Excerpt: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left”

“When he saw his old left-wing comrades busily hatching excuses for neutrality as Slobodan Milošević waged war on Bosnia, he realized that much of the Left was either indifferent about this confrontation or on the wrong side.”

Editor’s note: This excerpt comes from Matt Johnson’s book How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment, which was released with Pitchstone Publishing in February of this year.

In a 1944 letter to Noel Willmett, George Orwell worried that totalitarianism would spread throughout the world—a terrifying idea that would form the basis of a novel he was beginning to write. Orwell decried the “horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies” of these leaders. But he expressed optimism in response to Willmett’s observation that the United States and the United Kingdom had not succumbed to the totalitarian impulse: “As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA,” Orwell wrote, “Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom.”

Despite Orwell’s suspicion that something like the world he would create in 1984 was actually in formation, as well as his concern over what he described as the “decay of democracy,” he would not have written the book if he believed that outcome was inevitable. Although he was an unyielding critic of British imperialism and American cultural and political influence, he also acknowledged that Western democracy should be defended and improved: “I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.”

At the end of the Cold War, the Anglo-American journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens recalled a “common feeling that the values of pluralism and democracy were worth having for their own sake.” The totalitarian idea, it seemed, had collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. In a 1994 essay about his departure from the Socialist Workers Party in the mid-1970s, Hitchens recalled a conversation he had with the Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń when the Iron Curtain was still drawn over Eastern Europe: “He told me that he’d ceased to bother with Trotskyist disputation, and now felt that the real confrontation was between pluralism and state absolutism. However simplistically phrased, this became the slogan of the most thorough-going revolution we ever did live to see.”