When counter-factuals go bad
Matt Yglesias decided to stir things up yesterday.
My guess is that if Hitch were alive today he’d be the leading pro-Trump columnist in America, following the siren song of faux contrarianism to its ultimate end. https://t.co/Gq3Nj4HyML
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 7, 2018
My guess is that if Hitch were alive today he’d be the leading pro-Trump columnist in America, following the siren song of faux contrarianism to its ultimate end.
That’s an incredibly stupid “guess,” as a number of people pointed out. Hitchens wasn’t right about everything, but he would never have been a toady of Trump’s. The idea is ludicrous.
He’d be a regular guest on Tucker Carlson’s show doing segments about the Deep State’s plot against Trump and how the left lost its way, calling Elizabeth Warren a shrill harpy, and denouncing the excesses of political correctness.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 7, 2018
He’d be a regular guest on Tucker Carlson’s show doing segments about the Deep State’s plot against Trump and how the left lost its way, calling Elizabeth Warren a shrill harpy, and denouncing the excesses of political correctness.
He seems to have him confused with Bannon. Other way around, dude – Bannon wishes he were another Hitchens.
Utter, utter nonsense here. You have no idea what you're talking about.
— Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens (@amhitchens) April 7, 2018
What utter balls. You obviously didn’t know him.
— David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) April 7, 2018
What utter drivel. Makes you sound you like you never read or heard him. Trump is everything Hitchens hated most: a vicious, moronic fascist in league with appalling religious fanatics
— David Winner (@dwinnera) April 7, 2018
It’s so tin-eared. Hitchens would have despised Trump’s philistinism and demagoguery. He would have been quoting Mencken about electing a complete moron. Hitchens hated the Clinton clan, but he would have detested the Trump family.
He was a toady of Bush’s.
I don’t know how he would have responded to Trump, but given his white-hot hatred of both Clintons, I strongly doubt he would have done much to hinder the election of Trump.
But that wasn’t the claim. The claim was that he would be a pro-Trump columnist. Let’s not follow Yglesias in this kind of bullshit slippery slope argument. Hating the Clintons is not loving Trump.
Also…I didn’t say he would never have been a toady of Bush’s, I said he would never have been a toady of Trump’s. There’s a difference – the difference is in fact at the heart of the issue, at the heart of what’s wrong with Yglesias’s ridiculous claim.
Plus I don’t think he was a toady of Bush’s. Wolfowitz yes, Bush no.
Where I’m coming from: I wouldn’t have expected Hitchens to support Bush–I didn’t–but he did–or to support the Iraq War, or, lord help us, to continue supporting the “they had WMD” argument long after that was shown to be bullshit (I remember that clearly.)
And his hatred of the Clintons was, I think, near-pathological.
I realize that these things don’t make it certain that Yglesias is right that H would have supported Trump. I recognize the difference. He probably wouldn’t have. But I just don’t see Yglesias’ hypothetical as being as outlandish a possibility as you do.
Well, I can say this: Hitchens did seem to be on a rightward trajectory in some ways, so if Yglesias had said something like “given his trajectory in the last decade of his life, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him end up full-on pro-Trump”…that would at least have been an argument.
But I would still see it as impossibly unlikely. Trump is the sworn enemy of thought of all kinds. I really can’t see Hitchens aligning himself with that.
Hitchens wasn’t a toady of Bush’s; in fact, he was a loud and vocal critic of the man on many fronts and occasions. He frequently characterised Bush as a a moron, and even his send-up of the administration on the eve of Obama’s inauguration has an inordinate amount of throat-clearing, and even a hint of self-pity amid the ostensible defiance: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2009/01/no_regrets.html
Hitchens only tolerated Bush as a means to an end, and that end was the removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq and then the maintenance of an autonomous Kurdistan. It is impossible to imagine that he would have supported Hillary Clinton *or* Donald Trump, and only slightly less difficult to imagine him throwing his lot in with the likes of Jill Stein. If I had to guess, I’d say that he would’ve strongly supported Bernie Sanders during the primary and sat out the general—or written Sanders in. I imagine he would’ve supported, or at least urged, further military action in Syria and North Korea, and might have celebrated any signs that Trump and Co. were leaning in that direction, but that isn’t anywhere near the same thing as him blindly supporting Trump and so cheerleading those conflicts to show that support.
