I became a conservative because of three influences.
My parents were both democRATS back in the day when that meant conservative, not communist.
I received a commission as an officer in the Air Force.
And because I read Atlas Shrugged.
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Excellent commentary, HotHunt. A year back I ran across Ayn Rand's Introduction to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition to the Fountainhead, and here's an excerpt:
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The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature and struggle never to let him discover otherwise. . . Perhaps the best way to communicate The Fountainhead's sense of life is by means of the quotation which had stood at the head of my manuscript, but which I removed from the final, published book.
The noble soul has reverence for itself."
Beyond Good and Evil It is a sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one's life is important, that great achievements are within one's capacity, and that great things lie ahead. It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature and that the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning.
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LOL
Atlas Shrugged also sealed the deal for me. Many decades ago.