The force of Christopher's convictions

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

I joint the chorus of consternation at Christopher Hitchens's schizophrenic endorsements. On 21 October, in the pages of The Nation—the magazine he left over its pacifist stance on Iraq—he endorsed Bush. Less a week later, in the pages of Slate, he is noted as a reluctant Kerry supporter.

Is CH trying to have it both ways? Or is he just unsteady in his convictions? After all, CH's convictions are often so forceful (not to say violent) that they're likely to throw anyone off-balance, even himself. But is the force of CH's conviction severable from the content of his ideas? And does it provide a clue to his ideological transition?

Read more!In the Nation piece, CH muses about his notorious newfound political alliance with the neocons in the Bush White House.

One of the editors of this magazine asked me if I would also say something about my personal evolution. I took him to mean: How do you like your new right-wing friends? In the space I have, I can only return the question. I prefer them to Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin and the cretinized British Conservative Party, or to the degraded, mendacious populism of Michael Moore, who compares the psychopathic murderers of Iraqis to the Minutemen.

CH's point is well taken. The trendy Left is all-too-fond of rationalizing unsavory alliances away. The trendy francophilic Left most of all. I suspect that this is due to a mistake about causation: upon witnessing a loud and violent revolt, the immediate presumption is that an equally voluminous injustice was its cause. But this conclusion is unwarranted. Even the oppressed can be immoderante in their demands and tactics. Perhaps the immoderates on the Left (and Right) are animically incapable of appreciating this, and it is left to us moderates to calmly think things through.

But I digress. The question of CH's political (d)evolution is the subject, and it leads to a more general meditation of partisan mutation. You see, I was a Marxist once, a long time ago. When looking back, I'm torn between Pablo Neruda's admonition that no one can look at misery in Latin America and not become a communist, and Dubbya's apologetic aphorism to the effect that "when we were young and irresponsible... we were young and irresponsible." In any case, and whatever its merits, I am not a Marxist any more, rather an eminently moderate left-liberal.

My intellectual journey, however, was tentative, deliberate, gradual. In high school, I was never a Stalinist, not even a Leninist, but a tame Eurocommunist at best. In my first year of college I joined the Democratic Socialists of America. Soon enough I happened upon Rawls's A Theory of Justice and didn't need socialism to justify my commitment to social justice. Thus, quietly, I settled into liberalism. Removing the last utopian barnacles off of my shell has been a bit more violent, but hasn't turned me away from what by now is a pretty steady course. I now have neither the momentum nor the desire to get to the right bank of the stream.

Contrast this voyage to that of CH and many neocons (David Horowitz most notably). Their transition away from the Left resembles a conversion; it is so sudden that it lands them on the opposite bank. Now, I don't pur Horowitz and CH in the same camp. I think CH can point to a long history of opposition to Saddam that grew out of his championing of the Kurdish cause. And his rejection of Islamo-fascism—and that is what Ba'athism is—is certainly correct. But he seems all too eager to join the neocon crusade. It is, after all, a sort of permanent revolution of the kind that would appeal to an old Trotskyite. And this is my point: that immoderation of ideals and of strategies characterizes both extremes of the political spectrum. It is easier for CH to crawl into bed with the Bushies than to parse out the soporific nuances of the liberal intelligentsia. It's not that he can't handle nuance, it's that he doesn't want to.

Which brings me to his inconsistent votes. The longer Nation piece, I'd wager, expresses CH's deep preference; the Slate blurb is a tease. But the words of that tease are important: Kerry's "election would compel mainstream and liberal Democrats to get real about Iraq." He "should get his worst private nightmare and have to report for duty." CH wants the Democrats to convert too, and for that he needs them to go through a violent, traumatic experience. He doesn't want Kerry to win; he wants to turn Kerry into Bush, into a true-believer, a crusader, a man for whom resoluteness has replaced reflection. As with all radicals of the Left and Right, CH reserves his most bitter contempt for the moderate bourgeois intellectual.