The American Spectator has posted up a tribute to the late Tom Bethell, one of the great conservative journalists in Washington in the 1970s and 1980s, and in this excerpt recalls how Bethell popularized Joe Sobran’s analysis of the left’s hive mentality—more useful than ever today:
Left-wing individuals and organizations have disguised their agenda by adopting a new system of communication, one in which the crude old formulas such as “state ownership of the means of production” never appear. Joe Sobran, the National Review editor and columnist, has likened the contemporary system of socialist communication to a beehive. Bees in a hive don’t “talk” to one another, but they do have an effective system of communication, and they all work toward a common goal, different bees performing different functions. “There is no need to posit an overarching conspiracy,” Sobran wrote recently. “The world collectivist movement goes forward. None of its constituent parts — Communist, socialist, liberal — runs the whole thing; they don’t even consciously cooperate, for the most part.” But they manage never to sting one another.
