THE STRENUOUS CREDULOUSNESS OF THE CAPITAL. posted by Richard Seymour

The depressingly familiar journey from Trotskyist to neoconservative is not one we might have expected Christopher Hitchens to take. For one thing, it is cliched. For another, it is boring. And for another, it rather makes ones previous statements look foolish. Hitchens once avoided cliche, detested bores and would have plucked out his tongue with hot scissors before patronising his younger self, as he so avidly does these days.

Still. There were clues. And with a few raids on his past material, we might be able to locate them and in them an order of importance that is more than merely ordinal.

Hitchens is suspicious of what he calls "the strenuous capitalisation of the Abstract", so he tells us in Letters to a Young Contrarian. Yet, we find a similar tendency in his own writing, hidden seductively in a passage in which he argues the merits of "the decision to live at a slight acute angle to society".

Society here is a word used very much in its capitalised sense, as if it were a puressence, some undifferentiated unity. And although Hitchens is too good a debater to admit it, the advice he offers to this Young Contrarian (perhaps as "staunchly conservative" in the end as the Young Hegelians) actually implies an unreal homogenisation of Opinion which one can set oneself against. Thus, Hitchens rails against "the stupid liberal consensus" without pausing to wonder whether such a consensus actually exists beyond the pages of Harpers and the Nation. If Hitchens admits that society is a fractious, schismatic, internally militating affair, he might be asked to which tendency he is therefore living at a slight angle? ALL of them, presumably - and this is true for Hitchens in the sense that the totality of his public stances and opinions are unique to him, not so much tendentious as idiosyncratic. It is nevertheless noticeable that on specific issues, he finds himself aligned first with one tendency, then with another, and so on...

On the new US imperialism, he is an impeccable neoconservative; on the death penalty he is a liberal; on the Euro he is with the Tory wets and (some of) New Labour. The trouble with tortuously pursuing this elusive 'angle' is that it renders one susceptible to the "animating illusion" as one critic put it that to be in opposition is to be in the right. One designates the enemy Consensus, and then reacts against it. Hitchens' insults toward the antiwar movement reflect this. In the Observer, the house journal of Establishment liberalism, he tells readers that it is the antiwar movement that has become respectable. If Henry Kissinger opposes the war, then it must be so. Old European leaders, Brent Scowcroft, Gen. Anthony Zinni. Hitchens also suggested that Ariel Sharon too may be against it - a pure fantasy if not fabrication. He avers that the antiwar camp is obsessed with 'stability', so much so that it would rather see the preservation of the Middle Eastern autocracies than the spread of democracy. He is presumably aware that these allegations might more justly be made of the old Foreign Policy establishment, the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski et al. But it suits Hitchens ideologically to be in opposition. 'They' are "auxilliaries to dictatorship", sponsored by a clique of old hat imperialists, while of course Hitchens' own embattled position has to make do with the support of a few extremist revolutionaries like Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, the State Department, Israel, Silvio Berlusconi... With underdogs like that, who needs the ruling class?

This argument resonates with one he made elsewhere about the 1980s, in which he suggested that it was the Right who had been truly revolutionary - they broke the post-war consensus. And so, Hitchens admits, that was why he did not vote Labour in that period. He wanted Thatcher, with her "moral courage" to shake up British society. Even if it left millions worse off, on the dole, in poverty, with fewer and poorer amenities. It is this attachment to what we might call "oppositionism" that explains Hitchens' dogged attachment to obvious phantasies that the war on Iraq was about "democracy", "liberation" and so forth. He has need of the normative justifications in order to avoid consciously experiencing his oppositionism as the tawdry and cynical opportunism it is. Unless one had fetishised the notion of "permanent opposition" to borrow an over-worked phrase from Trotsky, how could one regard the 'respectability' of a position as some kind of failure? And it isn't as if Hitchens isn't able to welcome other successes of past antiwar generations. The Vietnam War spawned a movement which Hitchens credits with advancing the cause of 'precision weaponry' and casting a pall of disrepute over the use of chemical and other weapons - it would have been unhelpful to add that its greatest achievement was the curtailment of the ability of the US to intervene in other countries.

Here we have an argument that is 'at a slight angle to society' and yet entirely confirming to the direction of opinion in the country in which he lives. It would seem that Hitchens does not mind respectable opinion, so long as one does not call it that.


In the above-mentioned Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens quotes Zola on the Dreyfus affiar, when France was engulfed in waves of antisemitic outrage:

"A shameful terror reigns, the bravest turn cowards, and noone else dare say what he thinks for fear of being denounced as a traitor and a bribe-taker. The few newspapers which at first stood out for justice are now crawling in the dust before their readers..."

America, post-9/11, has been host to the same "moral sickness". Actors who denounce the war have been threatened with losing their jobs, others accused of giving succour to the enemy, peace protesters accused of being "objectively" on the side of Osama bin Laden (nice to see a bit of Stalinist terminology revived). Hitchens, in his pursuit of the contrary, has been a distinct pattern of ad hominem abuse. He has accused the peace movement of being an "auxiliary to dictatorship", of "anti-Americanism" of a febrile PC hysteria which would rather have Muslims killing us than be killed by us. The antiwar movement was led by people who "in their heart of hearts" yearned for the "return of the one-party state". Doubtless, if asked, he would assent to the proposition that such critics were "traitors" and their accidental allies in the French government "bribe-takers". Such enormous condescension from, let us face it, an enormous man, is not new to Hitchens. But if he took his fine rhetoric about democracy, secularism and freedom of speech seriously, he would not descend to such arrogant bullying and would be revolted by, rather than party to, this "shameful terror".

Hitchens tells his Young Contrarian that he thinks the game of socialism is over. Doubtless, with the international working class no longer leading the revolution, we are left only with the 'defense of secular and civil society' led by enlightened Western states. While Hitchens' "contrarianism" is not nihilism, it is fetishism, a fetish that encases in amber the burning polemical zeal of a former radical, a soixant-huitard. In the wake of a detumescent revolutionary fervour, and with the associated political vision largely gone, we are left with an opportunistic polemicising in which no matter how much one's opinion alters, it remains permanently in opposition, permanently contrarian. And this delivers the hammering Hitchensesque irony in which the most consummately bourgeois opinion acquires the mould and fashion of resistance. Irony is dead. Long live irony.