The Liberal Internationalist
A fine new book argues that the contemporary Left could learn a lot from the life and work of the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens.
A review of How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment by Matt Johnson, 462 pages, Pitchstone Publishing (February 2023)
British-American journalist, essayist, author, and human bulldozer Christopher Hitchens intimidated nearly everyone who encountered him, whether in print, on television, or on a debate stage. “He likes the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite,” his best friend and novelist Martin Amis once observed. Nobody ever beat Hitchens in argument, not even when he was wrong.
His scathing wit, his barn-burner polemics, his prodigious output, his ability to demonstrate the depth and breadth of an entire classical education on a single page, his knack for speaking extemporaneously in perfectly formed paragraphs, and his near-photographic recall of virtually everything he ever read were peerless. The man could knock out a sparkling magazine column in 30 minutes after sinking an entire bottle of wine (always red, never white) at four o’clock in the morning.
In 2011, Hitchens left us when he succumbed to complications caused by esophageal cancer. The drink didn’t get him, but smoking apparently did. There will be no new books from Hitchens himself after his posthumous Mortality, but plenty have been written about him in the meantime, not all of them friendly. How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment by Matt Johnson is not a hagiography, but it is friendly. It offers a delightful and (yes) nostalgic tour through Hitchens’s ideas and arguments over the decades by an author who clearly appreciates what the man had to say, how he said it, and how he thought.
Christopher Hitchens was far more than the insult comic of the YouTube “Hitchslap.” (“If you gave [televangelist Jerry] Falwell an enema,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity the day after Falwell died, “he could be buried in a matchbox.”) He “embraced the battle as an end in itself,” Johnson writes, “not only to refine his own arguments but because (as John Stuart Mill understood) the open exchange of ideas is the foundation of civil society. He fought in the open because debate and discussion are the only tools civilization has to solve its problems short of violence and other forms of coercion.”
What does the Left need saving from, per Johnson’s title? From itself, partly, but Johnson makes it clear that the Left isn’t exactly an “it.” He’s not a right-wing culture warrior bloviating against a monolithic enemy that includes everybody between Joe Manchin and Pol Pot. Johnson, like Hitchens before him, wants to rescue the Left from counter-Enlightenment forces of every conceivable variety. The Left of Johnson’s book is, for the most part, its radical wing (which still only slightly narrows things down). At different times, Johnson and Hitchens argue with different factions—the “anti-imperialist” Left, the identity politics (or “woke”) Left, and the censorious campus Left—from the point of view of the liberal and anti-totalitarian Left. Sometimes author and subject join forces with one faction, or even with conservatives, against another. (The socialist Bernie Sanders, for instance, is firmly in the anti-imperialist camp, but he’s at least partly on board with Hitchens on campus censorship and on identity politics.)
“The Left” has always been riven by factions, some of them centrist and moderate, some of them radical and extreme. Some of these factions are popular, some of them are lost in the wilderness, and some of them are so violently opposed to each other over barely perceptible differences that they seem to forget their common enemy entirely (a tendency brilliantly lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of Brian). When Hitchens resigned from the Nation in disgust, he did so not because he had become a neocon traitor, as some would still have it. As Hitchens himself explained, he no longer wished to share pages with what he had previously termed the “Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter” of the Left, itself a faction within a faction.
“You mustn’t become,” Hitchens once remarked, “or try and become, a party-liner—however good the party may be—as a writer. That’s a betrayal.” He always wrote and spoke the truth as he saw it and vigorously defended the right of everyone else to do the same, including his enemies. He detested censorship of every variety, but no instance moved him more than the Iranian fatwa issued against his friend, the British novelist Salman Rushdie, for “blasphemy.” “It was,” Hitchens wrote in his memoir Hitch-22, “if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.”
