“A nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow-citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nations’ way of life. Since a culture is a complex battleground of different ideas and influences, to speak of a ‘culture’ is to speak only of the *dominant* ideas, always allowing for the existence of dissenters and exceptions.” -”Don’t Let It Go” in Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand
The dominant ideas of the Enlightenment and the Founders were reason and individual rights – not faith and statism.
Conservatism has never been an influence in the culture because it has never had any new ideas to offer. Today, more conservatives are rejecting reason in favor of its centuries-old barbaric antipode – faith. The left abdicated reason decades ago in favor of collectivist whims and force.
It’s time for new leadership of the Republican Party which is able to do something never done before: advocate a moral defense of individual rights and the profit motive. Ayn Rand’s revolutionary philosophic system provides the full and consistent basis of such a defense, and nothing less will ever reverse the course of our culture’s statism and depravity – as decades of conservative impotence proves.
In the meantime, as Rand noted, “those who fight for the future live in it today.”
