interesting, thanks.
i began my journey from the democrat party when a doctoral candidate in our philosophy program said that i should not be seen with a book that i'd just purchased at the campus bookstore:
the new left: the anti-industrial revolution, by ayn rand.
since his father was a big shot in philosophy across the united states, i couldn't wait to get home and read the book banned on a state university campus by an "intellectual".
the new left's a collection of her essays of the 60's, and boy, did rand have today's left pegged.
Her novels amused me when I was a teenager (I stayed up all night reading "Atlas Shrugged" - well, there are worse things I could have been doing I suppose), but it was her essays that made her case. These are still respectable, particularly one from the 1960's where she predicted that the left, realizing that their programs could no longer be justified by referring to economic science, would move to environmentalism as a bulletproof excuse for power.