Michael Gerson is basically right about Ayn Rand:
If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship. Usually one grows out of it, eventually discovering that the quality of our lives is tied to the benefit of others. Rand's achievement was to turn a phase into a philosophy, as attractive as an outbreak of acne.
And also painfully wrong about libertarianism:
Many libertarians trace their inspiration to Rand's novels, while sometimes distancing themselves from Objectivism. But both libertarians and Objectivists are moved by the mania of a single idea — a freedom indistinguishable from selfishness. This unbalanced emphasis on one element of political theory — at the expense of other public goals such as justice and equal opportunity — is the evidence of a rigid ideology. Socialists take a similar path, embracing equality as an absolute value. Both ideologies have led good people into supporting policies with serious human costs.
I could get my Jesse Walker on here and point out that in America, socialism and libertarianism haven't had access to the kind of power that would allow them to provoke the kind of suffering caused by those dwelling in the polite, agreeable center of American politics. But I'd rather just point out that the idea that libertarianism is motivated by a "freedom indistinguishable from selfishness" is laughably wrong -- if conservatives were as "selfish" about freedom as libertarians, the U.S. wouldn't have 1 percent of its population in prison.
Certainly there are glibertarians to whom Gerson's description applies, but I frequently find myself far more frustrated by conservatives, who tend to employ libertarian rhetoric when opposing an individual mandate for health-care insurance but are perfectly comfortable defending laws passed for the general welfare when it might involve stripping gay people of their marriage rights. That kind of anti-Madisonian conservatism, with its tribal motivations and disdain for minority rights, isn't "freedom indistinguishable from selfishness"; it literally is just selfishness. Fact is I'd rather argue with someone who genuinely wants to drown government in a bathtub than someone who wants to use it to criminalize people's right to be Muslims.
