The late Joe Sobran along with Tom Bethell jointly came up with a diagnosis of the leftist hive mind, observing that the left behave like bees or ants in a colony, knowing instantly what position to take on any issue without any meetings, deliberation, or directive from a central committee.

It turns out James Burnham was on to this in has classic 1962 book Suicide of the West. There he described the same phenomena as follows:

A friend of mine, who is the lone non-liberal in a large department of the humanities division of a large university, told me wonderingly: “My colleagues have read hardly anything of history, political theory or political philosophy. They no nothing of economics, geography or strategy. They are acquainted with only the thinnest surface of current events, gleaned by skimming through the daily paper and perhaps Time or Newsweek. Yet, when any important public event happens anywhere in the world, every one of them reacts with the speed and automatic certainty of a fully programmed computer to give the orthodox liberal evaluation which will be confirmed by the recognized spokesmen within a day or two.