The Hive Today is the anniversary of Joe Sobran’s 75th birthday. He and journalist Tom Bethell developed the metaphor of “The Hive.” Joe explains the metaphor, below. Sobran’s: The Real News of the Month, June 1999 — Twenty years ago, I was struck by the way various sorts of political “progressives” — Communists, socialists, liberals, “civil libertarians,” “moderates,” “pragmatists” — all spontaneously cooperated with each other. It wasn’t a conspiracy; there was obviously no central direction. But the pattern was too clear to be denied. The word “Left” was a dead metaphor; it said nothing interesting about the people it referred to. So I used the metaphor of an insect hive, which captured the way such people moved in harmony and communicated with each other.