The Late, Great Joe Sobran’s Lesson for the Tea Party
I’ve only subscribed to two newsletters ever, one being former National Review editor Joseph Sobran’s “Real News of the Month.”
In the mid-1990s, I was in my early 20s, and the discovery of past conservative thinkers like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver encouraged me to seek out their contemporary intellectual descendants, of which Sobran was one of only a handful. Most right-wingers in the ’90s, including many pundits and intellectuals, were so obsessed with Bill Clinton that conservative principles took a backseat to partisanship and conspiracy theories. Neither interested me.
At the time, I realized that if being a conservative simply meant hating Democrats, then it meant nothing. But if being “conservative” was to think like Sobran, it had immeasurable meaning precisely because he constantly encouraged his audience to remember and re-examine what that term meant.
And now… the rest of the story. …..
Harold
