The rough beast of Atlas Shrugged slouches through the right wing

William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming,” written a hundred years ago, sounds today like prophecy:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Or, what is worse, it sounds trite, the sort of political drivel language that becomes the norm when honesty is treated as fake news and honest people are declared the enemies of the nation. But as progressives in the Democratic Party are called communists, as centrists struggled with the vote to convict a criminal president, as that president permits industrial waste to be dumped into our waters while making a wasteland of our legal system, and as his militia of trolls tear down the institutions that have protected what greatness we had, I am again impressed with the precision of poetry in describing the world.

I write this as I am going through my third try, this time successful, at reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. C.S. Lewis spoke for me when he said there is not a book long enough (or a cup of tea…