“I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously,” Christopher Hitchens wrote. Of course, he meant this less than literally. It was advice he used to bring himself to take the fearless positions he knew would bring on yet another firestorm. “One should compose as if the usual constraints — of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion — did not operate.” And so he did, whether that meant ironically asserting that women aren’t funny or seriously asserting that former President Bill Clinton is likely a rapist. Seven years after he died in December 2011 — too late for obituary and too early for biography proper — we can now begin to examine his work on his own terms.
Where does Hitchens’ legacy stand? Have events vindicated his worldview, what he claimed to have lived for? What’s striking is how distinct these two questions are. Because what defined the man is not what defines his legacy, at least not yet. In 2018, the “usual constraints” of intellectual fashion and groupthink have tightened. People treat facing an interlocutor as though they were facing an adversity. And Hitchens lived the disputatious life. He was our greatest exponent and exemplar of what Victor Hugo called the “sovereignty of conscience”: the principle of saying what one thinks so long as one thinks hard. (Hugo used the term in an oration on Voltaire, who took up as his monomaniacal slogan “Ecrasez l’infame,” or “Let us crush that which is loathsome,” in a campaign against the clergy. It might as well have been Hitchens’ slogan, too.) Nostalgia for Hitchens is nostalgia for a time when offense mattered less and ideas mattered more.
Even seven years in the grave, Hitchens can still kick up a controversy. In Becoming, Michelle Obama’s just-released, runaway bestselling memoir, the former first lady takes time to imply that a 2008 Hitchens column in Slate was a racist attack that “marginalized” her as “other” by vividly insulting the style of her prose. As it happens, I think Obama is almost certainly exactly wrong in her (pardon me) unbecoming implication. Hitchens was attacking her writing style for being too academic, not too vernacular, but the fact that she is still smarting from the decade old “Hitch slap” is a testament to the enduring power of the late writer’s famously sharp pen and barbed tongue.
Hitchens’ best friend, the novelist Martin Amis, said in a eulogy that “the salient and extraordinary thing about Christopher is the extent to which he was loved.” The salient and extraordinary thing about his legacy is the extent to which he is missed, by his many fans, readers, acolytes, and imitators. He is missed perhaps even more by his many haters, critics, and detractors, for whom Hitchens was such a juicy target to pick on in the abstract and such a difficult opponent to best in actual head-on debate. He is personally missed by his huge social circle in D.C., New York, London, and the wide literary-media-academic world in which he seemed to have known and charmed or clashed with everybody.
I miss him.
There seems to be, in short, a general wish to hold a seance for Hitchens to transcribe just a few more columns from his spirit, to record a few more geopolitical musings and literary witticisms. On the all-encompassing subject of President Trump, the general nostalgia for Hitchens’ brand of writing, which might be described as on-the-ground reporting from the front lines of his own mind, has caused some fights to break out over where he would now be on political matters. “If Christopher Hitchens were alive today, he would be the leading voice (along with Bernie Sanders) of the Resistance,” wrote Amis in October 2017. Vox’s Matt Yglesias speculated (somewhat less authoritatively) on Twitter several months ago that Hitchens would have been making some contrarian case in favor of Trump, and a wide political array of commentators, eager to claim Hitchens as an enemy at the very least, let Yglesias have it. In some small sense, the wish for a resurrection is being granted, as Amis has announced that his next novel will feature a character based on Hitchens.
For what it’s worth, we know confidently what Hitchens would have said about the Trump campaign and presidency. He once quipped that he was most impressed with Trump for figuring out how to “cover 90 percent of his skull with 30 percent of his hair,” which should be a guide not only to the fact that he would have made his peace with favoring Hillary Clinton (“my least favorite Democrat,” he once remarked) in the 2016 election, but also that he would not have been nearly so mystified as the rest of the commentariat by Trump’s rise. Nobody was more conscious than Hitchens of a political principle that would have allowed anyone to discern the dynamics of 2016: Whoever appears to be having the most fun is winning. He was conscious of it because he lived by it. He took unseriousness seriously, and he preferred being lightly boorish to being deeply boring. Having fun, Hitchens reminded us, is not only a rhetorical virtue but a profound intellectual one. Whatever memory he leaves, that is surely a meaningful part of it.
