The self-taught intellectual used to be an American type

National Review, June 22, 2009

The self-taught intellectual used to be an American type. Now the country has one fewer. Richard Nadler, 60, was a high-school dropout and musician. In the 1980s he became a conservative activist, working to promote school choice, phonics, and low taxes. He wrote books on Phil Gramm, Pat Buchanan, and feticide in Jewish law.

(He had turned Orthodox.) In his last years he developed theories about how the conservative movement could find new recruits among blacks, Hispanics, and small investors, and worked to put those theories into practice. He also occasionally contributed to NR. His wife, Barbara, indulged him in all of these "unremunerative hobbies," as he once called them. He died suddenly, working at his computer. R.I.P .