You made a very intriguing statement: "The goal is to change the underlying philosophy and the politics will follow." But who will make such a change? Is it one or more of us? Certainly such a person would have to see such a change as so much in his/her best interest that he/she would do this as a lifelong endeavor. I don't see that as happening, precisely because Objectivism is not a political party. Such a change would consequently require a silent coup of university philosophy departments. I can see that at some, but not many, universities. The tenure system could be either very positive or very negative in the success of such a silent coup. One serious constraint on such a coup is that the time to reach success would be long enough that even Objectivist philosophers might have a hard time justifying it as in their best interest.

Thanks and completely agree.

Zenphamy's original comments confused me. This added the needed clarity and I can see from his comment that he is thinking the same.

This is the problem with mob rule especially when one is selecting an overlord. In a real republic with a fixed constitution we would be selecting an administrator not an overlord. One vote out of 100 million doesn't decide these contests. But some overlord choices are definitely worse than others

In our system of two major parties, there are 2 candidates who win by just a few percent of votes however. Independents have little chance to get the 270 electoral college credits required for election, so the best an independent can do is throw the election into the house of representatives where one of the major party candidates would be picked anyway.

In this election trump is THE anti establishment, shake em up, and speak your mind presidential candidate that has a chance to get those 270 electoral college votes from actual voters, not cronies.,4 years of blowing apart cronyism can't be bad for us. I don't expect objectivist principles to magically be popular and make their way into politics instantly. The cultural thinking is just too statist right now. But it's a bankrupt culture and forcing its faults out into the light of day is an essential part of changing it.
That's why I think a vote for trump is a good thing this election, where 100,000 votes or less could mean keeping the evil witch woman from doing her wall street crony thing on us

Nice description. ;)

I recommend the following book:
Glennon, Michael J. (2014-09-10). National Security and Double Government . Oxford University Press.
I think it provides a very good academic study of the history and implications of "The Double Government", its inevitability arising from the failure of the Madisonians to account for the lack of civic virtue and responsibility in the American populace and the desire of the bureaucracy for efficiency.

They do seem to have the desire to be united and ruled due to a lack of independent thought and of those psionic abilities that have not yet been discovered except by science fiction writers such as Doc Smith.
Maybe the '10-80s' for the 10% who act without thought and the 80% who haven't a clue so wait for others to tell them what to do.

The start was the red shield banking cartel 500 years ago in Germany. Starting wars and Funding both sides for the last 5 centuries . Pure evil.

Proper representation would not include political parties. It would have individuals who want to be representative of a part of the country have to make their positions clear on specific issues, then have all the individual vote for the one they deem best suited. However, that means a large group is not represented, becomes disenchanted, and works against the other group. As they change power, they end up merging each others changes into the horrible mess we call the U.S. today. Our laws are a huge mix of the disenchanted trying to "fix" what the other guys have done, and political parties became the substitutes for the individuals. They assumed the roles of the individuals and now the individuals are no longer needed. Hence the total lack of civility or individual freedom, you don't need to be nice to slaves. My point is this all started before the Constitution was even written, and has been accelerating ever since.

Well said.

They are just actors. Playing a role that is ment to imply that they represent their constituents .

The shadow govt in their cunning created two parties to give the illusion that your vote means something . So you think you have a choice ,

One party bends us over and the other provides
The lube , and they slap hands and change rolls like a tag team wrestling match.

Thank you for the detailed response. I'll take them by paragraph.
1. You reiterate the point I made about a bipartisan consensus for high levels of war spending.
2. You hit on something related to my point-- the bipartisan consensus is for expensive gov't.
3,4,6 - I know villains use pragmatism and being practical as an excsue for their actions, but I do not believe all cases of being practical and using what works are part of the evil philosphy of the villains in the book.
5. I consider it Orwellian sophistry to argue maintaining a huge armaments industry is actually peace spending. The part about it being invalid to consider Social Security and Medicare separate just because they come from separate types of taxes make sense. Note that I called it a "fiction". None of this changes the fact the bipartisan consisent considers it beyond the pale to cut military spending to be equal to that of all current and potential enemies. Spending on military is so enormous reducing it to just a high level of spending is considered radical.
7.It either hyperbole or going off the deep end with this "neo-Marxist collectivist tyranny".
8. If things turn to worms, the doom predicitors will be vendicated. I'm confident they're wrong. You're right that there's no point in my guessing the motivations of doomsayers.

I noticed that in blatant form with Mark Levin publicly urging Trump to modify his campaign tactics. He didn't realize not only that it is his campaign, anyone watching it from the beginning could see that it is Trump -- and that Trump is a screwier candidate than Perot, who became the same kind of populist candidate. The difference is that more people caught on to Perot sooner, Trump is a slicker pied piper salesman, and people who lack principled understanding are more desperately frustrated.

Just as better marketing is not the answer for the GOP, neither is Trump "changing his tone" the solution to his candidacy. That both of these are popularly suggested is another example of the deeper Pragmatism oozing to the surface.

Galt very explicitly refused in the novel try to help save the statist system, which would have been futile. There is no way to save such a system from within. The 'strike' was only to accelerate the inevitable. He told them that if they wanted to save the country to get out of the way and they refused. The President today cannot govern other than by the statism enshrined in law and fiercely protected. What "Galt" would try to function under those terms?

Ayn Rand, who wrote what Galt was to say, emphasized that there can be no political solution -- with a futile "Objectivist Party" or anything else -- without a major shift in explicit philosophy to reason and individualism in the culture:

'We cannot fight against collectivism, unless we fight against its moral base: altruism. We cannot fight against altruism, unless we fight against its epistemological base: irrationalism. We cannot fight against anything, unless we fight for something—and what we must fight for is the supremacy of reason, and a view of man as a rational being."

