(This applies more to the presidential election before last, but your rotten bigotry makes it applicable all the same. The Objectivists deserve everything they’ll get as reward for their betrayal of liberty, and they’ll get a lot. In the meantime you can write articles about how libertarian are all immoral child molesters, or whatever lie strikes you as plausible.)

I guess many of you must have seen this lecture already, but if not, I recommend it highly.

“In my judgment, anyone who votes Republican or abstains from voting in this election has no understanding of the practical role of philosophy in man’s actual life—which means that he does not understand the philosophy of Objectivism, except perhaps as a rationalistic system detached from the world. ”

But then, if he abstained from voting for either candidate this year, he must have changed his mind, mustn’t he?

(Btw, I never liked his original statement. I thought it was “rationalistic” and “detached from the world”.)

If Tracinski thinks that a single election — particularly one in which the Democrats seriously courted evangelical voters — could refute Dr. Peikoff’s argument based on his DIM Hypothesis, then he’s even more hopelessly mired in short-term analysis than I thought.

Of course it’s not an either-or choice between God and State. That shows such a serious misunderstanding of Dr. Peikoff’s claims and arguments that I just can’t even wrap my head around what Tracinski thinks the refutation amounts to. Does he think that Dr. Peikoff’s view is that the state would wither away as people turned to the church? That people would embrace God
and individual rights? In fact, it’s going to be faith *and* force.

The real question is whether secular socialism is still an active intellectual force driving the culture — as it was in the early part of the 20th century — or whether religion is taking over that role and doing so for the long haul. Notably, if religion does become the dominant
philosophic force in the culture, we can and ought to expect it to embrace and incorporate other vicious modern ideologies — most notably welfare statism, egalitarianism, and environmentalism. All of those views can be supported by Christian scripture — and as Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate argued this summer, they will need Christianity to survive.

Obama is part of the movement to reinvigorate socialism under the banner of religion, I think. And that’s part of what makes him so dangerous qua socialist. In response, the GOP is likely to run a statist evangelical nut like Huckabee or Palin in 2012. (I just don’t see any hope for a fiscal conservative indifferent to “life” issues, not when the party’s intellectual leaders are insisting that compromise is fine on any issue but abortion.)

Soon, we’re darn likely to have two thoroughly religious political parties, with just minor variations in their increasingly statist policies. The GOP is already thoroughly religious — and they’ve abandoned all concerned for rights in recent years. The Dems haven’t understood or advocated rights in ages, and now they’re embracing religion as the basis of their egalitarian
ideals.

That’s the very ugly future about which Dr. Peikoff (along with Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate) have warned us.

Seriously, that’s really insanely annoying, as I just wasted a whole lot of time for absolutely no purpose whatsoever. I’m saving the comment, in the hopes that I can post it at some point. (Let me know when you fix the program.) In the meantime, I won’t be writing any more comments for this blog, as I don’t want to run the risk of being “spammy” again. That seems like a shame to me, as I generally like what you’re posting so far and I’d like to comment on occasion.

[Ed: I've posted your comment after disabling the existing spam protection. I reviewed its code and it was bizarrely aggressive. Previous versions of the system took a more modest approach to spam protection and the release notes didn't identify the change.]

Andrew, I hope we get it fixed, as I value your comments highly.

I agree. Not only do we have yet to feel the full effect of the current economic woes, but also reactions to them are going to make things much worse.

We may be in only the beginning stages of a very bad economy. This is a long-term trend to watch for, if it is indeed a trend and if attendance is an appropriate indicator.