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REASON * November 2001
Free Radical
Journalist Christopher Hitchens explains why he’s no longer a
socialist, why moral authoritarianism is on the rise, and what's
wrong with anti-globalization protestors.
Interviewed by Rhys Southan
In the roughly two decades since British writer Christopher Hitchens
arrived in the U.S., he has emerged as a singularly insightful,
provocative, and impossible-to-ignore critic of American politics and
culture. His regular columns for the left-wing think magazine The
Nation and the glitzy celebrity sheet Vanity Fair stand out in both
publications for their clarity of thought and prose. He famously
served as one of the models for Peter Fallows, the memorable
dissipated Brit journalist in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.
His television appearances are legendary, none perhaps more so than
his contretemps with Charlton Heston during CNN’s live coverage of
the Gulf War. Hitchens insisted that Heston list what countries have
borders with Iraq. After Heston flubbed the answer, he upbraided the
journalist for "taking up valuable network time giving a high-school
geography lesson." To which Hitchens replied: "Oh, keep your
hairpiece on."
Though the 52-year-old Hitchens clearly enjoys mocking the famous and
the powerful -- he once derided the House of Windsor for "sucking off
[Britain’s] national tit" -- he’s no mere gadfly. In books such as
The Missionary Position, No One Left to Lie To, and The Trial of
Henry Kissinger, he has crafted thoughtful and provocative extended
indictments of Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, and the former secretary
of state and Nobel Peace Prize winner; his recent collection,
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, was
reviewed in the July issue of REASON. (See "Literary Legislators.")
Hitchens’ willingness to put moral principles before political
alliances has earned him the wrath of ideological compatriots. When
he signed an affidavit contradicting testimony by Clinton
administration aide Sidney Blumenthal that the president had never
circulated tales of Monica Lewinsky as a crazed stalker, Hitchens was
attacked as a liar and a snitch in the pages of The Nation and almost
ended his relationship with the magazine.
Hitchens’ newest book is Letters to a Young Contrarian: The Art of
Mentoring (Basic Books), in which he exhorts youth to remain both
principled and oppositional, freethinkers in the best Enlightenment
tradition. Given such thoughts, it’s not surprising that Hitchens’
next book will be about George Orwell. Nor is it surprising to find
him increasingly interested in alternatives to orthodox left-wing
thinking. A regular reader of REASON -- a few years back, he wrote
that he gets "more out of reading...REASON than I do out of many
‘movement’ journals" -- Hitchens has become increasingly interested
in the libertarian critique of state power and its defense of
individual liberty. "I am," he says, "much more inclined to stress
those issues...to see that they do possess, with a capital H and a
capital I, Historical Importance."
Appropriately, Rhys Southan, REASON’s Burton Gray Memorial Intern and
the youngest member of our staff, interviewed Hitchens in late
August. REASON: How were you different as a young contrarian than you
are as an older one?
Christopher Hitchens: The book forces me to ask that question, and
yet I don’t quite. I must say that I’ve always found the generational
emphasis on the way that my youth was covered to be very annoying.
There were a lot of other people born in April 1949, and I just don’t
feel like I have anything in common with most of them. I forget who
it was who said that generation -- age group, in other words -- is
the most debased form of solidarity. The idea of anyone who was born
around that time having an automatic ticket to being called "a ’60s
person," is annoying to me. Especially membership in the specific
group that I could claim to have been a part of: not just of "the
’60s," but of 1968. There’s even a French term for it: soixante-
huitard. You can now guess roughly what the political parameters were
for me at the time. And you can also guess at least one of the
sources of my irritation, which is that by generational analysis,
Bill Clinton and I are of the same kidney and same DNA. I repudiate
that with every fiber.
But I’m postponing an answer to your question. In those days, I was
very much in rebellion against the state. The state had presented
itself to [my fellow protestors and me], particularly through the
Vietnam War, in the character of a liar and a murderer. If, at a
young age, you are able to see your own government in that character,
it powerfully conditions the rest of your life. I was taught very
early on that the state can be, and is, a liar and a murderer. Yet I
have to concede that I didn’t think there was a problem necessarily
with the state, or government, or collective power.
I had been interested in libertarian ideas when I was younger. I set
aside this interest in the ’60s simply because all the overwhelming
political questions seemed to sideline issues of individual liberty
in favor of what seemed then to be grander questions. I suppose what
would make me different now is that I am much more inclined to stress
those issues of individual liberty than I would have been then. And
to see that they do possess, with a capital H and a capital I,
Historical Importance, the very things that one thought one was
looking for.
