Emotions as a cause, Ayn Rand on the popular right

A thread at Ed Cone's turned to a discussion of epistemology, ie. how do we know what we think we know? I am reading "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand and Rand has a lot to say about epistemology and politics and how one influences the other. Rand asserts that there is such a thing as objective reality, that the success or failure of a populace in assessing objective reality has social/political consequences.

I find it ironic that Rand, a philosophical wellspring of modern conservatism, admonishes the socialists/communists villains of "Atlas Shrugged" for failings of reason in a way that can be properly directed at the modern popular right.* I've observed it as people trying to assert a point of view by untethering themselves from reality, Rand describes it thus:

"[They] have reversed causality in their consciousness, then strive to reverse it in existence. They take their emotions as a cause, and their mind as a passive effect. They make their emotions their tool for perceiving reality. They hold their desires as an irreducible primary, as a fact superseding all facts."

"They want to cheat the axiom of existence and consciousness, they want their consciousness to be an instrument not of perceiving but of creating existence, and existence to be not the object but the subject of their consciousness..."

And, elesewhere, this:

A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest--but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion that the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

* I recognize that I am making a generalization, one that I think is credible but, as a generalization, implicitly acknowledges that there are individual exceptions.