Jennifer Burns on Rand in the culture wars

Jennifer Burns says that Ayn Rand played a key role in making American libertarianism a predominantly pro-market movement, and thus compatible with the greater right culture in the U.S., despite differences about some lifestyle issues:



I'd still like to know more about the role Rand has played in the growth of irreligion in the U.S. To the humanists' apparent chagrin, she has had some enduring success in spreading a form of critical thinking and nonbelief through the market process, while the humanists' literature generally doesn't make money, apart from the recent bestselling books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. And those books probably wouldn't have generated as much interest if radical Muslims hadn't attacked the U.S. back in 2001 and drew our attention to the more dysfunctional aspects of religious belief.