ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, April 21 2011

Battle for the Republican soul
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

In the battle for the future of the GOP that has raged since the twilight of the Bush years, the coming Republican primary season may prove decisive. In one corner are advocates of Ronald Reagan's big-tent philosophy who hope to unite social and fiscal conservatives to defeat an incumbent who has antagonized both groups with his profligate spending and socially liberal agenda.

In the other are libertarians who believe that the popularity of their anti-big government economic message can compensate for their rejection of other conservative concerns. And then there are the eccentric outliers, including a certain aging billionaire with bad hair and big dreams of trading his reality TV bully persona for the biggest bully pulpit on earth.

The candidacy of Donald Trump is a joke — or, at least, it should be. But it's no coincidence that this bombastic, thrice-married magnate has been gaining traction in Republican primary polls the same month that Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged — Part 1" hit theaters.

Trump resembles the hard-charging, unapologetic egoists celebrated by Rand. And, according to some libertarians and Tea Party activists, Rand's objectivist philosophy as outlined in novels like "Atlas Shrugged" is just what the GOP needs in 2012.

The Russian-born novelist's belief system is not the stuff of gauzy campaign ads. Rand celebrated selfishness, mocked religion and reviled altruism. She lived in her personal life the same "me-first" philosophy she peddled in her novels, unabashedly pursuing an adulterous relationship with an acolyte decades her junior and blithely dismissing the notion that human beings should live for anything other than themselves and their own happiness. Her work was rebuked by such leading conservative lights of her day as William F. Buckley, who blasted her philosophy's "incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral."

The Rand revival taking place in some corners of the GOP focuses more on her critiques of big government than of traditional morality. Rand's early experiences under the Bolsheviks made her an ardent advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and a fierce critic of anything that smacked of collectivism.

Her suspicion of big government comes through in "Atlas Shrugged," a sermon disguised as a story that depicts America as a socialist state run amok. Viewing the film as a harbinger of things to come if Obama wins another term, FreedomWorks, a Washington-based Tea Party organization, screened its trailer at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February and has been marketing the movie aggressively to its rank-and-file ever since.

Rand's resurgent popularity and the rising influence of radical libertarianism in the GOP do not bode well for a Republican party hoping to revive Reagan's big tent. Nor is respect for "the virtue of selfishness," as Rand called it, an adequate principle by which to govern a nation.

Tea Party activists who embrace Rand as the second coming of America's founding fathers forget that as realistic as our founders were about the dangers of intrusive government and the self-interest that motivates citizens, they also were convinced that a free society requires a vibrant moral and religious culture to sustain it.

George Washington said that "religion and morality are indispensable supports" to political prosperity. John Adams warned that our Constitution was designed "only for a religious and moral people" and is "wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Libertarians scoff at such assertions, but many Americans still recognize them as manifestly true.

Some Tea Party activists are among that latter group. Despite the fiscal focus that characterizes Tea Party gatherings, the movement includes many social conservatives who oppose abortion, embryonic research, euthanasia and the redefinition of marriage as a unisex institution. They resonate with resistance to big government because they know that a domineering federal government threatens their most cherished freedoms: the freedom to worship as they wish, to speak publicly of their moral and religious convictions on controversial issues and to educate their children in the faith and values that they hold dear.

Their belief in original sin makes them suspicious of the idea that our human condition can be perfected through the right government program or political ideology. And though studies have shown that religiously affiliated Americans are the most generous in donating their time and treasure, religious conservatives look first to the private sector, faith communities and charities for solutions to social problems rather than to the state.

It's a sign of our narcissistic times that conservatives who see freedom and goodness as inextricably linked often are treated like skunks at the Grand Old Party, and in American public life in general. And it's all the more reason that Republicans eyeing the White House should spurn Rand's shrill exaltation of selfishness and turn to conservatism's deeper, more life-affirming roots to make their case for change.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.