Recently, ARI senior fellow Ben Bayer participated in the Texas Tribune Festival, Austin’s largest annual policy and culture conference. The festival regularly hosts events featuring state governors, U.S. congressmen, professors, journalists, and thousands of attendees. This year, it invited ARI to appear on a panel discussing the construction of the Ayn Rand Center in Austin.
Alongside Bayer, the panel “Free Markets, Free Ideas: Austin and Heterodox Thinking” featured the president of the University of Austin, Carlos Carvalho, and the director of government affairs at the Cicero Institute, Nick James. The three discussed the educational or political activities of their respective institutions and how those activities fit into the Texan political environment.
In his remarks, Bayer differentiated Ayn Rand’s pro-reason, pro-individualist philosophy from both “libertarianism” and “conservatism.” Against “libertarianism,” he emphasized Rand’s view of the necessity of a government that protects individual rights. Against “conservatism,” he emphasized Rand’s rejection of religion and altruism. He also discussed how her conception of freedom is all-encompassing, covering not only economic freedom but also intellectual freedom and, for instance, the personal freedom of a woman to have an abortion. Bayer also observed that today’s Republicans have abandoned any support for economic freedom in favor of supporting the tribal, fascist-leaning MAGA movement.
We hope the opening of the Ayn Rand Center in Austin will create more opportunities to present Rand’s ideas and participate in intellectual discussions in the Austin community — and beyond.
I love it. ARC, still in embryonic form, is already stimulating intellectual interest! Thanks, Ben.
It would, however, be interesting to hear why the "MAGA" movement is any more or less fascist-leaning than the alternatives on the Left, i.e., why you would mention the fascist tendencies of the right and not those of the left.