Not being a fan of Rand or the Randians (either ancient or modern), I’m not sure how much I can comment on the foolishness of the “Objectivists” in their demand for mass murder on behalf of the state in the “defence” of “individualism.” But it seems to be the kind of thing Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas addressed in his 1991 book After Christendon: How the Church is to Behave if Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation are Bad Ideas:

In effect liberals [in the classic philosophical sense] … no longer believe in the justification of liberal democracies based on the philosophical strategies of the Enlightenment, but they still want liberal results [of open-minded, reasonable societies]. Any other alternative would entail, they fear, a return to the kind of conflicts occasioned by the assumption that religious convictions should have public and even political expression. The whole point, after all, of the philosophical and political developments since the Enlightenment is to create people incapable of killing other people in the name of God.

Ironically, since the Enlightenment’s triumphs, people no longer kill one another in the name of God but in the names of nation-states. Indeed I think it can be suggested that the political achievement of the Enlightenment has been to create people who believe it necessary to kill others in the interest of something called “the nation,” which is allegedly protecting and ensuring their freedom as individuals.

…

Indeed one would like to know how liberals … understand the status of nations. For Anthony Giddens argues in The Nation-State and Violence, that nation-state as we know it is a remarkably different entity from the absolutist state that preceded it. Whereas the absolutist state was primarily concerned with maintaining control over a territory for purposes of taxation, that nation-state, which exists in a complex of other such nation-states, is “a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence.” [p. 33-34]

It clearly isn’t killing and war that bother the objectivists, but killing and war in the name of God. They’d rather justify death and suffering on something tangible and reasonable — the state, which they have turned into their god — than attribute it to something intangible and unreasonable.

The Best of Charles H. Featherstone