Is Ayn Rand Affecting Trump’s America? An Interview with Steve Simpson

“When people say things like “Trump is the Ayn Rand presidency,” that’s nonsense. She’s influenced the political right, but there’s a big gap between Objectivism and what many conservatives believe.”

On November 29th, 2017, Steve Simpson, Director of Legal Studies at the Ayn Rand Institute, joined Merion West’s Alex Baltzegar to discuss general themes of Rand’s philosophy, her philosophy’s take on contemporary free speech debates, and the compatibility of her views with Christianity.

Objectivism is a philosophy many people have some misconceptions about. Just to clarify to some of our readers, could you provide a summary of “Objectivism” and how it differs from other philosophical traditions?

Objectivism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand, a novelist who wrote the novel Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and a number of others. In essence, objectivism covers the major areas of any philosophy: metaphysics (what exists, what doesn’t exist, and how to think about existence), epistemology (how we know things), ethics (what we ought to do), politics (what sort of social system we should have), and aesthetics, which is art.

On metaphysics, Ayn Rand believed in reality and “what ‘is’ is,” and we can’t change it. What she referred to as “the primacy of existence,” the world is what it is and it’s our job to figure it out then act accordingly.

In epistemology, she was a champion of reason, which is our basic way of knowing the world. She believed, unlike a lot of other philosophers—I mean, postmodernists are a good example since we are talking about free speech, that reason is not only our only way of knowing things, but it is entirely effective. Therefore, we can actually know objective truths. So there is an objective reality out there, and we can know it.