He likewise detested the campus mobs that shout down guest speakers, even when the speakers in question are spouting odious nonsense (which is, of course, the only time the principle makes any sense since nobody shouts down their allies). As a university student at Oxford, he engaged in precisely that kind of behavior himself against British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart in protest against the government’s war policy in Vietnam and Cambodia. He felt guilty about that behavior for years and later admitted:
I remember arguing with dexterous casuistry that we had compelled the Establishment press to take notice and had thus, in a way, actually succeeded in enlarging the area of free speech. A nice try, I hope you will admit. But however one phrased the case, the only reason for mentioning free speech in the first place was that, however one looked at it, we had in fact shut down a public debate by force.
Even fascists have the right to free expression in a free society, Hitchens maintained, even though they’d take that right away from everyone else if they could. He didn’t always believe this. “It was one of one’s standard duties as a leftist,” he wrote in Hitch-22, “to turn out on weekends and block the efforts of [neo-Nazi] rabble to stage a march or to put up a platform in a street market. Stones and fists would fly, posters would be ripped down: it was all part of a storied socialist tradition that went back to street combat with the Blackshirts in the 1930s.”
He changed his mind forever when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) defended the right of Nazis to march through a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Illinois, in 1978, one of the most famous and difficult free speech incidents in American history. “The First Amendment to the Constitution, [ACLU director Aryeh Neier] said, enshrined the right of all citizens to free expression and to free assembly. If this protection was withdrawn from anybody, perhaps especially somebody repulsively unpopular, then it would be weakened or diluted in general.” This principle isn’t, or at least isn’t necessarily, even a charitable one. Ultimately it comes down to self-defense. For any law or principle wielded against one political group can (and almost certainly will) be used against your own.
As I observed firsthand, however, Hitchens was considerably less inclined to defend or tolerate the speech of fascists already in power. In 2009, he and I were walking down Hamra Street in Beirut, Lebanon, shortly after the neighbourhood had been invaded and occupied by Hezbollah and a Syrian Ba’ath Party terrorist proxy, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. As we passed a memorial emblazoned with the SSNP’s emblem, a spinning red swastika in the shape of a hurricane, Hitchens pulled a Sharpie from his pocket and scrawled “No, No, Fuck the SSNP” on their memorial. I would have advised him against that had he asked—I once had an apartment in that neighborhood, knew Lebanon well, and was writing a book about it. But before I could process what was happening, half a dozen SSNP goons jumped us and left Hitchens bruised and bleeding.
“You can’t have the main street, a shopping and commercial street, in a civilized city patrolled by intimidators who work for a Nazi organization,” he told me back at our hotel. “It is not humanly possible to live like that. One must not do that. There may be more important problems in Lebanon, but if people on Hamra don’t dare criticize the SSNP, well fuck. That’s occupation.” He had more resolve than regrets. “I’d like to go back,” he added, “do it properly, deface the thing with red paint so there’s no swastika visible.” Hitchens believed in freedom of speech in an arena where the unhindered exchange of competing ideas can battle it out. But he did not believe that charity should extend to totalitarian regimes and their shock troops, and neither do I.
“Beware of identity politics,” Hitchens wrote in Letters to a Young Contrarian. “I’ll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics.” He had begun his intellectual and political journey as an anti-totalitarian Marxist, and although he renounced socialism (not without some reluctance) when the Cold War ended, his youthful beliefs continued to inform and shape his reflexive hostility to gender and ethnic factionalism. His Marxism meant that he always plumped for class-based rather than race-based solidarity (while eschewing the anti-elite demagogy on which populism thrives). His anti-totalitarianism led him to support liberal-minded cosmopolitans of all classes, races, and nations against despotism, be it fascist, communist, or theocratic. “Hitchens believed,” Johnson writes, that “the shift toward identitarianism on the left was a renunciation of its most basic and precious principle: universalism.”
