Anti-Climacus

EXPLANATION: I'm going to attempt to give the background for the Letter to the Editor I wrote (and that was published today) as briefly as possible. Here goes:

Hitch used to write a column for The Nation, which is a Left political magazine. To situate it on a spectrum of political ideologies, I think it is helpful to keep in mind the comment once given by an editor of Partisan Review (which after WWII was the bastion of New Deal/ muscular liberalism) (I believe the editor was Dwight MacDonald, but don't quote me on that): "they're a bunch of boot-licking Stalinists."*

His column was really just a variation on one of four topics, which I can summarize as follows: 1. Saddam Hussein is a bad man 2. Bill Clinton is a bad man 3. The Palestinians deserve their own state 4. Henry Kissinger is a bad man. Needless to say, I rarely paid much attention to it. But following Sept. 11, he started publishing columns that attacked his fellow Leftists for, among other things, misunderstanding the nature of the enemy, not thinking about the implications of their worldview, flogging tired shibboleths, and lacking the sort of emotional response one might expect such an event to have on human beings. The apotheosis of this approach can be found in "Of Sin, the Left, and Islamic Facism," which is as much of a watershed text for modern liberalism as can be imagined. In fairness to him, this reaction was not unfounded, especially with regard to The Nation--which carried, to name but one example, Katha Pollit's column about her refusing to let her daughter fly an American flag, because it only represented evil things.

Needless to say, pandemonium ensued: a big fight with Noam Chomsky was had, and people started accusing him of being a turncoat. He continued to write away, and his fellow writers at The Nation were quite happy to say, again and again, that John Ashcroft was a bigger threat to America than Osama bin Laden**. Anyway, he became tired of all of this, and announced his intention to quit the magazine, the reasons for which are contained in his last column, "Taking Sides."

Some people, John Honkala included, have a little trouble taking him at his word, or understanding how someone can, for example, be a liberal and not reflexively declare everything the Bush Administration does is wrong. Additionally, they seem to interpret his pro-war (albeit conditonal) stance as making him into a Republican, or at least something vaguely unsavory. Obviously, this doesn't hold up on sustained reflection. Hence my letter.



* Actually, it was William Phillips, and the accusation was that they were "licking Stalin's boots." I'd like to thank Google, Arts & Letters Daily, and command-F for making it possible for me to find the article I remembered reading about this four months ago.

** As it so happens, I brought back the one and only copy of Mother Jones I bought (from my freshman year, when I was nominally still a socialist, so I think that suffices as an excuse), in October 2000. The cover story is titled "The Phantom Menace," and it's about how the government seemed to be under the impression that there was going to be a terrorist attack, but that was silly, because we all know terrorists won't try to attack America, right? Well, let's just say that increases my hesitation to trust Left assessments of threats of any kind.