Tribune, 28 May 1993
The journalist and controversialist is back from the US to launch a new book of essays. He talks to Paul Anderson
“We play a game on the left in America,” says Christopher Hitchens. “Which election do you wish that the Republicans rather than the Democrats had actually won?
“Some very daring souls say that if Thomas Dewey had beaten Harry Tru¬man in 1948 there would have been no cold war,” he says. “People can never dare to take it back as far as Franklin Roosevelt. And some of them don’t agree with me that Barry Goldwater should have beaten Lyndon Johnson in 1964 – because then there would have been no Vietnam war.”
Hitchens, in London for the launch of his latest collection of essays, For the Sake of Argument (Verso, £18.95), delights in upsetting received wisdoms, particularly those of the left.
Indeed, he does it for a living. Since leaving Britain for the United States 15 years ago, he has written a column for The Nation, the American weekly that plays much the same role as the New Statesman here, in which he has made a speciality of stirring up as much controversy as he can in pursuit of hypocrisy and cant.
He has done much the same in many other Ameri¬can periodicals and, particularly of late, on television and radio talk shows, becoming something of a minor celebrity.
America, it seems, loves to hate Hitchens’s posh Brit drawl, his alien far-left politics and his ability to shock. Here, we get the articles between hard covers, and late. Some of the stuff in For the Sake of Argument dates back to 1987, although most, including the best of the columns from The Nation, are from 1990-92. Still, late is better than never.
The book includes pieces on an extraordinary range of themes – from P. G. Wodehouse through the delights of “Booze and fags” (written, he claims, “while cold sober”) to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie – and it is all worth reading. But the best bits, undoubtedly, are his commentaries on American politics, especially the no-holds-barred assault on Bill Clinton, which has been almost uninterrupted since the Arkansas governor started running for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“So what is all this garbage about ‘the new paradigm’ of Clinton’s forthright Southern petty-bourgeois thrusting innovative fearless blah blah blah?” he yelled at readers of The Nation in March last year after Clinton had authorised the execu¬tion of a prisoner on death row. “In a test of principle, where even the polls have shown that people do not demand the death penalty, he opted to maintain the foulest traditions and for the meanest purposes. As the pundits keep saying, he is a man to watch.”
It is clear that Hitchens is already well on the way to deciding that last year’s election was one of those that the Democrats should have lost. Clinton is proving precisely the disaster that he thought he would be.
“In the campaign, his only consistent point was to say that he would cut the tax burden insofar as it fell on the ‘middle classes’, whom he refused to define,” he says. “He wanted everyone who heard that message to think it meant them. Now he’s increasing taxes, mainly on the middle-income population, and everyone in the administration is pretending that this isn’t a breach of promise.
“You’re supposed to get points for lying in that way, and you do get them from the opinion poll racket and from the people who write columns in the bourgeois press. But actually it isn’t all that smart because people find you out quite quickly.”
Clinton, he goes on, was an establishment candidate, bankrolled by Wall Street and special-interest lobbies. “The reason substantial sections of the establishment swung to him is that they’re afraid of the underclass. It was the Los Angeles riots that got Clinton elected. His test will be whether he can bring in these people who are very nearly excluded from society.”
So far, the signs are ominous. The reform of the health service that Clinton promised during the campaign has already foundered, as has his at¬tempt to give a boost to the economy.
On foreign policy, “in many areas he’s worse than George Bush”, says Hitchens, quoting the new president’s policies on the Middle East (where Clinton has been much more sympathetic to the Israel lobby than his predecessor), Cuba (where he “campaigned against Bush from the right”) and nuclear testing.
“Whatever you think about Bosnia, it is only possible to say that Clinton has been contemptible. He played with all sorts of solutions, raised expectations and, when anything showed signs of giving the least political difficulty, he dropped it. By any standards, a really low-grade performance.”
The only thing that Clinton is good at, according to Hitchens, is appealing to the myriad of special-interest lobbies that make up so much of what thinks of itself as the American left: “He has manipulated images so that people in the gay movement, the feminist movement, the civil rights movement and the Hispanic lobby feel that privately he’s on their side.”
Hitchens is scathing about this pandering to what he calls “identity politics” – the idea that there is something radical about identifying oneself as a member of a group ‘“oppressed” by dint of sharing such traits as skin colour, gender or sexual preference.
His opposition is not based on a reactionary yearning for a society run by white male heterosexuals: rather, his point is that the growing importance of racial and sexual identities in politics is a symptom of social fragmentation, with no necessarily radical implications. “The left has falsely convinced itself that there are all of these individual emancipations going on, and I think it’s going to be disappointed. What’s missing in all this is any conception of citizenship or comradeship or the common good. And that’s too precious to give up to any special claim.”
Hitchens’s initial journalistic reputation was founded on his coverage of British politics in the seventies, particularly for the New Statesman. He left for the US and The Nation because “the Statesman was going down the karsy very suddenly and very depressingly and there was nowhere else that I wanted to go or would have had me. Everything else looked pretty lousy too: the experience of the Callaghan years, seeing Thatcherism coming. I thought: ‘If I don’t get out now, I never will.’“ Even the left of the late seventies suffered from “extreme crumminess”, and the Labour left was worst of all. “Internal fights on the National Executive Committee don’t make very interesting copy even if you’re interested in it,” he says.
For all this, he retains a keen partisan interest in Britain. He is, of course, no admirer of the contempo¬rary Labour Party. One of the best pieces in For the Sake of Argument is “Neil Kinnock: Defeat Without Honour”, written for The Nation after last year’s British general election, an excoriating assault on Labour’s failed strategy in the late eighties; “Tell us what you want, it wheedled the voters, and we will agree to stand for it. Here are our principles, and if you don’t like them, we’ll change them.”
Hitchens has not changed his mind in the past year. Unsurprisingly, he is particularly hard on the Clintonmania that hit Labour’s upper echelons six months ago. “Clinton’s victory was something to cling to after the humiliation of Kinnock: here’s the new paradigm – apolitical, technocratic, lowest common denominator – and it works!
“Labour has learned absolutely nothing from the defeat of Kinnock. All its leaders think is: ‘Well, we must try harder next time.’“ He remembers John Smith from the seventies as “a talkable-to guy”. But “throughout the whole of the Wilson-Callaghan humiliation I don’t think he gave the whips any trouble at all. He’s a conformist, a complete conformist.
“People always say: ‘Well, what about the alternative?’ That, of course, turns any dolt into a master political strategist, as we saw with the Kinnock team. ‘Consider the alternative’ would be my slogan.”