Social justice activists detested Hitchens for this, but he was hardly alone on the Left for thinking this way. His fellow travelers include the likes of Bernie Sanders on the democratic socialist Left, Pete Buttigieg on the mainstream Left, George Packer on the moderate and intellectual Left, and so on. Identity politics may be all the rage in left-of-center politics today, but the debate is far from over, and writers like John McWhorter and Mark Lilla have picked up where Hitchens left off. The latter’s 2018 book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, argues that a coalition of coastal elites and minorities is too small and narrow to decisively defeat populist nationalism and that the Left will have to reject purity politics if it wants to actually win power and enact its desired policy changes.
It ought to go without saying (but sadly it doesn’t) that none of this means Hitchens opposed civil rights or gay rights or anything else identity-related but not identity politics per se. Rather, he modeled his approach on Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.’s advocacy for civil rights based on universalist principles that apply to every human being regardless of race, gender, or any other identity marker. “What’s especially strange about left-wing identitarianism,” Johnson writes, “is the fact that it presents a relentless focus on differences between people as the only way to strengthen the bonds between them.” Hitchens hated ethnic and identity tribalism, whether left-wing or right-wing, racist or “woke”—the Balkanized politics of Yugoslavia during its crackup, of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and of the prison yard. For years, he championed the pluralist coalition in bombed-out Sarajevo between Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosniaks, and Orthodox Serbs against Slobodan Milošević and his platoons of genocidal identitarian Serbo-fascists in Belgrade and Republika Srpska. That’s the model.
Some of this he picked up from the Marxists, and during the years of the Cold War, friends and critics alike pressed him to explain how he could reconcile his anti-totalitarianism and commitment to individual freedom with his stubborn commitment to socialism. Hitchens’s response was that he never identified with the communists—his was a kinder, gentler species of radicalism. “The communists never appealed to me,” Hitchens said in 1997. “And I was to a certain extent inoculated against it. I read Darkness at Noon before I read The Communist Manifesto.” This was never an entirely satisfactory defense. Nearly every socialist state outside the Middle East was constructed by communist parties. Nevertheless, there have always been socialist parties, factions, and individuals that hated the communists, and countries enjoying “actually existing socialism” (to use Josef Stalin’s terminology) inevitably dispatched them to the execution wall or to the gulag.
So there was an exasperating contradiction in much of Hitchens’s work during the Cold War before he finally pitched socialism over the side. Back then, he identified himself as a latter day comrade of the anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky. But Trotsky himself helped construct Stalin’s totalitarian edifice before falling victim in 1940 to an NKVD ice axe. And there were times when Hitchens’s conflicting impulses led him badly astray, such as his lengthy defense, in 1985, of Chomsky’s dismal record on Cambodia (a reply to which can be found here)—an error he never really got around to acknowledging. But he generally tried to be honest about these contradictions in ways that more inflexible doctrinaire anti-imperialists like Chomsky did not. “There was always a war within the left going on,” Hitchens later admitted, “and going on within myself as well.”
Hitchens was by no means the only person who believed that a democratic socialist internationalism could be rescued from Stalinism, and no morally serious person should wish that the people making this argument had never existed. However, Johnson is careful to draw attention to Hitchens’s friends and critics who never thought this rhetorical needle-threading was sustainable. Martin Amis was both a close friend and a critic, and his 2002 nonfiction book Koba the Dread was at once a harrowing review of Stalin’s crimes and a rebuke to those, like Hitchens, who persisted in defending a blood-soaked ideology:
Although I always liked Christopher’s journalism, there seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something faintly but pervasively self-defeating: the sense that the truth could be postponed. This flaw disappeared in 1989, and his prose made immense gains in burnish and authority. I used to attribute the change to the death of Christopher’s father, in late 1988, and to subsequent convulsions in his life. It had little or nothing to do with that, I now see. It had to do with the collapse of Communism. Truth had at last become time-urgent.
Hitchens was already moving in this direction before the Berlin Wall fell. In the closing days of the Cold War, his contemporary heroes, by and large, weren’t Marxists but liberals like Polish dissident Adam Michnik and Václav Havel, leader of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. Havel was a playwright rather than a rifle-wielding a revolutionary, and Hitchens admired him for being “ironic, understated, nonfanatical, nonviolent.”
