For nearly a decade Democrats have sought a religious wedge issue that could separate big chunks of white evangelical voters from their Republican home. Now they've found it, and are thrusting at the Social Darwinist/Ayn Rand underbelly of American conservatism.
First, a bit of recent history: Democrats have not gained much white evangelical support on healthcare and environmentalism. In 2008 they successfully used guilt over segregation to elect the first African-American president, but that may not work again as concern over Obamanomics trumps the ghosts of generations past.
Second, some late 19th-century history: Following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, conservatives who became known as Social Darwinists began equating the economic struggle among humans with the struggle for survival among animals. They typically argued that "society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members to leave room for the deserving. A maudlin impulse to prolong the lives of the unfit stands in the way of this beneficent purging of the social organism."
(Yale professor William Graham Sumner said that "Nature" has placed the downtrodden into a "process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness." Johns Hopkins professor Simon Newcomb argued that human evolution required the death of today's "worthless" humans. One problem: People created in God's image are not "things" and are never "worthless.")
Third, the history of George W. Bush's 1999-2000 "compassionate conservative" campaign: Dan Quayle, Lamar Alexander, and others complained that the double-C term was redundant, because conservatism by definition is compassionate. But that isn't true historically and it's not true at the present, because one departed thinker who still wields great influence on the right is Ayn Rand—and religious liberals are now rightly chastising conservatives who idolize her.
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a pro-free-enterprise but anti-Christian popular philosopher and novelist. Millions of Americans have read her most popular work, Atlas Shrugged (1957), even though it clocks in at 1,000-plus pages. Others have seen the movie, belatedly made from the first part of that novel, which hit the theaters this April. Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan is one of her devotees. Rush Limbaugh is among the many who call her "brilliant."