her real name. That contradiction? Pure Rand.
This morning though, it popped into my head, appropos of nothing, how much Ayn Rand railed against Ronald Reagan before she died and I recalled one particular essay from one of the final issues of The Ayn Rand Letter where she asked her readers not to support Reagan and instead to vote for Gerald Ford, who Reagan was challenging for the GOP nomination at the time (and who appointed her loyal apostle and acolyte, Alan Greenspan, to his position as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board).
I’m guessing that a lot of Republican Ayn Rand fans—maybe this will be news to Paul Ryan and Senator Rand Paul—probably don’t realise that their hero had such a dim view of The Gipper…
From The Ayn Rand Letter, Volume IV, Number 2, November-December 1975:
“Now I want to give you a brief indication of the kinds of issues that are coming up, on which you might want to know my views.
“1 – The Presidential election of 1976. I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. I urge you not to work for or advocate his nomination, and not to vote for him. My reasons are as follows: Mr. Reagan is not a champion of capitalism, but a conservative in the worst sense of that word—i.e., an advocate of a mixed economy with government controls slanted in favor of business rather than labor (which, philosophically, is as untenable a position as one could choose—see Fred Kinnan in Atlas Shrugged, pp. 541-2). This description applies in various degrees to most Republican politicians, but most of them preserve some respect for the rights of the individual. Mr. Reagan does not: he opposes the right to abortion”.
It’s easy to forget now, in the age of CATO interns and teenage Bitcoin maximalists quoting Atlas Shrugged like it’s scripture, that Ayn Rand didn’t trust the right any more than she trusted the left. Especially Reagan. Her beef wasn’t just political—it was philosophical. Reagan’s cosy relationship with evangelical Christians and his warm embrace of “family values” was anathema to Rand, who saw religion as anti-reason and faith as the enemy of freedom. It wasn’t just that she didn’t like the guy. She considered him intellectually bankrupt—a walking contradiction of everything she’d ever written.
From Rand’s final public speech, “Sanction of the Victims,” delivered November 21, 1981:
“In conclusion, let me touch briefly on another question often asked me: What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don’t think of him—and the more I see, the less I think. I did not vote for him (or for anyone else) and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called “Moral Majority” and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling—apparently with his approval—to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.
“The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for another fifty years.
“Observe Reagan’s futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element. But he will not find it in the God-Family-Tradition swamp”.
The venom Rand saved for Reagan is almost admirable in its consistency. She didn’t soften with age. No warm fuzzies, no “lesser of two evils” calculations. If anything, her later years saw her doubling down, turning her fury toward the rise of televangelism, pseudo-populism, and what she saw as the creeping sludge of moralism seeping into political life. Her quip—“I don’t think of him”—isn’t just a dismissive throwaway. It’s an icy evisceration. For someone who built her empire on the cult of the heroic individual, Reagan’s “Moral Majority” moment looked to her like the Second Coming of authoritarianism, dressed up in a flag and a halo.
In retrospect, it’s genuinely wild how often Rand gets lumped in with the modern conservative canon when she openly loathed most of its figureheads. The irony, of course, is that the same Republicans who worship at the altar of Reagan also worship Ayn Rand—never quite grasping that she would’ve thrown their hero out of Galt’s Gulch without a second glance. She didn’t believe in saints, only rational minds—and if you brought God into it, forget it. You were already off the island.
All of which makes it that much funnier when some cigar-chomping Rand fanboy starts praising Reagan as if Rand and Ronnie were ideological soulmates. They weren’t. She thought he was a theocratic dunce. So the next time someone waves a dog-eared copy of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal while singing Reagan’s praises, just smile politely—and send them this. Let them reckon with the ghost of Ayn Rand giving the Gipper the philosophical middle finger.
If you know any conservative Republican Ayn Rand fans, you should forward this post to them, just to annoy ‘em.
Below, William F Buckley on Ayn Rand.