What’s left of Christopher Hitchens?

Lowdown interview with his biographer Matt Johnson

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In the late 1990s and early 2000s Christopher Hitchens was the most famous journalist in the English-speaking world. I loved him and was proud to count him as a friend. Yet after his death, it is hard to know what to make of his writing. You can gasp at his learning and his style – he loved the English language and it loved him back. But as a source of inspiration? History has not, apparently, been kind to Hitch.

For readers to know where they stand, writers must be consistent. George Orwell, whom Christopher idolised, was a revolutionary socialist in the 1930s when he served with the POUM militia in the Spanish civil war. He had moderated to become a supporter of the Labour party by the time he wrote Animal Farm and 1984 in the 1940s. But he remained a left-winger. An English nationalist version of a left-winger, to be sure, but a man of the left nevertheless.

By contrast, Hitch was all over the place. In his youth he was a Marxist revolutionary, in theory at any rate. He was a comrade of Perry Anderson, Tariq Ali and other upper-class Marxists who gathered around Verso Books and the New Left Review.  He clearly believed in his version of Trotskyist socialism, but remained the strangest Marxist I have met. He had no interest in the economics of socialism. Instead, he was in love with the anti-Stalinist dissident tradition in communism that Leon Trotsky exemplified, and the Soviet state persecuted. Like so many of the 1968 generation it never seemed to occur to him that Trotsky would have been as terrible a dictator as Stalin if he had ever taken power.

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In the 1990s he abandoned socialism and reconciled himself with the neoliberal order, as so many did. After 9/11, he became a neo-conservative and was convinced that radical Islam was the gravest threat to the West. His former comrades on the far left, who were themselves taking up the Islamist agenda, denounced him as an apostate.  The venom was extraordinary even by the standards of the far left. After his premature death at the age of just 62 in December 2011, his publishers Verso published a book-length attack on its own writer. As I said at the time, “the publishing house has done something I have not seen since the passing of communism: denounced its dead author for his ideological deviations.”

But with the advantage of hindsight, the people who had the most right to shrug their shoulders and forget Christopher were standard supporters of moderate left-wing politics. As I have been guilty of Christopher’s faults myself, let me spell them out.

For the Marxist half of his life Christopher was denouncing the Labour party in the UK and the Democrats in the US as sellouts. Once Labour is back in power you will see hundreds of imitators on the UK left, who will never match Christopher’s range and gusto, do the same. Like me, Hitchens was from an English journalistic culture, which is rarely comfortable with the Labour party.  The Guardian’s politics vary from liberal to post-communist, but the paper has few authentic Labour voices. It’s hardly alone in that. Not one highbrow publication, not the New Statesman or the London Review of Books, is authentically Labour. If a foreigner were to arrive and ask to be shown the UK paper that reflects Labour thinking, you would be hard pressed to offer one.

In the US, Hitchens’ most famous polemic was a dissection of the Democrat president Bill Clinton, which earned him many friends on the right. He hated Hilary Clinton with a passion and was never happier than when exposing the hypocrisies of progressives.

So what, you might say, writers must call it the way they see it, and progressive hypocrisy provides an endless source of material.

But then Christopher turned on his head and became a neo-conservative and attacked the moderate centre-left with the same venom from the right. Once again, he was saying what he believed, as all writers must. But look at Hitchens work from the point of view of the people defending moderate leftish policies in the Democrats or Labour. One minute he’s attacking the centre-left from the far-left, the next from the neo-conservative right. His position changes, his dislike of the centre-left remains.

The problem for anyone trying to assess his work in our age is not only keeping up with his U-turns. It ought to be perfectly clear that the boring centre left he despised all his life is the last best hope of Anglo-Saxon democracies. The Republican party under Trump is a threat to the American republic. Only the Democrats can save it. Meanwhile, I dare anyone to deny that the Conservative party has destroyed the UK with austerity, Brexit and Truss, and that a moderate Labour party offers our only conceivable redemption.

We have learned the hard way that our most urgent task is defensive. We need to embrace any compromise for the greater good of keeping conservatives from power. And Christopher despised compromise.

Christopher died in 2011, and could not have predicted the world of Trump and Brexit. Yet you can make the case that he offers little help to those of us trying to resist it.

Matt Yglesias said on Twitter that he thought Hitchens would have supported Trump. It was a ridiculous accusation but I think I know where it came from. Christopher was a great essayist and newspaper columnist. British comment journalism loves writers who strike an unexpected stance. The roots of the contrarianism Hitchens championed lie in the commercial calculations of cynical newspaper editors that the best way to grab readers’ attention is by shocking them.

The result is it seems today that Hitchens has few heirs among leftwing journalists. His followers are among right-wing and increasingly far-right controversialists, whose fellow travelling with Trump will destroy them as surely as the fellow travelling with Stalin destroyed the leftists of the 20^th century that Orwell and Hitchens opposed.

To contest this bleak memorial for an old friend and to mark the anniversary of Christopher’s death, I interviewed Christopher’s defender, Matt Johnson, the author of the marvellous How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment

I began by asking him whether the left wanted Hitchens to save it. After all, the woke left, for want of a better word, strode away from universal values in 2010s, denouncing free speech and free thinking without a flicker of doubt.