Christopher Hitchens died last week and the commentariat has been awash in adulatory obits, with a handful of exceptions, such as The Nation's Katha Pollitt (who recognizes he was a slanderer, a drunk and a bully but nonetheless finds kind words to speak of the dead man). Maybe he was rhetorically brilliant and rapier witted. But I signed off on him a long time ago. Hitchens was, in my view, an enemy of the left, even while he claimed to be of it. The only consistent theme in his thinking was stridency.
An exemplar of the nastiest characteristics of the British upperclass, his left phase was as part of the Trotskyite International Socialists whose principal targets have always been on the left - whether the communist parties which were denounced as "state capitalist" or the social democratic parties which are denounced as sell-outs. This was a very comfortable posture for a Tory who was going through his "left phase".
But when the big test of his political life came he was firmly on the wrong side. He was an unrepentant celebrant of the second Iraq war, as can be seen in this essay A War to be Proud Of which appeared in the Weekly Standard in 2005 - long after it was plain that this was a war to be ashamed of.
In his late phase as an iconoclastic atheist he was able to avoid the problem of his central moral failure by famously debating under BBC auspices the similarly flawed Catholic convert Tony Blair on the topic of whether religion plays a positive social role.
An exemplar of the nastiest characteristics of the British upperclass, his left phase was as part of the Trotskyite International Socialists whose principal targets have always been on the left - whether the communist parties which were denounced as "state capitalist" or the social democratic parties which are denounced as sell-outs. This was a very comfortable posture for a Tory who was going through his "left phase".
But when the big test of his political life came he was firmly on the wrong side. He was an unrepentant celebrant of the second Iraq war, as can be seen in this essay A War to be Proud Of which appeared in the Weekly Standard in 2005 - long after it was plain that this was a war to be ashamed of.
In his late phase as an iconoclastic atheist he was able to avoid the problem of his central moral failure by famously debating under BBC auspices the similarly flawed Catholic convert Tony Blair on the topic of whether religion plays a positive social role.
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