We live in an unusually anomalous culture whose politics and economics are now dominated by Nietzscheans of both the Right and the Left, united particularly in their contempt for long-standing, traditional ideas of reason and ethics, which they believe they have “seen through” and exploded. With the plausibility implosion and waning of Marxism, their ascendancy has increased.
The Nietzscheans of the Right — in-your-face social-Darwinist capitalists, or their servitors, whose Trumpery is now the national brand — are the most obvious. The late Ayn Rand is one of their exemplars and heroines, and if they are literate enough to know her history among conservatives they bitterly resent the expulsion of her from their traditionalist ranks by William F. Buckley Jr. and his friend Whittaker Chambers, who denounced her in a notable essay in National Review in 1957.
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