What better example of conservatives’ stubborn unwillingness even to consider thinking in principles–and the disastrous results in practice:
Is it realistic for any political leader to make policy today based on assumptions about what the world will look like nearly six decades hence?
As it happens, 58 years ago it was 1945, the year of the United Nations’ founding. Whatever one might think of the U.N., one certainly cannot fault the men who started it for having failed to foresee how it would become a threat to world peace and an obstacle to American action today. [James Taranto, “Best of the Web Today,” 5/1/03]
Yes one can fault them, James–that’s what principles are for; anyone who had grasped the proper principles would have foreseen it, and Ayn Rand did foresee it.