While Hitchens began his long career on the radical, socialist Left, he ended as a liberal (though he never did like that term very much) in the mold of Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. He famously said that he missed socialism after abandoning it as if it were a missing limb, but he had no regrets. “The socialist movement,” he writes in Letters to a Young Contrarian, “enabled universal suffrage, the imposition of limits upon exploitation, and the independence of colonial and subject populations. Where it succeeded, one can be proud of it.”
Personal freedom was such an unshakeable part of Hitchens’s worldview that it’s hardly surprising he exchanged Marxism for liberalism. What is surprising is that it took him so long. “I have one consistency,” he said in an interview with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, “which is [being] against the totalitarian—on the Left and on the Right. The totalitarian is the enemy—the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.”
He knew this all along, too, not only after 1989, and Johnson points out that it led Hitchens to take some surprising positions, including supporting the Thatcher administration’s decision to “recapture the Falkland Islands from Leopoldo Galtieri’s military dictatorship in Argentina in 1982.” Hitchens credited Michnik for changing his life with a single comment from communist Poland back in the 1970s: “The crucial distinction between systems, [Michnik] said, was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, think that the citizen could—or should—be ‘the property of the state.’”
Many of Hitchens’s comrades on the Left were horrified by his support for the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. They believed it to be a betrayal of everything he and the Left ever stood for, but it wasn’t. There is a long history of left-wing military resistance against fascist regimes, not only during World War II but also in the Spanish Civil War, when George Orwell volunteered to fight Francisco Franco’s fascists alongside a Marxist militia on behalf of the Spanish republican government. Hitchens fulminated against American President Bill Clinton during the 1990s for dithering while Serb aggressors pulverized Sarajevo and Kosovo. And he grew to regret his opposition to the first Gulf War and became an ardent supporter of the Kurdish quest for self-determination—a development that heavily influenced his support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Invading Iraq certainly didn’t turn out to be prudent. Hitchens was wrong about what American intelligence had to say about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, wrong about how long the war would drag on, and wrong about how Arab Iraqis (but not Kurdish Iraqis!) would welcome British and American soldiers. But prudence was never one of Hitchens’s virtues, as I saw for myself in Beirut. Johnson walks us through the Iraq War debate and relitigates it from Hitchens’s point of view. It feels a bit tedious after so many years, though it would have been scandalous had Johnson omitted it.
Far more arresting and relevant is Johnson’s survey of what Hitchens had to say about Russia. Hitchens excoriated the “anti-imperialist” leftists who, he wrote, were “prone to sympathize with Vladimir Putin concerning the ‘encircling’ of his country by aggressive titans like Estonia and Kosovo and Georgia.” Who on the Left was doing this? Johnson names names. Max Blumenthal, for starters, scion of former Clinton senior advisor Sidney Blumenthal. And Blumenthal is still at it today. He has spent the past year dutifully repeating Russian propaganda about American imperialism and “the Nazi regime” in Kyiv (led by a democratically elected Jewish comedian, of all people, who even won a majority of votes in the Russian-backed separatist region of Donbas). “This is one of Putin’s favorite tactics,” Johnson writes. “Ignore the huge mobilization of Ukrainians who oppose Moscow and smear the entire movement as a bunch of fascists and Western puppets.”
None of this is new for Max Blumenthal or for the corpuscle of the far-Left to which he belongs. Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Norman Finkelstein, Tariq Ali, Chris Hedges, John Pilger, and so many others before them have been flogging this horse for more than a hundred years, even before George Orwell fired Animal Farm at them in 1945. As Johnson observes:
This basic script is copied and reprinted over and over again on the “anti-imperialist” left. When tens of thousands of Belarusians turned out in an unprecedented protest against the 26-year reign of Aleksandr Lukashenko and faced the threat of imprisonment and state-sponsored violence, [Ben] Norton declared that the “US/NATO are attempting a color revolution to overthrow the government in Belarus, the only remaining ex-Soviet state that still has socialistic policies and state control over the economy.”
