The Contrarian Spirit in Christopher Hitchens and David Horowitz

In the introduction to his book Letters to a Young Contrarian writer Christopher Hitchens describes the kind of summaries of his work that irritate him:

However, it does tire me to read, time and again, reviews and notices that are based on clippings from earlier reviews and notices. Thus there's always an early paragraph, usually written in a standard from of borrowed words, that says "Hitchens, whose previous targets have even included Mother Teresa and Princess Diana as well as Bill Clinton, now turns to ..."

Of course, as your guessed, this is dispiriting. For one thing, it bores me to see my supposed "profession" reduced to recycling.

I hope to do Hitchens better justice than that which he's used to in this post focusing on his work in relation to that of his friend David Horowitz.

Hitchens is known in the culture as a prolific journalist, critic, and pundit. He currently writes regular features for Vanity Fair, Slate, and The Atlantic, and writes frequently for other publications as well. Links to his writings can be found at the Christopher Hitchens Web.

Hitchens has written and edited some two dozen books, some of the most important I'd recommend to grasp the central themes of his writing include:

2008: Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
2007: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
2005: Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
2004: Love, Poverty, and War : Journeys and Essays
2003: Why Orwell Matters
2003: A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
2001: The Trial of Henry Kissinger
2001: Letters to a Young Contrarian (The book I've recently read and will discuss in relation to Horowitz.)
2000: No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family
1997: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
1993: For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

For most of his career Hitchens was known as one of the most prominent voices of the political Left. For 20 years he was a columnist for the Left's flagship publication, The Nation, a journal Horowitz regularly attacks as a journal that was "a fellow-traveler of Communist totalitarians during the Cold War and of Islamic totalitarians after 9/11." Hitchens' archive can be read here. This contentious relationship came to a conclusion when Hitchens' found himself at odds with the dominant response on the Left to the horrors of 9/11. He explained why he chose to leave the Nation in a letter to his former colleague Katha Pollit. This initial break was intensified when Hitchens chose to become a passionate supporter of the Iraq War.

Despite his commitment to the War on Terror and the Iraq War and his public break with the Left over these issues it's important to understand that Hitchens has not embraced the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement as Horowitz has. Nor has he made a clean break from the Left. In this BloggingHeads dialogue with former Nation colleague Eric Alterman Hitchens claims not to be a conservative, though he does embrace the neo-conservative label. Hitchens has not denounced his past writings or radically revised many of his already-stated positions. This doesn't seem to be the biggest problem for Horowitz. Since 9/11 the focus of Horowitz's work has shifted. In the '90s the principle enemy of America in his view was the Left. And so he focused his energies on attacking it and defending America from it. Since 9/11 a new, more dangerous enemy has established itself in Radical Islam. And so Horowitz is able to embrace Hitchens in this most important of fights while still holding important disagreements on less consequential matters. The Conservative Movement that Horowitz champions is one that does not demand ideological conformity on all issues. He discusses this point and the nature of the Conservative Movement in his essay "Michael Lind and the Right Wing Cabal" in his book Left Illusions. (See my In Depth reading of this essay here.)

Hitchens reviewed Left Illusions for the Los Angeles Times in an article titled "Left-leaving, Left-leaning." In the mostly positive review Hitchens wrote of Horowitz:

I should say at the outset that I have known or at least met Horowitz at almost every stage of his political evolution (and I confess that one of these collected essays defends me against some piece of calumny from a few years back. That article begins – quite correctly in a way – by saying that he knows full well that by taking my side he is throwing me a lifebelt made out of the heaviest possible cement). To have met Horowitz in Berkeley at the end of the ’60s, when he was running the now-legendary Ramparts magazine, was to have encountered a rather cocky and prickly guy, aware of his status as a celebrity of the New Left.

...

With the Cold War so to speak behind us, I suspected that Horowitz would find life without the old enemy a little dull. How much of an audience would there be for his twice-told tale about growing up in a doggedly loyal Communist Party family and his agonizing over the series of wrenches and shocks that had detached him from Marxism altogether? But then, I didn’t anticipate that in the fall of 2001 I would be reading solemn polemics by leading intellectualoids, proposing a strict moral equivalence – moral equivalence at best, in some cases – between America and the Taliban. Nor did I expect to see street theater antiwar demonstrations, organized by open admirers of Fidel Castro and Slobodan Milosevic and Kim Jong Il, united in the sinister line of, in effect, “hands off Saddam Hussein.” So I admit that I now find the sardonic, experienced pessimism in Horowitz’ book, a bit more serviceable than I once did. No matter what the shortcomings of U.S. policy may have been in the post-2001 crisis, it is clear at least to me that much of the left has disgraced itself either by soft-headed neutralism or, in the case of a very noticeable minority, by something rather like open sympathy for the enemies of civilization.

