Joe Sobran was one of my greatest friends, and I often thought about him over this past week, because February 23 was the anniversary of his death. He was a man of courage and of the utmost integrity. He began writing about politics for National Review, but he broke with the editor, CIA agent William F. Buckley, Jr., over his refusal to support Israel. Additionally, his own penetrating intellect had led him to find attractive the thought of Murray Rothbard, and this too Buckley could not abide, as he hated Rothbard, a hatred that even Rothbard’s death did not end.
Because Buckley could not stomach Sobran’s dissent, he launched a smear campaign against him. He called Joe an “anti-Semite” because of his anti-Zionist views. Of course that is ridiculous. Anyone who knew Joe would realize that he was a kind person, with good will for all people, regardless of their ethnic background. As I mentioned, he admired Rothbard, and after his break with Buckley, he and Murray became fast friends. Among his other Jewish friends were Dr. Israel Shahak and the great opponent of Zionism Alfred Lilienthal, Jr. The obvious fatuity of the smear, unfortunately, did not lessen its effectiveness.
Joe was one of the finest prose stylists of his generation, and you can see this in his brilliant evisceration of Buckley: “In my 21 years at National Review, I had a front-row seat. I watched closely as Bill Buckley changed from a jaunty critic of Israel to what I can only call a servile appeaser. In its early days, the magazine published robust editorials blasting politicians who sacrificed American to Israeli interests in order to pander to the Jewish vote; in those days it was considered risqué to suggest that there was a ‘Jewish vote.’ Today Bill’s magazine supports Israel with embarrassing sycophancy, never daring to intimate that Israeli and American interests may occasionally diverge. It has forgotten its own principles; today it would never dare to publish the editorials written by its great geopolitical thinker of those early days, James Burnham.”
After he became a Rothbardian, he expounded Rothbard’s thought and the thought of his great follower Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in a way that has much to teach us. As he wrote: “In the late 1980s I began mixing with Rothbardian libertarians — they called themselves by the unprepossessing label ‘anarcho-capitalists’ — and even met Rothbard himself. They were a brilliant, combative lot, full of challenging ideas and surprising arguments. Rothbard himself combined a profound theoretical intelligence with a deep knowledge of history. His magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State, had received the most unqualified praise of the usually reserved Henry Hazlitt — in National Review! I can only say of Murray what so many others have said: never in my life have I encountered such an original and vigorous mind. A short, stocky New York Jew with an explosive cackling laugh, he was always exciting and cheerful company. Pouring out dozens of big books and hundreds of articles, he also found time, heaven knows how, to write (on the old electric typewriter he used to the end) countless long, single-spaced, closely reasoned letters to all sorts of people. Murray’s view of politics was shockingly blunt: the state was nothing but a criminal gang writ large. Much as I agreed with him in general, and fascinating though I found his arguments, I resisted this conclusion. I still wanted to believe in constitutional government. Murray would have none of this. He insisted that the Philadelphia convention at which the Constitution had been drafted was nothing but a ‘coup d’etat,’ centralizing power and destroying the far more tolerable arrangements of the Articles of Confederation. This was a direct denial of everything I’d been taught. I’d never heard anyone suggest that the Articles had been preferable to the Constitution! But Murray didn’t care what anyone thought — or what everyone thought. (He’d been too radical for Ayn Rand.) Murray died a few years ago without quite having made an anarchist of me. It was left to his brilliant disciple, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, to finish my conversion. Hans argued that no constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard; nobody could have the legal standing to enforce those limits. The state itself would decide, by force, what the constitution ‘meant,’ steadily ruling in its own favor and increasing its own power. This was true a priori, and American history bore it out. What if the Federal Government grossly violated the Constitution? Could states withdraw from the Union? Lincoln said no. The Union was ‘indissoluble’ unless all the states agreed to dissolve it. As a practical matter, the Civil War settled that. The United States, plural, were really a single enormous state, as witness the new habit of speaking of ‘it’ rather than ‘them.’ So the people are bound to obey the government even when the rulers betray their oath to uphold the Constitution. The door to escape is barred. Lincoln in effect claimed that it is not our rights but the state that is ‘unalienable.’ And he made it stick by force of arms. No transgression of the Constitution can impair the Union’s inherited legitimacy. Once established on specific and limited terms, the U.S. Government is forever, even if it refuses to abide by those terms. As Hoppe argues, this is the flaw in thinking the state can be controlled by a constitution. Once granted, state power naturally becomes absolute. Obedience is a one-way street. Notionally, ‘We the People’ create a government and specify the powers it is allowed to exercise over us; our rulers swear before God that they will respect the limits we impose on them; but when they trample down those limits, our duty to obey them remains. Yet even after the Civil War, certain scruples survived for a while. Americans still agreed in principle that the Federal Government could acquire new powers only by constitutional amendment. Hence the postwar amendments included the words ‘Congress shall have power to’ enact such and such legislation. But by the time of the New Deal, such scruples were all but defunct. Franklin Roosevelt and his Supreme Court interpreted the Commerce Clause so broadly as to authorize virtually any Federal claim, and the Tenth Amendment so narrowly as to deprive it of any inhibiting force. Today these heresies are so firmly entrenched that Congress rarely even asks itself whether a proposed law is authorized or forbidden by the Constitution. In short, the U.S. Constitution is a dead letter. It was mortally wounded in 1865. The corpse can’t be revived. This remained hard for me to admit, and even now it pains me to say it. The essence of the state is its legal monopoly of force. But force is subhuman; in words I quote incessantly, Simone Weil defined it as ‘that which turns a person into a thing — either corpse or slave.’ For most people, anarchy is a disturbing word, suggesting chaos, violence, antinomianism — things they hope the state can control or prevent. The term state, despite its bloody history, doesn’t disturb them. Yet it’s the state that is truly chaotic, because it means the rule of the strong and cunning. They imagine that anarchy would naturally terminate in the rule of thugs. But mere thugs can’t assert a plausible right to rule. Only the state, with its propaganda apparatus, can do that. This is what legitimacy means. Anarchists obviously need a more seductive label. ‘But what would you replace the state with?’ The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be ‘replaced.’”
Joe was a devout Catholic and his defense of his faith rivals that of G.K. Chesterton. He wrote brilliantly in defense of life and in opposition to abortion. He was also a great literary critic, specializing in Shakespeare, and he wrote a provocative book, Alias Shakespeare that argued that the real author of the poems and most of the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.
Let’s do everything we can to keep the memory of the great Joe Sobran alive!