Writing about Hitchens is an admittedly minor subgenre, but it has its cliches, none more common than “contrarian.” It is false, but in a way that gets to what people get wrong about Hitchens. He was known most for disagreeing with people (the millions of views on a YouTube video of him flipping off Bill Maher’s entire booing studio audience stands as an example, as well as proof that the misunderstanding does not emerge out of nowhere). Instead, he should actually be known for thinking for himself. His intellectual individuality is what made him unpredictable enough that we can still debate about what he’d think about a particular issue — unlike a simple contrarian, who can reliably be expected to oppose the common view. There is a fundamental difference, one which Hitchens’ detractors often miss, between a man who is committed to taking contrary views and a man who is merely willing to take them. Nonconformity is not contrarianism. Disagreement requires two sides and necessarily goes both ways. So, when Hitchens declined to adopt some common view, he didn’t disagree so much as disagree back.
Hitchens would have made short work of the mild-mannered truism that we must not speak ill of the dead. He was not joking when he said, after his terminal diagnosis, that one of the things he most regretted about an early demise was that he would not get to trash Henry Kissinger in an obituary. Nor would he have been squeamish about vicious biographies of himself; he would have simply insisted the writers stick to what they believe could be established as true. He would have been honest in his assessment. The same cannot be said for the driblets of Hitchens biography that have come out since he was felled by esophageal cancer, which have been largely unfair and often personally compromised.
The most glaring example is a book by the pastor Larry Taunton, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist. Taunton claims (without quite claiming) that over two long, private exchanges, Hitchens demonstrated an inner stirring of specifically Christian faith. This contention doesn’t hold up to close inspection, however, as Hitchens’ friend David Frum demonstrated in an excellent takedown in the Atlantic based on a long and somewhat acrimonious interview with Taunton. (Disclosure: I transcribed Frum’s interview with Taunton and otherwise provided minor editorial assistance on the piece while working there.) Taunton’s thesis is derived from an implausible interpretation of what he says are Hitchens’ words. And anyway, they may not be Hitchens’ words; Taunton offers lengthy quoted dialogue of their conversations despite having taken no recording or contemporaneous notes. The book’s argument ultimately amounts to an assertion that Taunton, who is not an unbiased party, got some faithy vibes off Hitchens. Hitchens, for his part, had warned after his diagnosis that opportunistic religionists were likely to claim a deathbed conversion after he was gone, as they had with famous historical unbelievers. (He also predicted that preachers and other claimants to public moral authority have a way of turning out to be hypocrites. Taunton, since the publication of the Hitchens book, resigned from his ministry amid a sex scandal.)
A more serious work of early Hitchens biography is Daniel Oppenheimer’s Exit Right, a compilation of six chapter-length histories of the lives of “people who left the left and reshaped the American century.” Five of these chapters are generally professional, level-headed considerations of various figures, such as James Burnham and Ronald Reagan. But when he comes to the sixth and final section, the Hitchens chapter, it’s as though, ironically, Oppenheimer sought to give his subject “the Hitchens treatment.” He attempts, and fails, to adopt a sort of high-dudgeon imitation of Hitch’s polemical style: “If he’d quit drinking, or drinking so much, he might have been supple enough to disentangle his own fantasies from those of the men and women who were prosecuting the war. … He was too much the romantic, too much the contrarian, and too much the narcissist to chart out the ways that history might fail to conform to his desires. He chose to mistake thoughtful opposition for moral cowardice.” This is bulverism, not history.
Hitchens is often criticized by being compared to that which he hated. On religion, he is sometimes called evangelical or faithful or outright crusaderly about the causes of antireligion and atheism. He was largely untroubled by this idea that his arguments had the same structure as those of his enemies, saying he was comfortable if they differed only by being valid. The essence of his argumentative style was to embody the spirit of the paraprosdokian, “If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong,” or to strike the tone adopted by Gary Oldman in “The Contender,” who ripostes to an accusation of pigheadedness: “We’re both sticking to our guns. The difference is, mine are loaded.” And as often as Hitchens’ guns were loaded, they were blazing.