In 2007 Hitchens wrote a piece for Slate supporting Horowitz's Islamofascism Awareness Week and defending the very term "Islamofascism." Since the War on Terror began and Hitchens' allegiances with the Left grew more tenuous and many of his pieces have been featured on Front Page. His archive is here and an interview between him and Front Page managing editor Jamie Glazov can be read here. When Horowitz wrote The End of Time, Hitchens was featured in the first chapter and identified as a friend.

However, as is to be expected, Hitchens first appeared as an adversary in Horowitz's early conservative texts. He makes appearances in Destructive Generation, first for expressing admiration for Noam Chomsky and later for attacking Horowitz and Peter Collier's Second Thoughts conference. In Horowitz and Collier's description of Hitchens, discussing the writer in the late '80s, we see Hitchens' post 9/11 shift more clearly:

Remembered by Oxford classmates as part of a coterie of self-style revolutionaries who joked about compiling a list of social democrats to be killed after the revolution, Hitchens is perhaps best known in America for an article in Harper's attacking the idea that there is such a phenomenon as terrorism, or that American power ought to resist it. According to Hitchens, terrorism cannot be defined except polemically. American "state terrorism" is thus said to exist coequally with Shiite terrorism, although it is called something different by the brainwashed American media and thus escapes the verbal and political onus that Third World bomb throwers and kidnappers must bear.

Page 382 of Radical Son features Horowitz's recollections of a TV appearance on Lewis Lapham's Book Notes in which Hitchens got the opportunity to act as commentator for this book in which he, himself appeared. Horowitz describes Hitchens' ferocity:

As soon as we began the proceedings, his bile spilled onto every surface, souring the entire mood of the show, which reached its nadir when I mentioned the passage in which I had written about my father's funeral. "Who cares about his pathetic family?" Hitchens snapped.

Horowitz and Hitchens' paths would cross again when they found a common enemy in Bill Clinton. Horowitz's Hating Whitey features the essay "Defending Christopher," which is reprinted in Left Illusions and is the piece mentioned by Hitchens in his review. The article describes Hitchens' effective take-down of Clinton:

In two mordant and incisive articles in Vanity Fair before this episode, Hitchens demonstrated that the nation’s commander-in-chief cynically and mendaciously deployed the armed forces of the greatest super-power on earth to strike at three impoverished countries, with no clear military objective in mind. Using the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen, Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq for only one tangible political purpose (as Hitchens put it) to “distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake.”

The piece also contains the seed showing why Hitchens and Horowitz would one day find themselves as friends instead of enemies:

Reading Hitchens’ riveting indictment stirred unexpected feelings of nostalgia in me for the left I had once been part of. Not the actual left that I came to know and reject, but the left of my youthful idealism, when I thought our mission was to be the nation’s “conscience,” to speak truth to power in the name of what was just. This, as is perfectly evident from what he has written, was Hitchens’ own mission in exposing Blumenthal as the willing agent of a corrupt regime and its reckless commander-in-chief. Unfortunately, in carrying out this mission, Hitchens was forced to trip over the Lewinsky matter, specifically Blumenthal’s effort to smear the credibility of the key witness to the President’s bad faith. But that is because it was through Lewinsky that the Starr investigators had set up the character issue in the first place.

Hitchens and Horowitz are both possessed of the same spirit. They are both animated by a drive to challenge, provoke, and especially to confront. (The importance of confronting the malicious and the ignorant is a theme that runs throughout Horowitz's work of which I have already written.) They both pursue the truth and then force people to deal with it, no matter how painful it might be.

This spirit, style, approach, or mentality is the subject of Hitchens' book Letters to a Young Contrarian. The book contains nineteen short chapters, each in the style of a letter to an unnamed correspondent. In the first letter Hitchens offers an aphorism that sums up the contrarian spirit :

There is a saying from Roman antiquity: Fiat justitia -- ruat caelum. "Do justice, and let the skies fall." In every epoch there have been those to argue that "greater" goods, such as tribal solidarity or social cohesion, take precedence over the demands of justice. It is supposed to be an axiom of "Western" civilisation that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as "order." But in point of fact, such immolations have been very common. To the extent that the ideal is at least paid lip service, this result is the outcome of individual struggles against the collective instinct for a quiet life.

Do Justice, and let the skies fall. This approach would apply to Horowitz just as it would any contrarian. The problem that Horowitz has come to know so well is that sometimes when the skies fall they come down right on top of you. When you set out to do justice by speaking the truth there will usually be retribution -- injustice will be done unto you. The next literary ally of Horowitz's that I'll be exploring is Ron Radosh, a historian whose political journey parallels Horowitz's in many ways. His memoir Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left will be discussed in a future post.