Hitchens on Reagan

Nick Gillespie | June 8, 2004

Over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens, who very graciously wrote an introduction for Choice: The Best of Reason Magazine (due out in September), takes a feel-good whiz on Reagan's casket, detailing a long list of particulars and concluding, "He was as dumb as a stump."

Then comes this interesting bit:

Many of [my old] friends had twice my IQ, or let's say six times that of the then-chief executive. These friends had all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be, presumably successively, the president instead of Reagan. They would go on to put Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen bumper stickers on their vehicles. No doubt they wish that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.

Whole thing here.

Hitchens had good things to say about Reagan prototype Margaret Thatcher back when we interviewed him just before the 9/11 attacks. "By subtracting my vote from the Labour Party, I was effectively voting for Thatcher to win [in 1979]. That�s how I discovered that that�s what I secretly hoped would happen. And I�m very glad I did. I wouldn�t have been able to say the same about Reagan, I must say. But I don�t think he had her intellectual or moral courage."

Whole Q&A here.

Comments

|6.8.04 @ 5:16AM|#

I wonder, was Hitchens calling for active undermining of the Soviets (the essence of the Reagan Doctrine) back in the day? I seriously doubt it. Whatever his list of particulars against Reagan, Hitchens can't quite swallow his bile long enough to understand that Reagan got the Big Thing right: The Soviet Union was an empire, it was evil, and our long-term security, prosperity, and freedom depended on the Soviet Union failing.

If Hitchens ever voiced similar sentiments back when they might have made a difference, I would be surprised. The conventional wisdom back then consisted of a belief that the Soviets were strong and stable, that we should therefore accomodate and not confront them, and, in more leftish precincts of the kind Hitch used to hang out in, that anyway they were our moral equivalents or betters and they were going to prevail in the long run.

Reagan got a lot of little things wrong, but in retrospect his view of and policy on the Soviet Union was dramatically right. Would the Soviets have collapsed without the Reagan Doctrine? No one knows, but a policy of active undermining was more likely to bring them down than the policy of accomodation supported by the Mondales, and likely the Hitchens, of the world.

|6.8.04 @ 5:29AM|#

I thought it was a cool essay. The article version of a surprise ending.

I was reading Slate's fray to see in anyone got that it praised Reagan, but all the D's said it was a great article, Reagan was stupid, and all the R's thought Hitch should be shot. (I have to assume most R's in Slate's fray are D's trying to make R's look bad through cursing a whole lot.)

I had a similar revelation to Hitch in 2000. I was going to vote for Nader even if my vote cost Gore the election. In the after-election counting scandal, I started to realize that I had secretly wanted Bush to win, but couldn't admit it to myself. Now, I jokingly tell my friends that I voted for Bush last time around, "cuz a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, right?"

|6.8.04 @ 5:34AM|#

If anyone should understand the complexity of foreign policy, it should be Hitchens. For the most part I agree with R.C. Dean's post. Reagan's actions towards the USSR have to be seen against the light of what would have been if the left really had control America.

I should also add that I have nothing against ad hominem obituaries. Hunter Thompson's obit for Nixon is still one of my favorite pieces of writing. But this article could have been better if it had a coherent viewpoint. These days when I read Hitchens I still smell the erudition. But more than that I smell cognitive dissonance, pointless ego-tripping and--let's be honest--the smell of whiskey didn't do much for Thompson in the long run either.

|6.8.04 @ 5:41AM|#

Whizzing on the casket? Hitchens may have whipped it out, but he produced barely a trickle. This guy is supposed to be some kind of erudite deep-thinker? The story was essentially a collection of graffiti from 80s underpasses.

US out of Nicaragua!

|6.8.04 @ 6:39AM|#

Poorly written and quite impolitic.

Tim Cavanaugh|6.8.04 @ 6:54AM|#

Yeah, God forbid somebody should be impolitic when writing a column about politics.

Did anybody other than amr read the thing through to the end? Y'know, the kids today: sometimes they say ba-a-ad when they mean good!

|6.8.04 @ 6:59AM|#

Poor Hitch--he's so conflicted nowadays that the bottle is his only solace. A longtime athiest and humanist, he's, unwillingly, become a sycophant for an adminstration dominated by religious crazies. Like Andrew Sullivan, it's at least fun to read him to see the palpable cognitive dissonance rising from your monitor.

Soldier on, 'ol Lefty!

|6.8.04 @ 7:49AM|#

Tim: I read it three times all the way through. I though I was missing something, that there was more than the section Gillespie chose to extract. He pulled the pea from a turd.

Perhaps someone might give depth to apparently superficial blatherings, lacking wit or style? Having neither sniffed Hitchens's underpants nor cataloged his ideological significance, I'm lost. Maybe that is the point?

|6.8.04 @ 8:21AM|#

I think the point is that, amidst the media worship, important aspects of his personality and administration (how many indictments?) are being glossed over. I think the following passage IS relevant:

"Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles�a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you." Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps."

