Review: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left” by Matt Johnson

“[Matt] Johnson believes that by adopting [Christopher] Hitchens’s approach—his allergy to party politics, his hatred of racism and nationalism, his emphasis on pluralism and humanism—the contemporary left will not just benefit at the ballot box but will also benefit morally and intellectually.”

A German chess player once remarked that Bobby Fischer, the American grandmaster, was so superb that “even his weaknesses are dangerous.” For polemics, politics, and oratory, the same is true of the late British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens. He was a skilled rhetorician. He regularly combined wit, irony, and a large grasp of history into spontaneous paragraphs. Even when he went awry, it was difficult to pinpoint, for he always had the appearance of being correct. “Nobody ever beat Hitchens in argument,” as Michael J. Totten wrote, “not even when he was wrong.” Hitchens was dangerous, even in his weaknesses.

Hitchens enjoyed argument for its own sake and ridiculed the idea of a unifier. “Politics is division by definition,” he claimed, and “if there was no disagreement there would be no politics.” Hitchens’s posthumous YouTube reputation, however, has garnered very little division. He is praised ad nauseam for “awesome comebacks” and “nuclear” responses. A term was invented—the “Hitchslap”—to describe his one-liners. A video with Hitchens in the thumbnail, wearing a serious face and a cream-colored suit, reads: “My Top 7 Favorite Hitchslaps.” He often debated religious leaders and political personalities. “You give me the awful impression,” he once told Sean Hannity, “of someone who hasn’t read any of the arguments against your position ever.” There are similar videos by the dozen. Although a divider and dissenter, Hitchens has garnered a unified crowd of fans. But Hitchens has another reputation, too.

Today’s political left remembers his later career as a case of horrible transformation. Beginning as a principled Marxist, he degenerated into a warmongering neoconservative, supporting the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Former Labour Member of Parliament George Galloway said Hitchens’s evolution was “the first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug.” Richard Seymour, the author of the 2013 book Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens, called him a “left-wing defector.” After the Taliban brutally retook Afghanistan in 2021, The Spectator conducted an autopsy on Hitchens’s post-September 11th politics, concluding that he had a “neoconservative mind.” In 2022, Jacobin published an essay on him, calling him a “zealous neoconservative convert.”