Going it Alone: Christopher Hitchens and the Death of the Left

history did not, as the conservative critic Francis Fukuyama pronounced, come to end in 1989, this is because, in the sense of being the self-realization of freedom, history by then had already stopped. Even before the emergence of new geopolitical configurations and institutional forms, a new and unprecedented political situation had already taken shape, one in which were severed the last threads of continuity connecting the present with the long epoch of political emancipation. That history, stretching back through modern socialism and the labor movement to the Enlightenment and the great bourgeois revolutions that came before, has become almost unintelligible. And, yet, unlike Stalinism’s well-publicized collapse, the death of the long-ailing Left in our time has passed almost wholly unnoticed. A notable exception to this may be found in the work of journalist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens, whose writings, though they sometimes express it only unconsciously and symptomatically, register very often a distinct awareness of the unprecedented circumstance that is the death of the Left.

When Hitchens publicly broke with the The Nation in the aftermath of 9/11, the break was based on chiefly moral grounds. The Left’s anti-war arguments were, Hitchens argued, “contemptible” and in “bad faith”; its authors were corrupt “masochists” [104-8]. While Hitchens’s defection was widely condemned by the Left, few attended closely to the moral form that it took, which is in many ways as revealing as the substance of the debates it occasioned. In Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left [hereafter CHHC], editors Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman provide a handy single-volume introduction to Hitchens’s tussle with the Left during those years, supplying both an ample selection of Hitchens’s writings and published interviews, as well as many criticisms by his erstwhile comrades. Through them we relive something of the disorientation and struggle for clarification on the Left that accompanied 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Though in some respects a replay of debates around western intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s, far more engaging is the near total discrediting of the existing Left that Hitchens has accomplished writing as a moralist since.