Hitchens’ cultural break with the Left might have been more complete now, as he also viewed the rise of identitarian hysteria as stifling, anti-intellectual, and irrelevant. To his great credit, Hitchens had staked out his strong stance against PC culture early on. “Much of the correctness-minded left prefers to argue about the exquisite modulations of the proper mixture of epidermis and genitalia, while a surprising number of people (not without clout in a major political party) hint darkly that our organs of mass communication are directed by and for the Jews,” he wrote in 1995. Later, in 2001, he issued a warning:
This is of a piece with his determination to criticize Islam despite charges of Islamophobia — decisions that were already not terribly intellectually fashionable in the aughts, but have gone from edgy to outright anathematic in recent years. Keep in mind just how much things have changed on this front since his death. He liked to protest that he rejected the very concept of “Islamophobia” as a group prejudice, because, literally understood, it should mean something about a religious ideology rather than referring to the concept of ethnic hate toward Arabs and Persians. Islam, after all, is a religion which makes claims that Muslims take seriously, and Hitchens said he wanted to take them seriously, too. Anyway, Hitchens proved repeatedly that when it came to actual rather than notional respect for Muslims, bonhomie trumped a contempt for faith. For example, he disowned one of his erstwhile heroes, the Italian interviewer and essayist Oriana Fallaci, for her dangerously dehumanizing language about “the sons of Allah breeding like rats.”
Of course, were Hitchens alive today, offering such logical defenses of his more “problematic” views would probably get him in more trouble, not less. The year 2018 is, after all, an age when the prevailing discourse surrounding Arab Muslims has degraded to such lows of sheepish condescension and incoherence that it is possible to publish with a straight face columns such as the Guardian’s recent “Jamal Khashoggi’s borrowed white privilege made his murder count,” an argument that the strong condemnation of the murder of an Arab dissident in Turkey by his Arab government is somehow a matter of American racism. These are the subjects that make one miss Hitchens’ clear, independent voice the most.
Yet ignoring reputational consequences cuts both ways, and some of Hitchens’ most previously unpopular views now seem positively ahead of the fashion. Around the same time he first decried the grip of identity politics among intellectuals, Hitchens’ venomous opposition to the Clintons was already calling into question his status as a man of and for the Left. He lost friends over his refusal to “Move On” from asking “Is There a Rapist in the Oval Office?” as he did in a chapter of No One Left to Lie To, his book on the Clinton presidency. Yet in light of #MeToo, prominent Bill Clinton defenders from the ‘90s such as Gloria Steinem have been forced to concede, in what we might call a “volte-shameface,” that perhaps Hitchens had a point a quarter-century ago. Perhaps there was something immoral in Monica Lewinsky being used “as the physical rather than moral equivalent of a blow-up doll” by a president who was simultaneously preaching abstinence for the young. And perhaps there was something more than a little believable about the multiple women, such as Juanita Broaddrick, who had independently asserted that a pre-presidential Bill Clinton violently sexually assaulted them and bit them on the face, without having heard one another’s stories before making the claim.
The issue of Bill Clinton’s character is the area where Hitchens was most regularly accused of being disloyal or “contrarian” for some craven or personal reason. So score one for his claim to moral prescience. Score another for his prediction that a cadre of the boring and selfish would take a big chance on identity politics. Though, to be fair, he didn’t appear to foresee that the chance would pay off quite so well. And his legacy is more equivocal, too, because on the idea that when read posthumously matters of fashion and intellectual opinion would cease to matter, he was dead wrong. He is still in the fight, even now.
The evidence taken together, then, is mixed, and it provides only a provisional answer on the question of whether Hitchens is being vindicated by what has developed since he died. On some of his particular moral pronouncements and predictions, his independence served him well. On others, it did not. But in the matter of his legacy, to add up the number of items in the pro column against the number in the con column is to miss the point. Only people who misunderstood him think he was giving instructions on what to think, rather than urging us all, whatever we think, to do so by our own lights. “The only real radicalism in our time will come — as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness,” he wrote. By that measure, we’ve only gotten less radical without him.
Insofar as Hitchens’ legacy is marred, it’s marred by faddish things. And that’s why we miss him: He was our greatest champion against faddishness. That’s quite a legacy.
