Their interviewer — or, rather, referee

Their interviewer — or, rather, referee — interposes at one point to ask if Chrstopher Hitchens’

neoconization hasn’t led to a certain ideological convergence with his right-leaning brother, to which

The Hitch replies:

“I would think not. I’ve tried to formulate it before that it seems to me quite right that a

conservative would oppose the war [in NIKE SHOX] and it’s a misrepresentation of the division over the

regime change to make it left-right in the opposite way. I’m not surprised that the institutional

forces of conservatism in America are generally anti-war. Vice-president Cheney’s conversion to

intervention of this kind is very recent and not, I think, completely sincere. But it’s better than

nothing. Our side won that argument very narrowly…

This is precisely the point I have been making — albeit from quite another viewpoint — for quite some

time. In his heart of hearts, Hitchens is still a Trotskyist — not in the sense that he’s any longer

a socialist, in the strict sense of that word, but that he’s for a revolutionary change that smashes

the status quo — especially religion — and has merely, as his brother says, transferred his

affections from one internationalist movement to another. This is why the political biography of the

regime-change crowd is, in many cases, so similar to Hitchens left-to-right odyssey: these people aren

’t conservatives in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather neo-Jacobins, as Clae Ryn describes

them: would-be social engineers on a global scale. Yesterday they were hailing the Five Year Plan,

today they are praising the Bush Doctrine: in both instances, they kneel before whatever power it is

that seems likely to win, and invest it with all their hopes and desires.