REASON: When did your focus change? In Letters, you write that you’ve
"learned a good deal from the libertarian critique" of the idea that
the individual belongs to the state and you praise a friend who
taught you that "the crucial distinction between systems...was no
longer ideological. The main political difference was between those
who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or
should -- be the property of the state."
Hitchens: It’s hard to assign a date. I threw in my lot with the left
because on all manner of pressing topics -- the Vietnam atrocity,
nuclear weapons, racism, oligarchy -- there didn’t seem to be any
distinctive libertarian view. I must say that this still seems to me
to be the case, at least where issues of internationalism are
concerned. What is the libertarian take, for example, on Bosnia or
Palestine?
There’s also something faintly ahistorical about the libertarian
worldview. When I became a socialist it was largely the outcome of a
study of history, taking sides, so to speak, in the battles over
industrialism and war and empire. I can’t -- and this may be a limit
on my own imagination or education -- picture a libertarian analysis
of 1848 or 1914. I look forward to further discussions on this, but
for the moment I guess I’d say that libertarianism often feels like
an optional philosophy for citizens in societies or cultures that are
already developed or prosperous or stable. I find libertarians more
worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable
corporation. The great thing about the present state of affairs is
the way it combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the
insurance companies.
What I did was to keep two sets of books in my mind. I was certainly
interested in issues that have always interested libertarians --
defining what the limits to state power are. The first political
issue on which I’d ever decided to take a stand was when I was in my
teens and before I’d become a socialist. It was the question of
capital punishment. A large part of my outrage toward capital
punishment was exactly the feeling that it was arrogating too much
power to the government. It was giving life-and-death power to the
state, which I didn’t think it deserved, even if it could use it
wisely. I was convinced it could not and did not.
In the mid-1970s, I first met someone whom I’ve gotten to know better
since, Adam Michnik, one of the more brilliant of the Polish
dissidents of the time. Michnik made the luminous remark you quoted
about the citizen and his relation to the state. I remember thinking,
"Well, that’s a remark that’s impossible to forget."
REASON: So, do you still consider yourself a socialist?
Hitchens: Brian Lamb of C-SPAN has been interviewing me on and off
for about 20 years, since I’d first gone to Washington, which is
roughly when his own Washington Journal program began. As the years
went by, he formed the habit of starting every time by saying: "You
haven’t been on the show for a bit. Tell me, are you still a
socialist?" And I would always say, "Yes, I am." I knew that he hoped
that one day I would say, "No, you know what, Brian, I’ve seen the
light, I’ve seen the error of my ways." And I knew that I didn’t want
to give him this satisfaction, even if I’d had a complete conversion
experience.
The funny thing is that, recently, he stopped asking me. I don’t know
why. And just about at that point, I had decided that however I would
have phrased the answer -- I didn’t want to phrase it as someone
repudiating his old friends or denouncing his old associations -- I
no longer would have positively replied, "I am a socialist."
I don’t like to deny it. But it simply ceased to come up, as a matter
of fact. And in my own life there’s a reason for that.
There is no longer a general socialist critique of capitalism --
certainly not the sort of critique that proposes an alternative or a
replacement. There just is not and one has to face the fact, and it
seems to me further that it’s very unlikely, though not impossible,
that it will again be the case in the future. Though I don’t think
that the contradictions, as we used to say, of the system, are by any
means all resolved.
REASON: Many socialists have a radically anti-authoritarian
disposition, even though the policies they would enact end up being
authoritarian. What causes this divide?
Hitchens: Karl Marx was possibly the consummate anti-statist in his
original writings and believed that the state was not the solution to
social problems, but the outcome of them, the forcible resolution in
favor of one ruling group. He thought that if you could give a name
to utopia, it was the withering away of the state. Certainly those
words had a big effect on me.
The reason why people tend to forget them, or the left has a tendency
to forget them in practice, has something to do with the realm of
necessity. If you make your priority -- let’s call it the 1930s --
the end of massive unemployment, which was then defined as one of the
leading problems, there seemed no way to do it except by a program of
public works. And, indeed, the fascist governments in Europe drew
exactly the same conclusion at exactly the same time as Roosevelt
did, and as, actually, the British Tories did not. But not because
the Tories had a better idea of what to do about it. They actually
favored unemployment as a means of disciplining the labor market.
