Alasdair MacIntyre had detected in an earlier strain of ex-Communist.6 Such defectors, often reacting to the austere controlling regimes within the official Communist parties that they had left, sometimes resorted to a moral individualism in which their critique of Stalinism was reduced to a statement of conscience: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’ Rejecting the orthodoxy of high Stalinism, in which morality was deliquesced into iron historical law, the defectors affirmed that the individual was the sole source of virtue. But the illusion of moral independence came at the high cost of reducing their critique to arbitrariness. This made them ‘the moral Quixotes of the age’.7
Of course, Hitchens had never been a member of a Communist Party, far less the victim of a Stalinist regime. He was, first of all, a left-wing member of the Labour Party until he was expelled because of his activism against the Vietnam War (1965–67). Then for about seven years he was an International Socialist (1967–74), then a member of the Labour Party most likely until his move to the United States (1975–81), and for the majority of his remaining time on the left he was a member of no party or tendency. The sociological basis, as it were, for his leftism was the radical intelligentsia. His main point of contact with these informal circuits in the United States had been Alexander Cockburn, the son of Claud Cockburn, the radical British journalist; as a radical émigré writer in the United States, the younger Cockburn was something of a paragon for the young Hitchens.8 But once Hitchens was established, he could be said to have had no particular dependency on anyone of the left, and only his employers – the Nation, London Review of Books, Verso Books, Vanity Fair from the early 1990s, and other occasional patrons in the newspaper and television circuit – had any possible hold over him. So when Hitchens spoke of casting aside his chains of political and ideological fealty, these were the chains of leftist conscience rather than organisational or institutional binds.
Nonetheless, it was very important for him to represent his stance as precisely an affirmation of that conscience. And since Hitchens was not joined in his defection by any major faction of the left, either in the United States or elsewhere, this necessarily entailed the suggestion that power had corrupted almost the entirety of the left, which had purchased its plot in the status quo and was anxious to preserve it. In Hitchens’s account of his life and writing, he was always one step ahead of the fools.
Other tendencies did manifest themselves. One, which MacIntyre also identified, was to substitute one group affiliation for another – from class struggle to religion, say, or country or ‘race’. In Hitchens’s case amor patriae took the place of socialist confraternity. Likewise, the old habits of a certain kind of vulgar historicism came to Hitchens’s aid. This is extremely important in understanding Hitchens’s unique political psychology. For one of the things that he often meant by Marxism was a sense of history as a narrative of progress. In Hitchens’s hands this was rather crude and mechanistic, and tended to express contempt for those on the losing side. As Adam Shatz, a former colleague at the Nation, explained:
Hitchens is drawn to dynamism, to the forces that are actually reshaping the world. I suspect that to him the radical Left increasingly looked like a group of outsiders, losers, and he was tired of the association. It was a short step to embracing revolutionary neoconservatism, which had energy and power on its side.9
This must be borne in mind in connection with the slightly ouvrieriste strain in Hitchens’s politics that persisted in a muted form even after his defection. Even if he did not necessarily have much sympathy for the poor, he respected the organised working class and admired its capacity as an historical force. When he decided that it was no longer such a force, allying with the forces of the right in the American state became a more attractive proposition.
The episodes in Hitchens’s trajectory to the right are well known: l’affaire Rushdie, the Bosnia wars, the skirmishes with the Clinton White House, and finally the September 11 attacks. The main conclusions that Hitchens drew from these milestones were that religion, specifically Islam, constituted an underestimated force for evil in world affairs, that the US empire could be a countervailing force for good, and that the left comprised herbivores and unprincipled opportunists who had found themselves detached from any international working-class movement capable of challenging capitalism and thus was on the wrong side of history.
This combination of views was not cut entirely from new cloth. Rather, components of his long-standing beliefs took up enlarged roles in a new ideological articulation. His fascination with America, his antitheism (or theophobia, as it might be called, since it plays a role analogous to that of ‘Stalinophobia’ during the Cold War), his condescending attitude towards the actually existing left, and his faith in empire (for example, his support for Britain during the Falklands War) had long been elements of his worldview. Similarly, his enthrallment with the right, as the truly revolutionary, dynamic force, can be detected in his writings about Thatcherism and indeed Mrs Thatcher herself (‘pure sex’, he vouched).
Yet for all his inconsistencies Hitchens is a recognisable type: a left-wing defector with a soft spot for empire. He would not be wholly out of place among a century of renegades, including John Spargo, Max Eastman, James Burnham, or Irving Kristol. Indeed, the issues of imperialism and nationalism, so critical to Hitchens’s development, were central to the defection of leftists throughout the twentieth century. Leftists often become ex-leftists at the moment they perceive the militarised nation-state as the appropriate defender of progress or democracy. As such Hitchens represents a potentially fascinating instance of a significant political category, well worth examining in his own right, and as an example of something broader.
A MAN OF THE RIGHT
Christopher Hitchens was known as a man of the left. But he was too complex a thinker to be placed on a single left–right dimension. He was a one-off: unclassifiable … You never knew what he would say about anything until you heard him say it.
– Richard Dawkins, ‘Illness Made Hitchens a Symbol’
Despite Hitchens’s idiosyncrasies, the attempt to represent him as anything other than a conservative in the last ten years of his life rests far too much on his own largely sentimental attachment to the rhetoric of left-wing internationalism and is equally too much informed by his mistaken view of conservatism as simply a force for the status quo. In this book I argue that not only was Hitchens a man of the right in his last years, but his predilections for a certain kind of right-wing radicalism – the most compelling recent example of which was the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq – pre-dated his apostasy.
Certainly, a cliché of conservative thought is that it venerates tradition, which is itself a prima facie cause for suspecting the idea. As Ted Honderich has shown, the notion has the decided disadvantage of representing conservative ideology as mere stupidity – the attachment to the familiar regardless of how absurd or intolerable it is. In fact, conservatism, Corey Robin argues, is distinguished not by an appeal to tradition or the gradual emendation and improvement of the status quo but by violent adventurism, brutal modernism, and the desire to radically transform the status quo the better to preserve it. Conservatism, as an ideology of reaction, reviles the status quo precisely for its inadequacy in the face of revolutionary challenge. From Burke onwards, conservatism has been adept at appropriating the ideas and modes of organisation of the Left, for essentially counterrevolutionary purposes: whether it is Joseph de Maistre’s appeal to “citoyens” or the neoconservative appropriation of internationalist rhetoric.10
This latter tendency can be seen clearly in the case on which Hitchens staked his new creed, the invasion of Iraq. Hitchens justified his support for the venture on multiple grounds, but the keynotes were humanitarian and liberal. The Ba’athist regime was an unusually repressive dictatorship that had perpetrated a genocide against the Kurds. The US was, for all its faults, a pluralist society that would impose the same on Iraq. More broadly, America had found itself ‘at war with the forces of reaction’ since September 2001.11 Hitchens suggested that the neoconservatives were the radicals and
