A Stitch in Haste

I was trying to find William F. Buckley, Jr.'s infantile, insulting and insolently inaccurate 1982 column on Ayn Rand's death, when I instead stumbled upon this:

There's nobody more interesting than Ayn Rand, the founder of the Objectivist Order. And she was pretty assertive in the late '50s. She figured that the conservatism that didn't embrace her point of view 100 percent was going to sort of die of malnutrition.

That was William F. Buckley, Jr., in 2003.

Isn't it interesting that "the conservatism that didn't embrace her point of view 100 percent" (i.e., the conservatism of George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, etc.) is indeed now dying, not of malnutrition but rather of gluttony — the gluttony of political megalomania, moral self-righteousness, irrational mysticism and primitive bigotry, all glued together with the stale kiddie paste of mob rule and adorned with the glitter-on-glue of petty hypocrisy?

Movements come and go. Philosophies endure. Buckley founded a movement. Rand founded a philosophy.

Now that both are dead, the real test of whose ideas will win out over whose can begin in earnest.

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Incidentally, the Buckley column I was looking for is — "Ayn Rand, R.I.P.," dated April 2, 1982 (PDF - 3 pages).