In the end, it’s impossible to say; even the fact that everyone who knew and loved him, and everyone whom he respected and admired, is staunchly anti-Trump isn’t necessarily indicative of how he would’ve fallen; much the same could’ve been said about the second Gulf War, and his perhaps-naive optimism about its motives and its ability to succeed. But I’ve read enough of both him and of George Orwell to know that he knew a fascist when he saw one, and he never liked one he saw.
Let’s see what Hitchens said going into the last presidential election for which he would be alive:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2008/10/vote_for_obama.html
I know writers don’t always write the headlines and subheadline, but here they accurately summarize his article: “Vote for Obama: McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace.”
Would someone worried about presidential temperament be a Trump supporter?
He might not have been a big Hillary supporter though, as he wasn’t a fan of the Clintons. I suspect he would have supported her over Trump. The most extreme (and very unlikely) situation would have been his anti-Clinton sentiment leading him to grudgingly support Trump as the lesser of two evils, followed by him blasting most of Trump’s actions after he took office and lamenting the poor choice we’d been given. But, again, I highly doubt that’s how it would have played out.
He’d never in any universe be the “leading pro-Trump” columnist. Give me a break.
Also, here is a (short) video on how he felt about Bush before the 2000 election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn0sH1gnHm4
And a longer one (about ten minutes) that splices together his thoughts on Putin’s Russia from 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83OY6De6Ob4
Given that last, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine him swallowing Russia’s interference in the American and European elections or waving it away as a Democratic conspiracy theory, and hence it is even less likely he would fall into line as a Trump sycophant.
Again, that doesn’t mean he would never support the same things as Trump or his cronies might seem to, but in those cases his support for Trump (like his support for Bush) would hinge on Trump’s (like Bush’s) similarity to Hitchens’ own views, rather than Hitchens altering his views to bend to support for Trump.
That is the difference between someone who’s wrong and someone who’s a toady. The first will accept the support of other mistaken people, to the extent those people agree with them; the latter will change their own views to mesh with the people up to whom they’re toadying.
Skeletor, that article is quite suggestive. Here are a couple of quotes that popped out at me:
On the importance of character:
On McCain’s proto-Trumpian running mate, Sarah Palin:
It is impossible for me to read these quotes (or indeed the rest of the article) and come away with anything like Yglesias’s snide, crude, thoughtless accusations.
Exactly so. There’s way too much thought and detailed information in those passages to make Yglesias’s guess even slightly plausible.
Yeah – the Palin comparison is telling. & Trump is far worse than Palin who at least had had some political experience.
& if I remember correctly Hitchens was quite dewy-eyed at Obama’s inauguration, as anyone who had observed the American Civil Rights movement would have been.
http://www.hughhewitt.com/vanity-fairs-christopher-hitchens-reflects-on-the-inauguration-of-barack-obama/
He admired Obama’s ability with words. Word wielding counts a lot for a literary gent like Hitchens. Something that Trump lacks in spades.
Also “toady” of Bush is wrong. “Critical supporter” better. Admirer of Wolfowitz and hawk politics is reasonable.
Hitchens condoned violent opposition to Islamic imperialism, to the point of being seduced into endorsing reckless adventuring against the Baath regime. And he loathed the Clintons with a fervor that may have helped Trump/Stein/Sanders/Putin.
Neither of these makes him a man of the Right. Not even the saner edges of the Right.
Rosie @ 12 –
That. I watched every minute of it, a first (and last) for me. When the camera picked out John Lewis in the top row it just about did me in.