to widespread feelings of socioeconomic insecurity, as well as to an unpredicted instability within conservative politics themselves, which recent populist conservative electoral insurgencies have highlighted. Much of Rand's posthumous success results from her re-conceptualization of the terms of the political discourse. This re-conceptualization poses a more problematic challenge to public policy. It grew out of the isolation in which Rand found herself as her writing career developed. The outrage that followed her radical re-imagining of the ethical and political world in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged only served to harden her views in her later essays. The basis of her growing dogmatism was her belief that the progressive New Deal political discourse articulated by the New Dealers in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s was merely the thin edge of the totalitarian wedge. Her long struggle against this discourse convinced her that its terms needed to be radically changed. Therefore, notions of selfishness, selflessness, and altruism were given meanings in her writings that are counter-intuitive, indeed perverse, in comparison to those of ordinary usage or the usage of ethicists. Unsurprisingly, these redefinitions specifically reinforce her transactional conception of the individual. 94 Gary Weiss notes that Rand's citations in The Virtue of Selfishness of the Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of "selfishness" were quite selective. He notes, moreover, that "Rand made up her own definitions of selflessness and altruism."95 Rand's altruism came to mean "that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification for his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue, and value."96 It follows that altruism is antithetical to reason and freedom and is the ultimate source 119D. N. Byrne of all despotism. Rand also viewed altruism as inherently incompatible with capitalism, "Capitalism and altruism a