Johnson’s (and Hitchens’s) critique of this crowd is spot on, and yet this part of the book feels strangely out of date, even though it was published this month. Since Hitchens left us, the political map has changed enormously with the rise of the MAGA movement, America First, and sundry other populist-nationalist movements worldwide. While this crowd scornfully derides Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and either excuses or outright supports Vladimir Putin, the anti-Ukrainian Left is now a comet out in the Oort Cloud, barely detectable with a telescope. Left-of-center parties across the Western world are overwhelmingly united in their support for military aid to Ukraine. This even includes (in his maddeningly squishy way) German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a man who was so far to the left during the Cold War that he became vice president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, met with members of East Germany’s Politburo, and denounced “aggressive-imperialist NATO” every morning with breakfast.
What remains of the “anti-imperialist” Left in America, keenly aware of its abject irrelevance to Democratic Party politics, is teaming up instead with the MAGA movement. This trend is best exemplified by former progressive Democrat Tulsi Gabbard and the Intercept’s cofounder and former contributor Glenn Greenwald (who always loathed Hitchens) yukking it up with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. In 2017, Gabbard toured Assad’s Syria with the fascist goons who beat Hitchens in the street in Beirut, and Carlson cheerfully admits that he’s on Russia’s side and smirks as his program is subtitled and rebroadcast on Kremlin TV.
So-called leftist “anti-imperialists” and their new paleoconservative allies would rather see the violent expansion of a belligerent Russian empire than permit their fellow Americans to aid a friendly country in distress. They’re barely distinguishable from the Cold War “tankies”—a term coined by Hitchens’s old faction to describe the Western Stalinists who popped champagne corks when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956, smashing the anticommunist Hungarian revolution and reopening the torture chambers.
George Orwell lambasted the same crowd for the same thing back in the 1930s and ’40s. In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” Orwell went after intellectuals who delight in “seeing their own country humiliated” and “follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. … One finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries.”
At least for now, this movement has all but expired on the Left. In October of last year, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal triggered an uproar in the Democratic Party when she released a letter pressuring Joe Biden to pair military aid to Ukraine with diplomacy intended to reduce the likelihood of escalation with Russia. Outrage from Jayapal’s Democratic colleagues was so explosive and so nearly unanimous that she backtracked as if she were retreating from lava. Nothing in that letter is even in the same time zone as what the “anti-imperialist” Left or the America-First Right has to say, yet even that was a bridge too far for left-of-center politics in America in 2023. This is a development of which Hitchens, were he around today, would heartily approve.
Christopher Hitchens was, when all is said and done, a cosmopolitan globalist. He didn’t care for the anti-globalization Left any more than he’d appreciate the populist and nationalist Right were he alive to see it. Anti-globalization, he said in 2001, seemed to be a “protest against modernity, and to have a very conservative twinge, in the sense of being reactionary. … I hear the word globalization and it sounds to me like a very good idea. I like the sound of it. It sounds innovative and internationalist. To many people it’s a word of almost diabolic significance.”
American internationalism is, of course, very different from internationalism in the abstract, the internationalism of the United Nations, or the internationalism of any other nation or power—especially the belligerent Russian variant. Johnson sets out Hitchens’s position like this:
Hitchens thought American internationalism should be motivated by a basic set of ideas. First, Enlightenment values such as free expression, pluralism, democracy, and individual rights are, in fact, universal—they can be understood by anyone, and once understood, they will generally be chosen over the alternatives. Second, the United States should simultaneously embody and defend those values in the world. And third, nationalism, religion, and other forms of tribalism should be resisted, as they often lead to the negation of those values.
