Unhitched. Richard Seymour
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War II, as former Communists, Trotskyists, and left-liberals made their adjustments to the Cold War, and in response to the civil rights and antiwar movements that crested about twenty years later, with the neoconservatives. Some of the same figures – notably, Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell – populated both camps of reaction, first becoming Cold War liberals, then neoconservatives. But while the cold warriors comprised a broad and ascendant political bloc, with ex-communists forming the vanguard, the neoconservatives arose amid the breakdown of the Cold War consensus and the revival of leftist politics. As a result the ex-communists could be more single-mindedly focused on the international struggle against the Soviet Union, while the politics of neoconservatism were far more substantially inscribed by domestic struggles on issues ranging from race to education – a fact reflected in the ensuing culture wars.
This is to state things in an extremely schematic fashion. In reality turns to the right among the intelligentsia were drawn-out processes punctuated by miniwaves and with distinct temporalities in each society. For example, while the neoconservatives began to take shape in the United States in the wake of the civil rights movement, the French ‘antitotalitarians’ emerged from their Maoist chrysalis in the mid-1970s as the struggles unleashed after May 1968 subsided. Similarly, in the UK a new generation of reactionaries emerged amid the crisis of social democracy and particularly the ‘winter of discontent’. During that nadir ‘former leftwingers such as Kingsley Amis, Max Beloff, Reg Prentice, Paul Johnson and Alun Chalfont anthologised their apostasy in a book proudly titled Right Turn. Most of these would find themselves comfortably in the Thatcherite camp. Another of their number, Robert Conquest, even spent time as Mrs Thatcher’s speechwriter.24
Hitchens, a member of the soixant-huitard generation, could well have defected along with many of his peers in the late 1970s. Indeed, in this period he was close to that informal sodality of Amis, Conquest, et al., who were defined by their staunch antileftism. And in retrospect it now appears that he did have a certain closeted sympathy for Thatcherism. But resistant to cliché as he then was, he instead moved to the United States and positioned himself as an English radical amid compromising liberals. Even his Falklands fever was somewhat covert and never recorded in an article by him at the time, as far as I can discover. The troupe of David Horowitz and Michael Medved could not tempt him away with the prospect of ‘Second Thoughts’ in the late 1980s, nor did he immediately join the Fukuyama-ites in proclaiming the ‘end of history’ when Stalinism toppled over. Aloof from, and seemingly insusceptible to, the gravitational pull of the right, Hitchens nonetheless proceeded to make a gradual rapprochement throughout the 1990s, so that what remained of his leftism could not withstand the challenge by the aerial assault of a handful of motivated jihadis.
The point here is not to identify a tradition of apostasy extending to Washington, DC, circa 2001. It would be absurd to situate Hitchens in any proximity to Mussolini or Hervé, although Hitchens was closer to Spargo and Kristol than he might have been willing to admit. Such defections are historically specific. Even if they draw on the archives of past ideologies – as, for example, the former leftists who signed up for the war on terror and donned the discursive regalia of the Cold War ex-communists – their defection arises from the unfolding of present conditions and their crises. Nevertheless, certain structural similarities in the secessions of each generation deserve attention.
First is the ever-present context of empire and militarism, which, in its different forms, is implicated in each of the waves I have identified. The emphases of different left–right defectors vary, but the issue of international order is an almost constant factor, as is the existence of a Bogey-Scapegoat that can absorb the blame for its chaotic violence. Second, and relatedly, defectors have a propensity to become nationalistic. This is often because in the context of war, or interimperialist rivalry, the nation itself is both threatened and seen as the bulwark against a threat to survival. Socialists often begin their journey to the right when they begin to identify their national state with the prospects for civilisation. Third, as neophyte reactionaries who have suddenly found that they have spent much of their lives working for the wrong side, they prosecute the war against their former confederates far more viciously and devotedly than their newfound allies. Finally, with the turn to the right comes the promulgation of a new theodicy, a manichean doctrine of good vs evil accompanied by a less-than-sanguine appraisal of humanity. From Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Children of Darkness/Children of Light’ dichotomy – pioneered for Cold War ideology, which also underpinned neoconservative ideology – to the ‘liberalism of fear’ developed by Judith Shklar and taken up by the ex-Trotskyist Kanan Makiya, such ideological metaphors occupy a central role in antitotalitarian doctrine. The effect of this is profoundly conservative, since its suspicion of what is called utopian thinking – the sort Hitchens derided as ‘sinister perfectionism’ – ultimately proves to be hostile to any but the most gradual and cautious social transformation.25
On each of these points Hitchens proved an exceedingly typical apostate. In truth, it is not hard to see him in the Isaac Deutscher essay Hitchens referenced in reviewing the Second Thoughts conference:
He is haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society; like Koestler, he may even have an ambivalent notion that he has betrayed both. He then tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of extraordinary certitude and frantic aggressiveness. He insists that the world should recognise his uneasy conscience as the clearest conscience of them all.
But there is a crucial difference. Deutscher was describing the ex-communists with some sympathy. He understood their sense of betrayal. In their horrified revulsion they were similar to Beethoven and Wordsworth, who resiled on hearing that Napoleon had made himself emperor – an act they regarded as a defeat for humanity. The ex-communists too had seen such a reversal, as the supposedly revolutionary state of Russia forged alliances with Hitler and purged the revolutionaries from Soviet ranks. ‘There can be no greater tragedy’, Deutscher said,
than that of a great revolution’s succumbing to the mailed fist that was to defend it from its enemies. There can be no spectacle as disgusting as that of a post-revolutionary tyranny dressed up in the banners of liberty. The ex-Communist is morally as justified as was the ex-Jacobin in revealing and revolting against that spectacle.26
But Hitchens was coping with no great betrayal, despite his laboured pretence to the contrary. Nor was there anything comparable to the USSR and Warsaw Pact. The histrionics of the Cold War liberals and neocons had been over-the-top about that supposed threat to the ‘free world’. So, how was it that Hitchens had sailed through the Cold War without greatly panicking but nonetheless conjured a civilisational challenge out of a handful of combatants with box cutters?
A MAN IN FULL
This is not a biography but an extended political essay. Therefore I am less interested than most reviewers and columnists in raking through Hitchens’s familial affairs, sex life, and circles of friendship and influence. Yet one cannot ignore these things completely. For all his distaste for the slogan ‘the personal is political’, Hitchens applied it and lived it to the full. Whether it was Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, or George Galloway, Hitchens’s foil had to be shown as an out-and-out unprincipled, mediocre, physically repulsive mountebank. In fairness, Hitchens might have struggled if those standards were applied to him, even before he wound up spinning for President Bush, until there was no one left to lie for. But Hitchens was a great sentimentalist, and his approach to politics was profoundly visceral and instinctual.
To evaluate Hitchens’s politics is to attempt at least some assessment on the type of person he was. His judgement of character – those he chose as friends as well as allies, and those he chose to make enemies or travesty of – is also inseparable from his political development. It is, then, another measure of the declension of his faculties and of his probity. It is one thing to sell out Sidney Blumenthal to the GOP, but to exchange Edward Said for Ahmed Chalabi? To smear Noam Chomsky yet endear oneself to Paul Wolfowitz?
Who, then, was ‘the Hitch’? He was, in an idiom he would have understood, a petty bourgeois individualist who esteemed collectivism at least some of the time but never submitted to it himself. He resented the rich and powerful but enjoyed their company, and he sympathised with the radical working class