You see what I mean: Right away, one’s in an argument, and there’s
really nothing to do with utopia at all. And then temporary
expedients become dogma very quickly -- especially if they seem to
work.
Then there’s the question of whether or not people can be made by
government to behave better. They can certainly be made to behave
worse; fascism is the proof of that, and so is Stalinism. But a big
experience, and this gets us a bit nearer the core of it, a very big
influence on a number of people my age was the American civil rights
movement, and the moral grandeur of that and also the astonishing
speed and exclusiveness of its success. A lot of that did involve
asking the government to condition people’s behavior, at least in the
sense of saying there are certain kinds of private behavior that are
now not lawful. And there seemed to be every moral justification for
this, and I’m not sure I wouldn’t still say that there was.
But it’s become too easily extended as an analogy and as a metaphor --
and too unthinkingly applied. In my memory, the demand of the
student radical was for the university to stop behaving as if it was
my parent, in loco parentis. They pretend they’re your family, which
is exactly what we’ve come here to get away from. We don’t want the
dean telling us what we can smoke or who we can sleep with or what we
can wear, or anything of this sort. That was a very important part of
the ’60s.
Now you go to campus and student activists are continuously demanding
more supervision, of themselves and of others, in order to assure
proper behavior and in order to ensure that nobody gets upset. I
think that’s the measure of what I mean.
REASON: Does that explain Ralph Nader’s popularity among students
during last year’s election? He came across as a contrarian in his
campaign, and became a hero to a lot of college students. You
supported him, too. But he’s essentially a curmudgeon with a
conservative disposition who advocated lots of regulation.
Hitchens: If I separate in my mind what it is that people like about
Ralph, I’m certain the first thing is this: There are people who
support him who don’t agree with him politically at all, or have no
idea of what his politics are. I would be hard-put to say that I knew
what his politics were, but the quality that people admired of him
was certainly his probity, his integrity. It’s just impossible to
imagine Ralph Nader taking an under-the-table campaign donation or a
kickback. Or arranging to have someone assassinated, or any of these
kinds of things. That’s not a small thing to say about somebody.
You’re right that his approach to life is in many ways a very
conservative one. He leads a very austere, rather traditional mode of
life. I met him first about 20 years ago. He contacted me, in fact,
as he’d admired something I’d written. We met, and the main outcome
of this was a 20-year campaign on his part to get me to stop smoking.
In fact, he even offered me a large-ish sum of money once if I would
quit. Almost as if he were my father or my uncle. Yes, generally
speaking, he is a believer in the idea that government can better
people, as well as condition them. But he’s not an authoritarian,
somehow. The word would be paternalist, with the state looking after
you, rather than trying to control you. But there’s some of us who
don’t find the state, in its paternal guise, very much more
attractive. In fact, it can be at its most sinister when it decides
that what it’s doing is for your own good.
I certainly wish I wasn’t a smoker and wish I could give it up. But
I’m damned if I’ll be treated how smokers are now being treated by
not just the government, but the government ventriloquizing the
majority. The majoritarian aspect makes it to me more repellent. And
I must say it both startles and depresses me that an authoritarian
majoritarianism of that kind can have made such great strides in
America, almost unopposed. There’s something essentially un-American
in the idea that I could not now open a bar in San Francisco that
says, "Smokers Welcome."
REASON: The right and the left have joined together in a war against
pleasure. What caused this?
Hitchens: The most politically encouraging event on the horizon --
which is a very bleak one politically -- is the possibility of fusion
or synthesis of some of the positions of what is to be called left
and some of what is to be called libertarian. The critical junction
could be, and in some ways already is, the War on Drugs.
The War on Drugs is an attempt by force, by the state, at mass
behavior modification. Among other things, it is a denial of medical
rights, and certainly a denial of all civil and political rights. It
involves a collusion with the most gruesome possible allies in the
Third World. It’s very hard for me to say that there’s an issue more
important than that at the moment. It may sound like a hysterical
thing to say, but I really think it’s much more important than
welfare policy, for example. It’s self-evidently a very, very
important matter. Important enough, perhaps, to create this synthesis
I’ve been looking for, or help to do that.
REASON: What are the signs that political fusion between some
libertarians and some leftists is happening?
