The Randroid Worship of Power

Interesting conversation under my latest C4SS column: "Small Government Conservatives Who Love the State." Aster mentioned that mainstream Randroids of the ARI variety are even worse state-worshippers, when it comes to the coercive and punitive "Daddy" arms of the state, than the Republicans at Fox New et al. I commented (some minor cleaning up):

The Randroids IMO are far, far worse than Fox and even most Republican talk radio.

I recall some pieces by Bidinotto saying the U.S. was justified, in “self-defense,” in turning the Gulf region into molten glass if the Islamic countries didn’t obey an American demand that they shut down the Madrasas (aggressive calls for violence, you know), and give the oil fields to private owners (cough Exxon-Mobil cough).

Now consider, first of all, that the ARI’s propaganda might be interpreted by some in the Islamic world as “calls for violence.” And consider also that Ayn Rand rejected Rothbard’s views on state property: she viewed student occupations of state universities, like the Berkeley FSM, as a thuggish violation of property rights that should be suppressed by state violence.

Starting from the perverse definitions of “self-defense” and “aggression” that these Randroid monsters use, it’s possible to threaten “Do what we say or we’ll murder the entire human race,” and define failure to obey as “aggression” and global genocide as “self-defense.” Maybe, using the ARI’s logic, the rest of the world should define the U.S. government’s very act of permitting such calls for violence from the Ayn Rand Institute and The Objectivist Center as itself constituting state sponsorship of terror–and then launch a war of extermination against the U.S. to make the rest of the world safe from American corporatist terror. It would be at least as rational and internally consistent as the Randroid doctrine. In fact, I believe Bin Laden justified the civilian deaths from 9-11, arguing for the moral culpability of the entire population in supporting or acquiescing to government policy, in the very same terms the ARI beasts of prey regularly use.

Most Randroid foreign policy propaganda, behind all the elaborate philosophical justifications, amounts to “Let’s kill all the people we don’t like and take their stuff.” It’s just an animal’s howl of rage, wrapped up in faux Aristotelian rhetoric.

Addendum. In the comments, Robert Bidinotto challenged me to produce a link to any instance of where he'd said such things. I found that I'd conflated his name, in particular, with the content of a number of objectionable ARI pieces which were not written by him which had been posted (mostly by Kevin McFarlane, who regularly posts links to ARI columns, I think) on the Libertarian Alliance Forum. I can find no instance in which Mr. Bidinotto made the madrasa or oil "theft" arguments referenced above. As I told him, before turning a C4SS comment based on my loose recollection of a wide array of objectionable content from the ARI into a blog post in its own right, I should have done better fact checking. For that, I apologize. My reaction to the actual arguments referenced above still stands, but I lack the time or inclination to track them down to the original Objectivist writers responsible for them.