Pat Buchanan, regarded by many as a "right-wing extremist," has recently joined forces with Lenora Fulani, an avowed Marxist. This has led to many comments about "strange bedfellows"--but the combination is not really so strange. In fact, it is entirely in keeping with the distorted meaning now attached to the "right"--a meaning that has turned the "right" into merely a variant of the left.

Everyone knows what the left stands for: increased government intervention, from socialized medicine to public housing to environmental regulation. So it is logical that the "right" should stand for opposition to government controls and for the defense of individual freedom. But that is no longer what the term "right" denotes. Buchanan embraces, not the free market, but its antithesis: economic protectionism, anti-immigration, populist hostility to big business, religion-inspired regulation.

And what about his critics on the "right"? The Republicans--the supposed party of the right--have as their presidential front-runner George W. Bush, who presents no major challenge to the welfare state, demanding only that public funding be expanded for "faith-based" welfare programs. His chief opponent on the "far right," Gary Bauer, is less interested in economic freedom than in widening government power by bringing prayer into the schools, outlawing abortion and banning sexually explicit material.

Today, the concept of the "right" has been transformed into a destructive package deal containing two irreconcilable elements: some degree of economic freedom, and sweeping government controls over our personal lives. The best symbol of this package deal is Steve Forbes, who, with his stances in favor of a flat tax, the gold standard and privatizing Social Security, is the most ardent free-marketer of the Republican contenders--but who is also one of the most assiduous courtiers of the religious "right."

This package deal is an unstable and logically untenable mix. It is a glaring contradiction to say that individuals are free to pursue their own goals when they produce and sell goods--but have no right to decide what art to view, how to raise their children or what to do with their own bodies.

This package deal undermines American political discourse by destroying the meaning of our most basic political distinctions. The opposition between "right" and "left" ought to differentiate the two extremes of the political spectrum. But what options does the current left-right spectrum offer us?

The farthest extreme on the left is communism, which stands for total government control of the economy; the farthest extreme on the right, allegedly, is fascism--which also stands for total government control. We are thus offered two virtually indistinguishable forms of totalitarianism. The only political choice we are given, therefore, is between different forms of enslavement.

The "moderates," too, offer us only choices of moderate doses of statism. On the one hand, today's liberals defend "civil liberties" such as freedom of speech and separation of church and state--while arguing for comprehensive regulation of the economy. Today's conservatives, on the other hand, nominally defend a free economy--while calling for regulation of TV programs, control over our sex lives, and so on.

The essential alternative we are offered is: either being controlled in our personal lives, or being controlled in our economic lives. But both sides share the same basic premise: that the individual must be controlled. Both view the needs of collective "society" as overriding the rights of the individual. They merely disagree on whether "the public interest" is served by sacrificing the individual's material values, or by sacrificing the individual's intellectual and moral values.

But what about the view that the rights of the individual must never be sacrificed? That is precisely the position omitted from this distorted "spectrum." The purpose of offering a choice only between communism and fascism, or only between liberalism and conservatism, is to obliterate discussion of the actual alternative to statism: capitalism--genuine, laissez-faire capitalism. Our political debate ought to center on one question: Does the individual have an inalienable right to control his own life, both economically and intellectually? The opposing answers to this question constitute the only fundamental political alternatives, and define the only meaningful spectrum on which to evaluate political positions.

But to frame the debate in these terms, it is necessary for new types of candidates to emerge--candidates who are uncompromising advocates of capitalism and individual rights, and who are prepared to reclaim the title of the "right."

Robert W. Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute between 1997 and 2004. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.