Hitchens: One reason the War on Drugs goes on in defiance of all
reason is that it has created an enormous clientele of people who in
one way or another depend upon it for their careers or for their
jobs. That’s true of congressmen who can’t really get funding for
their district unless it’s in some way related to anti-drug activity.
There’s all kinds of funding that can be smuggled through customs as
anti-drug money -- all the way to the vast squads of people who are
paid to try to put the traffic down, and so forth. So what’s
impressive is how many people whose job it has been to enforce this
war are coming out now and saying that it’s obviously, at best, a
waste of time.
The other encouraging sign is that those in the political-
intellectual class who’ve gone public about it have tended to be on
what would conventionally have been called the right. Some of them
are fairly mainstream Republicans, like the governor of New Mexico.
National Review, under the ownership of William Buckley, published a
special issue devoted to exposing the fallacies and appalling
consequences of the War on Drugs. I thought that should have been The
Nation that did that. I now wouldn’t care so much about the
precedence in that. It wouldn’t matter to me who was first any
longer. I don’t have any allegiances like that anymore. I don’t ask
what people’s politics are. I ask what their principles are.
REASON: Has your own shift in principles changed your relationship
with The Nation?
Hitchens: For a while it did. I thought at one point that I might
have to resign from the magazine. That was over, in general, its
defense of Bill Clinton in office, which I still think was a historic
mistake made by left-liberals in this country. It completely
squandered the claim of a magazine like The Nation to be a journal of
opposition. By supporting Clinton, The Nation became a journal more
or less of the consensus. And of the rightward moving consensus at
that, because I don’t think there’s any way of describing Bill
Clinton as an enemy of conservatism.
I’d been made aware by someone in the Clinton administration of what
I thought was criminal activity. At any rate, the administration
engaged in extraordinarily reprehensible activity by way of
intimidating female witnesses in an important case. I decided that I
would be obstructing justice if I’d kept the evidence to myself. That
led to me being denounced in The Nation as the equivalent of a
McCarthyite state invigilator, which I thought was absurd. Where I
live, the White House is the government. So if one attacks it, one
isn’t reporting one’s friends to the government, so to speak, by
definition.
The controversy shows the amazing persistence of antediluvian
categories and habits of thought on the left, and these were applied
to me in a very mendacious and I thought rather thuggish way. I had
to make an issue of it with the magazine, and I was prepared to quit.
But we were able to come to an agreement. They stopped saying this
about me, in other words.
But there is no such thing as a radical left anymore. Ça n’existe
pas. The world of Gloria Steinem and Jesse Jackson, let’s say, has
all been, though it doesn’t realize it, hopelessly compromised by
selling out to Clintonism. It became, under no pressure at all, and
with no excuse, and in no danger, a voluntary apologist for abuse of
power.
It couldn’t wait to sell out. It didn’t even read the small print or
ask how much or act as if it were forced under pressure to do so. I
don’t think they’ve realized how that’s changed everything for them.
They’re not a left. They’re just another self-interested faction with
an attitude toward government and a hope that it can get some of its
people in there. That makes it the same as everyone else -- only
slightly more hypocritical and slightly more self-righteous.
REASON: In Letters to a Young Contrarian, you talk about how it was
libertarians -- specifically Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan --
who did the most to end the draft by persuading President Nixon’s
special commission on the matter that mandatory military service
represented a form of slavery. Is it the contrarians from unexpected
ranks that enact real change?
Hitchens: Absolutely. Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Friedman used my mantra
correctly by saying the draft would make the citizen the property of
the state. To argue against them, however, I’ll quote someone whom
neither of them particularly likes, but whom I think they both
respect. John Maynard Keynes said somewhere -- I think in Essays in
Persuasion -- that many revolutions are begun by conservatives
because these are people who tried to make the existing system work
and they know why it does not. Which is quite a profound insight. It
used to be known in Marx’s terms as revolution from above.
It would indeed come from enlightened and often self-interested
members of the old regime who perfectly well knew that the assurances
being given to the ruler were false. That the system didn’t know what
was going on or how to provide for itself, but couldn’t bear to
acknowledge that fact and had no means for self-correction. That is
indeed how revolutions often begin.
REASON: What do you think about the anti-globalization movement? Is
it contrarian or radical in your sense?
Hitchens: There was a long lapse where it seemed that nobody took to
the streets at all, and where the idea of taking to the streets had
begun to seem like something really from a bygone era. It came back
very suddenly, initially in Seattle. In some kind of promethean way,
the idea was passed on and contained, perhaps like fire in a reed,
only to break out again.
