I don't think we've ever disagreed on anything here on Free Republic. This might be the first time but I do so respectfully since I so value your contributions -- always factual and accompanied with citations.
In my opinion, atheist Ayn Rand can be dismissed as a Conservative and thus on the right. She was wrong with her advocacy of slaughtering innocent children. And that's the most precious right of them all -- life. Without that, nothing. Yes, she spun a few good yarns but her seething contempt for President Reagan along with her pro-abortion stance makes her wrong. I realize that plenty of FReepers (not necessarily you) have a high opinion of this woman. To me, she's first and foremost an abortionist and that cancels out everything else. Again, my opinion only.
She hated Reagan and opposed him, she really hated his pro-life views, she was truly anti-conservative but she did support some republicans like Nixon and Ford and Goldwater, so I just meant she was part lefty and part republican, like the libertarians we see here at FR, all over the place, but among those places are elements of the left and elements of the right.
I wasn’t trying to get into rigid or perfect definitions of left and right, I was just casually using democrat and republican.
Ummmm, clarification .... do you mean that you dismiss the idea that she was a conservative and a Rightist?
She was a big libertarian (hence her anticlericalism and pro-abortion views, I suppose); but her main identity has been as a radical capitalist and a powerful anticommunist, based on her direct experience of Communist horrors in her native Russia.
She will have been brought up Orthodox (I'm guessing here) which, if Orthodox Christianity, or Christianity in general, failed to sustain the people against the Communists, then she could have become embittered against both prelacy (the performance of the hierarchy) and faith itself.
So do you call her a non-Conservative anticommunist and libertarian and marketarian capitalist, or what?
I read Atlas Shrugged (my point of reference) and started Anthem but never finished it due to the press of other matters. Like, the Draft.