Sublime

I’ve met Ayn Rand fanatics all over—among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, at the office of the Tampa Bay Tea Party, even on a road paving crew. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (who read Atlas Shrugged in high school) brought her pitiless philosophy of egoism to policymaking on Capitol Hill. Libertarianism speaks to the American myth of the self-

America had once been an archipelago of small towns in which hierarchy commanded deference and local opinion bounded behavior. But the country’s extraordinary social and geographic mobility was creating a horizontal society. When every man or woman is free to constantly recreate himself or herself, one never knows who one should be or, just as frig

The crisis of self-governance

most plausible or defensible—

More ironic still is the populist Right’s appropriation of postmodernist arguments and its embrace of the philosophical repudiation of objectivity—schools of thought affiliated for decades with the Left

The rules didn’t mention individuality, self-motivated study, or other virtues that had been extolled by Hu Yanli, the John Dewey acolyte.

the nature

Wealthy eras usually repair to realism,