When Argentine President Javier Milei scolded panjandrums at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, it brought to mind a central passage in Christopher Hitchens’s Hitch-22 in which the late Anglo-American writer confronted contradictions between his socialism, which was creaking by then, and his instinctive, humane liberalism.

The incandescence of Milei and Hitch illuminates how the Left and Right evolved in the past two decades, rendering Democrats and Republicans almost unrecognizable side by side with what they were at the start of the 21st century.