How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment - Matt Johnson
Language: EnglishKeywords:
Democracy
Nonfiction
Politics
Shared by:WangLaoshi2020
Written by
Read by Mike Chamberlain
Format: M4B
Unabridged
Christopher Hitchens was for many years considered one of the fiercest and most eloquent left-wing polemicists in the world. But on much of today’s left, he’s remembered as a defector, a warmonger, and a sellout—a supporter of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who traded his left-wing principles for neoconservatism after the September 11 attacks.
In How Hitchens Can Save the Left , Matt Johnson argues that this easy narrative gets Hitchens exactly wrong. Hitchens was a lifelong champion of free inquiry, humanism, and universal liberal values. He was an internationalist who believed all people should have the liberty to speak and write openly, to be free of authoritarian domination, and to escape the arbitrary constraints of tribe, faith, and nation. He was a figure of the Enlightenment and a man of the left until the very end, and his example has never been more important.
Over the past several years, the liberal foundations of democratic societies have been showing signs of structural decay. On the right, nationalism and authoritarianism have been revived on both sides of the Atlantic. On the left, many activists and intellectuals have become obsessed with a reductive and censorious brand of identity politics, as well as the conviction that their own liberal democratic societies are institutionally racist, exploitative, and imperialistic. Across the democratic world, free speech, individual rights, and other basic liberal values are losing their power to inspire.
Hitchens’s case for universal Enlightenment principles won’t just help genuine liberals mount a resistance to the emerging illiberal orthodoxies on the left and the right. It will also remind us how to think and speak fearlessly in defense of those principles.
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This post has 12 comments with rating of 5/5
August 13th, 2023
Maybe someone can bring me up to date on just exactly what it is the left stands for these days?
August 13th, 2023
Same question, but both the left and the right.
Left used to be about compassion and helping the poor. Right used to be about fiscal conservatism and national security. Not saying either of them actually did those things, but those were the platforms.
Now the left seems to be a collection of socially reinforced restrictions on freedom of thought in which specific groups are exempted from wrong doing, regardless of actual wrong doing. Oh, and making big business richer.
And the right seems to be what might happen if policy making was left to a the worst students in a creative writing class. Jewish space lasers, child blood drinking celebrities and the whole ’stolen’ election lie. Oh, and making big business richer.
I get the feeling that the one thing both parties have in common: making big business richer, might help to explain why everything else they do is such a distracting circus.
August 13th, 2023
…you’ve got the thesis of “same party - with 2 crazily destructive wings” there, erouting.
To render it yet more complicated, you seem to only be describing the American political sphere. Whatever left & right signify is mutable, depending on geography & time. Although rapid communication & globalisation are bringing about something of an homogenising effect.
August 13th, 2023
There also seems to be some confusion between left and right as political ideologies, and the current trend of everyone calling everything either left or right, and then screaming about what the thing they’ve just made up says about society as a whole.
August 14th, 2023
Thank you.
August 14th, 2023
There is no longer a true left or true right. There is only top and bottom.
August 14th, 2023
Yeah, but who’s the top & who’s the bottom in this torrid relationship? (Bear in mind, this is a family site.)
August 18th, 2023
Hitch! Yay
August 24th, 2023
Marxists should be hung from light poles like halloween decorations …
September 8th, 2025
Hitch would be ashamed for what the left has turned into.
September 15th, 2025
Efforts to shoehorn everything into an us-and-them view of right and left and then attempting to find consistent shared ideology is effort wasted. The same goes for lamenting what each of the two categories has become. It’s the us and them sorting that is the primary objective.
November 29th, 2025
Is there anyone here who is capable of setting aside their personal political positions - at least a moment - to thankfully appreciate the generosity of our peers who make all of this possible?
Please?
Just because you have an opinion, you don’t need to act as though you are a bomb waiting to be triggered - especially here, where ALL books are valued for the perspectives they offer us.
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