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-

Certainly having the correct views, as progressives do, does not preclude them from being dicks, to put it bluntly.

When faced with a tension between competing values, they do what any smart privileged person bursting with cultural capital would do. They find a way to have both. They reconcile opposites.

Modern liberalism has adopted the Jacobin spirit. Having dispensed with traditional moral norms, liberals have transformed the severe quality of conscience into a playpen of desire. Hav­ing denied a religious foundation for human rights, they have left individuals vulnerable to the despotic whims of the secular state. This outcome was predicted by

Taylor argues: “Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before.”

Then by dismissing views as “outdated” and “pseudoscientific,” the left hopes to give the impression that there is nothing more to say, that these views are absurd and downright evil—and that this is something “everyone” agrees on.

What, then, are they conserving, other than the progressive accomplishments of the prior generation?

Second, there is plenty of room for our morality, including our political morality, to be strict and based in the notion of rules and rights. We should subject ourselves to the constraint of respecting human rights, noting that only semi-absolute human rights will be strong enough to place any constraint on pursuing the benefits of a higher rate of