Politically, the best that can be expected are political candidates able to draw popular support with an articulate defense more in favor of freedom in some way than the current crop: "Will he protect freedom or destroy the last of it? Will he accelerate, delay or stop the march toward statism?"

Today we are running off the end of even that possibility. It requires an appeal to the American sense of life that used to prevail despite the contradictions of the altruist-collectivist ideology widely paid lip service to, and that is running out as the explicit ideology progressively takes over across the culture. It is still not at the level of the European statist mentality, but is more acquiescent and larger portions of the population are explicitly collectivist, mindless, and being stoked.

Outstanding! Philosophical cataract surgery!
$$$

The fundamental problem of the Republican Party is not "marketing". They have nothing to market. Telling them to better sell something they don't have does not address the lack of a coherent philosophy of reason and individualism. That is why it has just collapsed into the likes of a Trump with no principles other than pragmatist statism marketed very well as another "Deal" to save the frustrated.

The Republicans are stuck with a schizophrenia of the soul. Ask yourself what kind of person runs on the premise of limited federal government at the federal level. Ron Paul and Rand Paul perhaps. Yet these candidates disappear. This is because the Democrats and statist Republicans are glad to take upon themselves the duty of any office they so deem as valid.

It is the same reason state governments do not form their own laws but simply comply with federal regulation. Texas being a commendable exception. The checks and balances between the branches were primary upon ratification. The Federalists and Anti-Federalist differed in their interpretation of the Constitution. Now we have issue politics with parties as primary with the Constitution as the flickering light in the background.

A lot of Americans want to return to the Constitution but are tumbled around by wave after wave of issues that easily distract us. We are in effect taught that abortion law is more fundamental than Constitutional separation of powers. We have pragmatists. We have "realists".

Imagine a party to take over Washington and then divest it. Is it possible? There are buildings, people, processes, rules, regulations, laws, ways of life, all centered around our issue politics. With our fundamental issue, the Constitution, taking a back seat. It is regrettable.

So what drives issue politics? Lobbyists. Cronies. Etc. Who do not trust the consumers to make the best decision or who boldly defraud people into a favorable position.

Democrat political philosophy is progressive statism, not a "hodgepodge of little problems" to solve. They don't oppose government, they want to completely control it for their own ends of social transformation. They aren't "distrustful" of government; they "distrust" their opponents controlling it. Even with the military, when the Democrats control government the old "anti-war" crowd announces, "They're our planes now".

Democrats do not oppose government, they deny and evade their coercion and spread false 'narratives' like "the government is us" or is "We the People" -- the standard collectivist dictatorship line. We are the country, not the government, and we are being ruled by government.

The warped notion of 'only solving problems' as an evasion of acknowledging ideological statism-collectivism is Pragmatism denying principles on principle and as ideology in the name of non-ideology. Pragmatism openly embraces statist methods by adopting the unprincipled "do whatever works": When government coercion is always regarded as a "pragmatic tool" for any end in the name of solving a problem, with no principles allowed to ban the coercion on principle, you have statism as a philosophy of government.

Pragmatism is a parasitic philosophy relying on unadmitted principles of unacknowledged philosophy to decide the criteria of what works by what standard for whose purposes and how anyone can know if it does "work". Pragmatism itself does not work. It is serving as an evasion of the indefensible altruist and collectivist and statist principles of progressive government, always progressively imposing and promoting more and more statist controls and taxes with no end in sight and no statement of how much would ever satisfy them -- because nothing ever could .

The military is by far the smallest segment of Federal spending compared with the social programs in the rest of it, and is not "spending on war" -- as national defense it tries to prevent war beyond what we are already suffering. It is wasteful and often misguided for bad foreign policy, but most of the money does not go to active "war". That does not change by artificially excluding most of the social spending in a false comparison. The declining value to Democrat multi-culturalists of the need for national defense of this country is not a compliment.

This 'Pragmatism as cover' is the meaning of Obama's latest line: "I think for your generation you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don't have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory, you just decide what works."

The Pragmatism with altruist-collectivist unacknowledged ideology is how he and his supporters are "fundamentally changing" the country into neo-Marxist collectivist tyranny and balkanization in the name of non-ideology -- and is why the Republicans, who have swallowed the same century-old Pragmatism with an underlying ideology that amounts to "me too but slower" are ineffective in challenging him. This is where the epistemologically pragmatist "open capitalism" of the "mixed economy" has led.

Yes the country is in "immediate peril". The country is headed into fascism with communist slogans in the name of "solving practical problems". Only anti-intellectual pragmatism allows the evasion of that. People who are watching what is happening and trying to warn against it are not subjectively motivated by "usually feeling the need to say things are horrible", which accusation is anti-intellectual and gratuitously insulting.

It needs exercise like the rest of the body!

Trump is the "end" result and logical conclusion of the Republican Party.

When Democrats ran socialist candidates Ayn Rand did see a difference, often advocating voting for an acknowledged bad Republican to stop it, such as her "anti Nixonites for Nixon" to stop McGovern.

The purpose of government is to defend the rights of the individual within a geographic area, not to "come together to make things happen" through government force. Individuals morally choose to act in relations to others in society through trade and individually shared values without physical coercion, and delegate the use of physical force to government for protection of the rights of the individual under objective law.

A "collective exists" only as an abstraction referring to a number of individuals in some relationship. It has no priority of any kind -- metaphysical, epistemological, ethical or political -- over the individual thinking and acting himself. Only individuals exist as entities, think, choose, and through immediate self defense and through law protect their rights.

How about P0's (referring to an utter lack of psionic abilities)? Or perhaps, "What would Forrest Gump say?"

I thought that it might be a general observation. Thank you for the clarification.

The choice of verbs was intentional. Thank you for recognizing that.