Aristotle famously said: "I love Plato, but I love truth even more." Can defenders of Joseph Sobran say the same?
While I don't wish to make a blanket condemnation of paleocons, I am disappointed how many of them are wedded to an "old boys' club" mentality. One sees this in the emotive rebuttal by Scott P. Richert (published on Taki Theodoracopulos' blog) to James Hitchock's criticism of Sobran and other paleocons in Human Life Review. Richert waxes nostalgic over Sobran's essays for past issues of Human Life Review. But this is a case of resting on past laurels. Sobran may have done some good in the past but, if like Ezra Pound, a brilliant mind suddenly takes up with bizarre attitudes, this does not mean we should do the same.
What also bothers me is Richert's mudslinging. He treats Hitchcock like a sophomoric upstart. Never mind that Hitchcock is a veteran conservative commentator and university professor (with a 1965 doctorate from Princeton), who has been in print at least as long as Sobran (who got started with National Review in 1972). To put Richert's argument as simplistically as it deserves: "Hitchcock is just another neo-con hack. Neo-cons are stupid. Therefore, Hitchcock's criticism is invalid." This is the sort of ideological denunciation and deflection that one expects from Marxists.
Here are Hitchcock's accusations (all documented in the article):
Does Richert address these? Not that I can tell.During the 2006 election campaign... Joseph Sobran, a Catholic who considers himself one of the few remaining spokesmen for authentic conservatism... characterized James Webb, the Democratic candidate for senator from Virginia,... as someone “who commanded my immediate trust and respect”....
Despite [Howard] Phillips’ obvious lack of interest in the abortion issue, Sobran has often endorsed the Constitution Party, which he says is the only reliably prolife party in America, and after the election (November 16 [2006]) he found it impossible to distinguish between two “factions” pretending to be two different political parties, but he expressed great satisfaction that Webb’s opponent, the “arrogant” Senator George Allen (who happened to be anti-abortion), had been defeated; then he declared (December 21) that Bush was a worse president than William J. Clinton (who happened to be by far the most zealously pro-abortion president ever to occupy the White House).
[Sobran] praised the pro-abortion Democratic Senator Joseph Biden as “someone who takes his faith very seriously”....
Sobran questions the justice and wisdom of American involvement in World War II.
After the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, Sobran wrote a series of articles questioning (and sometimes ridiculing) the fear that al-Qaeda constitutes a threat to American security, and five years later... he reported that for him the real experience of terror was having to undergo a security check at Dulles Airport.
I had my own dispute with a Sobran supporter recently. I was told that the controversial columnist was witty and incisive (it is his selling point against humdrum mainstream conservatives). But when I pointed out his collaboration with holocaust revisionists, this was chalked up to sheer guilelessness. So which is it? Either Sobran is a genius, in which case he must be right to get cozy with far-right racialists and anti-war leftists, or he's a political naïf whose contributions to the conservative cause are extremely limited.... in fact, non-existent at this point.
Previous post: "Sobran's Intellectual Decline and Fall"
