This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com. If you have any doubts that the phenomenon of Donald Trump was a long time a’coming, you have only to read a piece that Gore Vidal wrote for Esquire magazine in July 1961, when the conservative movement was just beginning and even Barry Goldwater was hardly a glint in Republicans’ eyes. Vidal’s target was Paul Ryan’s idol and the idol of so many modern conservatives: the trash novelist and crackpot philosopher Ayn Rand, whom Vidal quotes thusly: “It was the morality of altruism that undercut America and is now destroying her. “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society.