The battle between the libertarian and traditionalist wing sparked by Whittaker Chambers' unfavorable review of Atlas Shrugged and Buckley's later endorsement of it is still echoing today, and the reverberational effects of that novel shows what part of America Rand's work shook.

To put it bluntly, the conservative movement is not dissimilar to a marriage between an Irish Catholic and a U.K. Anglican. My mother's parents had such a marriage, and it was marked by family reunions that were chilly and formal, when words were spoken at all.

Such marriages tend to be like that unless a common interest is shared which can distract both groups from their habitual suspicion of each other. This gives an opening to a peacemaker whose goal is to keep the in-laws from either fighting or freezing each other out.

In the case of the" marriage" between libertarianism and traditionalism, the peacemaker is the fusionist. They try to keep both sides of the new family from squabbling through keeping attention focused upon these commonalities: sound economics; recoil against educational decadence; a love of liberty; and admiration for economic success. The first fusionist was National Review's Frank Meyer, and its political expression was Goldwaterism.

You might be interested to know that Rand herself got shown the door by Goldwater back in 1964. A letter she sent urging him to drop the primacy of faith from his movement got a response from him thanking her but rejecting her suggestion. (It's reproduced in The Letters of Ayn Rand.) This precedent has continued: as far as the issue of faith vs. reason is concerned, conservatism stood and still stands by faith. This has kept the libertarians "below the salt" in the right wing world.

So a lot of the Randians, out of pride, renounced politics completely. Taking from the book the message that becoming entangled in the business world in a mixed economy leads to your soul being drained in one form or another, and then adding politics to this no-go zone, they turned away from career success in emulation of Rand's heroes' "strike." Jerome Tuccille was bang- on when he said that the New Left was deeply influenced by both Goldwater and (primarily) Rand; the antipolitical element in it gave both wellsprings away. (It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand.)

This got the Randians written off as "drop- outs." Which led to something.

Yes, that hidden dark reader, hinted at by Chambers, tended to drift to the computer industry, and found salvation in a new field that combined intellectual effort with a quest for profit through producing new products. The virtual banishment of the full Randian from politics got them focused upon productive achievement instead, while being left alone besides. Since the mainstream tends to view Randians as cranks, they were dismissed as a force not worth reckoning with back in the 1970s. This gave the Objectivist info-preneur his cleared road.

That's why the influence of Rand is all over the Internet, despite her lack of influence in the academy and in the old middlebrow markets. From the standpoint of economic growth, the strike actually worked by freeing the most productive from a game of office politics which always seems to make the high achiever the "gull." It's as if Gulliver had been rescued by a friendly stranger with scissors.

Those Randians that chose politics or activism as a way to show their stuff had a much harder time of it, of course. In the real world, this type - the politically skilled - was the group to suffer the "path of Rearden" most closely.

So, in this sense, the libertarians being placed in servant's quarters in the Right has been good "for America" because the ones too proud to serve in that role had to buckle down in fields that tend to combine intellectual achievement with entrepreneurship. The cost of this came in conservatism's loss of what could have been the best pro-liberty thinkers available.

This could be considered a happy ending. The traditionalists indeed have kept conservative Republicanism traditional.