Something very weird and deeply unsettling was going on in 1920’s America. During this decade Eugenics, the idea that the human race can be improved by proper breeding and – more significantly – by preventing “undesirables” from reproducing, really came into its own in American society. At the same time the celebration of an amoral Superman, an idea derived from a flawed understanding of Nietzche’s Ubermensch concept, led to at least one horrible crime and – for one person – seems to have provided the basis for a horrible “philosophy.”
The problem is that the “one person” was Ayn Rand, and through her writings both of these rotten ideas continue to exert influence over many of the people who help shape our national conversation today. Listen carefully to the leaders of the Conservative Movement and the rhetoric designed to further the Conservative Cause, and you can hear these terrible ideas, filtered through Ayn Rand’s awful rhetoric, thrust themselves into our current discourse.