In a way I should have been pleased to see that, and I suppose in
some small way I was, but a lot of this did seem to me to be a
protest against modernity, and to have a very conservative twinge, in
the sense of being reactionary. It’s often forgotten that the Port
Huron Statement, the famous Students for a Democratic Society
document, was in part a protest against mechanization, against
bigness, against scale, against industrialization, against the
hugeness and impersonality of, as it thought of it, capitalism. There
were elements of that that I agreed with at the time, particularly
the interface between the military and the industrial [segments of
society].
I do remember thinking that it had a sort of archaic character to it,
exactly the kind of thing that Marx attacked, in fact, in the early
critiques of capitalism. What SDS seemed to want was a sort of
organic, more rural-based, traditional society, which probably
wouldn’t be a good thing if you could have it. But you can’t, so it’s
foolish to demand such a thing. This tendency has come out as the
leading one in what I can see of the anti-globalization protesters. I
hear the word globalization and it sounds to me like a very good
idea. I like the sound of it. It sounds innovative and
internationalist.
To many people it’s a word of almost diabolic significance -- as if
there could be a non-global response to something.
REASON: This anti-global approach seems especially surprising coming
from the left.
Hitchens: The Seattle protesters, I suppose you could say, in some
ways came from the left. You couldn’t say they came from the right,
although a hysterical aversion to world government and
internationalism is a very, very American nativist right-wing
mentality. It’s the sort that is out of fashion now but believe me,
if you go on radio stations to talk about Henry Kissinger, as I have
recently, you can find it. There are people who don’t care about
Kissinger massacring people in East Timor, or overthrowing democracy
in Chile, or anything of that sort. But they do believe he’s a tool
of David Rockefeller, and the Trilateral Commission, and the secret
world government. That used to be a big deal in California in the
’50s and ’60s with the John Birch Society.
There are elements of that kind of thing to be found in the anti-
globalization protests, but the sad thing is that practically
everything I’ve just said wouldn’t even be understood by most of the
people who attend the current protests, because they wouldn’t get the
references.
REASON: You’ve called yourself a socialist living in a time when
capitalism is more revolutionary.
Hitchens: I said this quite recently. I’m glad you noticed it. Most
of the readers of The Nation seemed not to have noticed it. That was
the first time I’d decided it was time I shared my hand. I forget
whether I said I was an ex-socialist, or recovering Marxist, or
whatever, but that would have been provisional or stylistic. The
thing I’ve often tried to point out to people from the early days of
the Thatcher revolution in Britain was that the political
consensus had been broken, and from the right. The revolutionary,
radical forces in British life were being led by the conservatives.
That was something that almost nobody, with the very slight exception
of myself, had foreseen.
I’d realized in 1979, the year she won, that though I was a member of
the Labour Party, I wasn’t going to vote for it. I couldn’t bring
myself to vote conservative. That’s purely visceral. It was nothing
to do with my mind, really. I just couldn’t physically do it. I’ll
never get over that, but that’s my private problem.
But I did realize that by subtracting my vote from the Labour Party,
I was effectively voting for Thatcher to win. That’s how I discovered
that that’s what I secretly hoped would happen. And I’m very glad I
did. I wouldn’t have been able to say the same about Reagan, I must
say. But I don’t think he had her intellectual or moral courage. This
would be a very long discussion. You wouldn’t conceivably be able to
get it into a REASON interview.
Marx’s original insight about capitalism was that it was the most
revolutionary and creative force ever to appear in human history. And
though it brought with it enormous attendant dangers, [the
revolutionary nature] was the first thing to recognize about it. That
is actually what the Manifesto is all about. As far as I know, no
better summary of the beauty of capital has ever been written. You
sort of know it’s true, and yet it can’t be, because it doesn’t
compute in the way we’re taught to think. Any more than it computes,
for example, that Marx and Engels thought that America was the great
country of freedom and revolution and Russia was the great country of
tyranny and backwardness.
But that’s exactly what they did think, and you can still astonish
people at dinner parties by saying that. To me it’s as true as
knowing my own middle name. Imagine what it is to live in a culture
where people’s first instinct when you say it is to laugh. Or to look
bewildered. But that’s the nearest I’ve come to stating not just what
I believe, but everything I ever have believed, all in one girth.
End<{{{
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