Hitchens’s attitude toward America, in particular its internationalist character, changed over the years. “As a socialist he regarded the United States as a marauding imperial power,” Johnson writes, “but he was forced to revisit this view after the Cold War.” Indeed, but it wasn’t just the end of the Cold War, the sectarian conflicts in the Balkans, or his growing solidarity with the Kurds that did it. And he hadn’t yet entirely shucked off his worst tendencies, even two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“Patriotic and tribal feelings,” Hitchens wrote the year the Soviet Union collapsed, “belong to the squalling childhood of the human race, and become no more charming in their senescence. They are particularly unattractive when evinced by a superpower.” Fulminate against bigoted tribalism all you want—and nobody did that better than Hitchens—but it’s not tribalist to love home, to feel closer to family and friends and neighbors than to strangers, and to think of unseen, faraway lands as abstractions. It’s human.
Hitchens was to learn this lesson late in life, most poignantly after September 11th, 2001, when he was ambushed by patriotic feelings himself, and for a country that, as an English transplant and a noncitizen, wasn’t technically or legally even his own. What did he love about America? Aside from its open society, as he put in his 2001 essay for Vanity Fair “For Patriot Dreams,” he loved “my Palestinian tobacconist, my cheap all-you-can-eat Ukrainian joint, my Italian grocery.” But there was also something else more valuable:
The crucial four words in the greatest of all documents. The pursuit of happiness. Just to name that is to summarize and encapsulate all that is detested by the glacial malice of fundamentalism and tribalism. That’s what they can’t stand. They confuse it with hedonism and selfishness and profanity, and they have no idea. No idea at all.
Another contradiction resolved. Solidarity with your Palestinian tobacconist, your cheap all-you-can-eat Ukrainian joint, the open society, and the pursuit of happiness are the very opposite of tribalism. Surely he understood that all along, but he didn’t quite feel it so intensely until it came under attack by a genocidal terrorist cult. He continued:
I was asked if I wanted to attend the midtown memorial service for the hundreds of my immolated fellow Englishmen. I can’t say that it was exactly at this moment that my thoughts crystallized, but it was at about that time. No, I don’t want to go to anybody’s gender-specific or national or ethnic-identity ceremony. I have found the patch of soil on which I will take my own stand, and the people with whom I’ll stand, and it’s the only place in history where patriotism can be divorced from its evil twins of chauvinism and xenophobia.
And so, at last, it all comes together. His love of openness and pluralism (I don’t believe he ever used the fashionable word “diversity,” though in a way that’s what he was talking about), his loathing of identity politics for even his own “tribe” of “Englishmen,” and the emotional connection he had forged with his adopted country, almost without realizing it, not as an imperialist marauder but as the most powerful force for revolutionary and liberal ideals that has ever existed.
Johnson closes his book on just the right note, showing how Hitchens finally felt at home in the United States as a rooted cosmopolitan and an American citizen. While adding the final touches to his book Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, Hitchens discovered that he had referred throughout to “our republic” and to “our Constitution.” “I didn’t even notice that I had done this until I came to review the pages in final proof. What does it take for an immigrant to shift from ‘you’ to ‘we’?” In his final chapter, Johnson writes:
Jefferson was a slaveholder and a hypocrite, the Constitution did codify slavery, and the United States has subverted democracy and propped up dictators around the world. But it’s possible to acknowledge these blights and failures, as Hitchens did, while recognizing the essential radicalism of the American experiment. For an author so wedded to irony—and for a man who was powerfully repelled by America’s crimes and excesses, yet caught in the “strong gravitational pull of the great American planet”—Hitchens’s final embrace of the United States as a revolutionary force in the world was a fitting epilogue.
Perhaps the most moving description of Christopher Hitchens in How Hitchens Can Save the Left, at least to an American like me, comes from George Packer. Packer is a brilliant author in his own right, and he beautifully captured his old friend in a single sentence of the speech he delivered after he was awarded the 2019 Hitchens Prize. Hitchens, Packer said, was a “figure of the Enlightenment, a coffee-house pamphleteer, a ready duelist, an unreasonable fighter for reason, an émigré from England come to the New World to tell us what the universal words of our Declaration meant and hold us to them.”
