The Purest Neocon

Christopher Hitchens, an unreconstructed Bolshevik, finds his natural home on the pro-war Right.

"There is no denying Christopher Hitchens’s skill as a public figure: he is seldom at a loss for words, sometimes entertaining, and occasionally even right. But he keeps getting important things wrong because, throughout his political wanderings, there persists a strange loyalty to an obscure bloodthirsty revolutionary and to the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution. For Hitchens—now honored throughout the neoconservative Right—remains what he has been throughout his public life, a disciple of Leon Trotsky and a talented writer and polemicist—perhaps the most talented polemicist the Bolshevik tradition has produced in the West.

(...) So where does this lover of Trotsky and hater of God, this despiser of religion and tradition and devotee of “permanent revolution,” this anti-Catholic bigot and reviler of Reagan and John Paul, now find an ideological home? Among the neoconservatives, naturally.

As Hitchens told Johann Hari in the same interview where he said “I don’t regret anything,” he admires Paul Wolfowitz, whom he described as a “real bleeding heart.” According to Hari, Hitchens sees neoconservatism as a “distinctively new strain of thought, preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread democracy.” Hari also wrote that Hitchens believes that if neoconservatism “can become dominant within the Republican Party, it can turn US power into a revolutionary force.” Barry Didcock came to a similar conclusion in the June 5, 2005 Sunday Herald after interviewing Hitchens: “The way Hitchens tells it, he began to realize, as the 1990s wore on, that US force could and should be used to fight what he saw as the forces of fascism.” Hitchens still wants world revolution; the only difference is that now he sees us Americans as perfectly placed to do the fighting and the dying needed to achieve his Trotskyist dream.

(...) Didcock notes, “the origins of [Hitchens’s] position lie in his long-held distaste for religion,” and Hitchens told Hari, “The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represent all the most reactionary elements on earth. ... However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this.” Hitchens also wrote—in the same column in which he extolled the priest-killing potency of the French and Russian Revolutions—that “George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he—and the US armed forces—have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled.” Hitchens’s entire politics is motivated by his hatred of religion and tradition; he’d be just as happy bombing St. Peter’s as the Taliban.

Needless to say, Hitchens’s views have nothing to do with American conservatism or even American patriotism, which sees America as a real country and a real place, not as a template onto which foreigners project their ideological fantasies. None of the Founders wanted to use American power to bring about world revolution, nor did they believe in wasting American blood and treasure in grandiose ideological crusades. Neither did Ronald Reagan. While effusive in his praise for the neocons, Hitchens told Hari that he would never join “the Buchanan-Reagan right.”

For their part, the neocons have warmly embraced Hitchens. His writing is welcomed at The Weekly Standard, which also gave a glowing review to his latest book, and at FrontPageMag.com, which has given him three sycophantic interviews and describes him as “one of the most prominent political and cultural essayists of our time.” Regulars at National Review Online praise and link to Hitchens’s work, and David Frum has boasted there of his friendship with Hitchens. Recently, Hitchens was even allowed to post in NRO’s Corner to respond to Ramesh Ponnuru’s flaccid criticism of his Catholic-bashing piece on Judge Roberts. (Ponnuru agreed that he found Hitchens’s outbursts on the pope “bracing,” but he drew the line when Hitchens used his anti-Catholicism against the Bush administration.) NRO has hardly been as accommodating to any of the traditional conservatives its writers have smeared. (..)" By Tom Piatak, The American Conservative