The Left Is in Trouble. Can Christopher Hitchens Save It?

with Matt Johnson

Identitarianism is now so deeply ingrained in left-liberal politics, it’s easy to forget that things weren’t always this way. Material economic concerns once formed the solid core of left activism and thought on the domestic front: labor protections, combating economic inequality, providing services for the poor, and so on. Anyone who didn’t put those issues at the center of their politics couldn’t reasonably call themselves a member of the left. Now these quite serious issues have been displaced by a superficial obsession with race and identity. If you’re not calling for “racial justice,” it seems, it doesn’t matter how many warehouse workers you organize. Even Bernie Sanders found himself in the crosshairs of his ostensible allies when he downplayed identity politics in the 2020 Democratic primaries.

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and thinker produced by—but not reducible to—that older tradition of left-wing thought and activism. For much of his life, he was an advocate for organized labor and a strong social safety net. He took the ideas of justice, equality, and democracy very seriously. Sometimes this led him to positions that would be at home on today’s left, as when he advocated for reparations for the descendants of slaves. But sometimes his commitments put him at odds with his fellow travelers, as when he supported the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Iraqis were being deprived by Saddam Hussein of their right to democratic self-determination.

Hitchens also believed that identity politics was a cheap substitute for what he saw as real political action. My guest this week, the writer Matt Johnson, thinks that, on that issue, Hitchens had it right. In fact, Matt wrote an excellent book about it. There was nobody quite like Hitch. His rhetorical force and precision, his moral clarity (even when he was wrong), and his wit seem in short supply today. I’ve hosted some left-liberals, like Mark Lilla and Norman Finkelstein, who are unafraid to speak out against “their side” on identity politics. And clearly Matt believes that the left can recover something of Hitch’s spirit, otherwise he wouldn’t have written the book. Despite my own political commitments, I hope he’s right.

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GLENN LOURY: How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment. The great Christopher Hitchens can save the left. The left's in trouble. It's worth saving, says Matt Johnson. And one of the reasons it's in trouble is because it's immersed in what Hitch called “the sinister bullshit” of identity politics. And Hitchens can save us from that, too. How so?

MATT JOHNSON: He was very opposed to identitarianism, because he saw it as regressive. In one article, he wrote, “If we were dogs, we would all be the same breed.” Emphasizing human difference is unhealthy and it's tribal and it's become very obsessive on the left. You know, I've listened to you for years, Glenn, you and John McWhorter. I'm not a fan of the DiAngelo school of identitarianism, not a fan of Kendi.

These guys, they really do frustrate me. I look at the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and I wonder what Martin Luther King or Bayard Rustin would say about a movement that encourages large audiences of white people and corporations to look inward and identify and root out the racism instead of just looking at inequities in the society and trying to address them on a fundamental level.

It's this toxin. It's so easy to be tribal. It's so easy to identify with a group. And Hitchens, in Letters to a Young Contrarian, for example, just said that identity politics is a cheap excuse for politics to the extent that the left was enmeshed in it, which it really has been for a long time. It was giving away one of the most important moral principles that it could hold, which would be universalism. We should try to move toward a colorblind society. I know that saying that automatically gets you branded a reactionary. It's like saying “all lives matter.” You're viewed as somebody who's fighting the progress of racial justice in the country. I really do think that that should be the end goal. And if it takes 200 years, so be it. If it takes 500 years, so be it.

But I think there are a lot of people who don't think it's the goal we're striving for. I think they think that race is this eternal fact about us, and racial division is an eternal fact about our politics. And Hitchens always hated that idea, and he thought we could be radical enough to get past it.

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Why do you think the identitarian view of the world has had such success on the left? You might have thought even without the high ground, the high ethical ground of universalism, a kind of transracial humanism, even without that, just the practical politics of it: I need to build coalitions to get people lined up on the same page behind what I'm trying to achieve. I have a left agenda. I want universal health care. I want less military spending. I want higher wages for workers. How am I going to get it? I need to get 51% to the polls. How do I do that? I get people of different stripes around the same agenda, and we march together. I don't understand. I mean, the susceptibility of a kind of socialistic orientation to all of this special claiming, to this insular thing.

So why has identity politics become such a powerful theme on the left? I mean, I have my own theories about it.

I would assume yours are more fleshed out than mine. It's a form of inequality that's so obvious, I suppose, when people just look differently from you. If you're going to divide people into demographic categories, the kid down the street who has an alcoholic, abusive dad who works at the mine and has an unemployed mom and who's in a low income bracket, he's just white. He looks like other white kids and it's harder to suss out what makes his oppression worse than somebody else's oppression or not as bad or what have you.

And then I also do think it's the history of the country. Looking at the Civil Rights Movement, which was ultimately successful and it ultimately gives you this sense of historical inevitability, which is probably a mistake. I think it's understandable for black Americans in particular to say, you know, we still have these vast inequities. We still have inequities in educational attainment. We still have inequities in health outcomes and massive inequities and levels of personal savings and household savings and socioeconomic status. So you just see those numbers and you see they have a racial valence. And then you say, well, the work of Martin Luther King obviously isn't done and we need to be radical and we need to mobilize on behalf of the most marginalized Americans. I do think that's understandable.

I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of people who are on the hard traditional left, they actually tend to distrust identity politics. They tend to distrust identity-based politics. Like Chomsky, he's not really woke. Hitchens has a history as a Marxist, and he always thought identity politics was short-circuiting people's brains. You're not doing any of the hard work of trying to identify how to improve educational outcomes or how to reduce poverty. It's just grievance-based politics. It's just scolding.

Then there are other people on the left. I mean, Bernie Sanders. He said during the primary in 2020, we should choose the next president on the basis of ideas and principles [and a] functional political program. We shouldn't choose the president based on gender, race, sexual identity, anything else.

And he got savaged.

Yeah, he was panned for that. He was ripped to shreds for it. You see this over and over again among a certain class of left-winger. And a lot of the time, these are the people who are traditional, inclined towards socialism. You can take it all the way back to Rustin, who was also a socialist. He said reparations was a harebrained idea. He thought it was a terrible idea. He was brutally consistent about that. So this is a radical tradition that is flying in the face of chic contemporary identitarianism. That's another reason why I think Hitchens is a powerful voice, is because he represented that in a pretty compelling way. His explicit anti-tribal focus, his explicit focus on universalism, was valuable, and I wish the left would rediscover it.

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