Source for this claim? I think you’ve been listening too much to what David Kelly says other people are saying, or you’ve taken a statement out of context.
From The Ayn Rand Institutue’s website. “About ARI” Section, “Overview” page, Introduction (Paragraphs 2, 3, and 4):
ARI seeks to spearhead a cultural renaissance that will reverse the anti-reason, anti-individualism, anti-freedom, anti-capitalist trends in today’s culture. The major battleground in this fight for reason and capitalism is the educational institutions—high schools and, above all, the universities, where students learn the ideas that shape their lives.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy—known as Objectivism—holds that historical trends are the inescapable product of philosophy. To reverse the current political and economic trends in America and throughout the world requires a reversal of our society’s fundamental philosophy. Victory in this war of ideas will ultimately mean the defeat of the widely held, pernicious ideologies that dominate contemporary culture and threaten our liberty—ideologies such as collectivism, moral relativism and multiculturalism.
ARI undertakes a two-pronged strategy:
Through its education programs, ARI finds, trains and supports individuals who thoroughly understand Ayn Rand’s ideas and can communicate and apply them professionally.
Through its outreach programs, ARI disseminates Ayn Rand’s books and ideas to the general public.
The terms “elected officials” and “policy makers” are both conspicuously absent.
Hardly.
The devil is in the “how”, not the “what”. If by “talking to people” you mean sanctioning their ideas or spouting thinley veiled libertarianism, as Devid Kelley has done (see here and here) then, NO. David Kelly’s advice is hardly being followed, nor is it needed, or wanted.
Assembling a cabal of “elected officials” and “policy makers” to foist Objectivist political principles onto the public with the explanation “because I said so” is somehow less of a seperation of philosophical fundamentals from their resultant values than wrongly and desperately exclaiming that freedom of the press is a self-evident value that can “transcend religious and cultural differences”?
Not to imply that I have a decided opinion on such a tactic, but the ability of an ARCIR influenced policy maker to intimidate a politically-active Marxist through something like stepped-up police surveillance is not going to do anything to reshape and then integrate his ill-conceived reverence for reason into a consistent set of philosophical principles. It’s certainly not going to do it for those quasi-Marxist, quasi-religious every day altruists who read about it in the newspaper.
And don’t tell me the ARI is doing this because politicians have the spotlight and the mainstream’s attention. That they can influence the moral atmosphere of the culture. David Kelley, before he (I agree) went off the deep end, was open to talking to libertarians, paleo-conservatives, and anyone else of noteriety else for that very same reason.
Just as Diana Hsieh, in the first blog post of hers you cited, explained that a culture founded upon anything other than reason and individualism will not tend to, but will produce nothing but superstition, duty and sacrifice, stagnation, violence, and oppression - so will an organization founded upon anything other than a commitment to fight the philosophical (and only the philosophical) war produce nothing but more and more Kelleyites.
At least, that’s what the powers that be at ARI have been saying since 1989. Until recently, that is. When they created the ARCIR.