And this one, too:

"Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too."

Sure, it lacks Hitchens' usual eloquence, but they are interesting facts, nonetheless.

|6.8.04 @ 8:59AM|#

What's with all you people picking on Hitch for drinking? It comes up in every thread. Are Reason readers a bunch of puritanical pussies?

|6.8.04 @ 9:28AM|#

Good question, drunk (hic).

Warren, I disagree with Hitchens a lot, but he's no idiot. That's too easy a dismissal.

"I've always felt her greatest failing was her affinity for a man that was her inferior in both intellect and conviction."

Are you talking about Reagan or Pinochet? :)

|6.8.04 @ 10:06AM|#

Les,

Facts? Well, let's take a look first at Hitchens's disingenuous -- and perfectly dastardly -- abuse of Reagan over the word "freedom."

I happened to be reading last night Whittaker Chambers's magisterial essay, "The Direct Glance" last night. Enjoyin' me a little Chambers (if nothing else, he was one of the finest prose-stylists in the English language) I considered an eminently fitting tribute to Reagan last night, especially after earlier yesterday being made ill by Hitchens's vaingloriously shitty little screed. (The Chambers essay, BTW, is published in the indispensible Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought, edited by Charles Kesler, Professor of Political Philosophy and Government at Claremont McKenna College [and editor of the equally indispensibe Claremont Review of Books]).

So I was delighted when I happened upon the following implicit smack-down of Hitchens:

Communism is a philosophy of brute materialism. But if we ask: "What is the true philosophy of the West?" is there not a certain embarrassment? What is the philosophy of the West? In a war for men's minds, what is it that we are offering whose inherent force is so compulsive that it instantly seizes on the imagination of men and incites them to choose it in preference to Communism? In the name of what do we expect them to rise and overthrow Communism which can be done only by an effort of incalculable suffering -- and not the suffering of faceless millions (as we so easily think of such things), but the suffering of this father and that mother who love their children whose lives, rather than their own, are the first sacrifice in so one-sided a conflict? Is it Christianity? There are millions of Christians in the Communist Empire whose Western populations are overwhelmingly Christian. Some 40 million must be practicing Catholics. I remember no appeals to the Christians in the name of their common faith with the West. Individual freedom is often mentioned. It is well, perhaps, to remember that freedom, in our understanding of the term, has been restricted largely to the United States and the fringe of Western Europe. In the rest of the world it has no accepted currency . . .

(p. 421).

So there, fuck you Hitchens. Stick that in your pipe, pal.

Again, Whittaker Chambers:

In the name of what are we inviting the slaves of the East to revolt? We speak of freedom. Every day that the Communist Empire endures, the WORD becomes more meaningless for millions.

(ibid p. 421, caps mine).

Most uncanny, methinks, that the very next sentence follows thus (as if Chambers has Hitchens in mind):

It is the business of the Communist theoretician, with his eyes on the whole sweep of history, to try to assess the relationship of forces in the world at every given moment, to calculate their rate of drift and general direction as a guide to action -- in order to take advantage of the constantly changing relationship of force to promote a revolution which the Communist holds to be beneficent and, in some degree, fated.

eponymous|6.8.04 @ 10:41AM|#

how easy is it for hitchens to admit that 'being smart' can be overrated?

a clumsy apology, but clear enough in the end

|6.8.04 @ 10:44AM|#

Did anybody other than amr read the thing through to the end? Y'know, the kids today: sometimes they say ba-a-ad when they mean good!

You're right. I said goodly bad when I meant to say badly good.

Did you read my post to the end? I got the surprise twist. Maybe not everyone did. Personally I liked the article. I'm not sure how deeply he's rejecting the first part with the last. Again, the dissonance is palpable and fun like a trainwreck to watch.

Hitchens is a bastard and has the onerous distinction of being the smartest man to be on the wrong side back then and now.

|6.9.04 @ 1:31AM|#

Robert,

If Reagan was speaking metaphorically (which I admit is quite possible), it would have been smarter to say that the Soviets have no word for freedom.

"So, Les, I'm sure you like preening yourself of being oh so smart and -- like all jack-ass worshippers -- somehow outside Plato's Cave looking back at the those "dummies" stuck gazing upon shadows, but, alas, Reagan was a highly intelligent man."

What have I said to make you think I "worship" Hitchens? What have I said to imply that Reagan was not intelligent? You're getting miffed and making assumptions. I think Reagan said a good number of stupid things, true, but then again so do I and I'm not even in the public eye all the time. Hell, Reagan could have been smarter than I am (not too much of a stretch).

I think you'll find my only criticism of Reagan has been his support of terrorists and death squads in Central America. Fighting the good fight is one thing. Fighting it with terrorists is another.

|6.9.04 @ 1:37AM|#

I think it's inarguable that he did good things. But I think he did bad things that were as bad as his good things were good. And I believe that when we neglect (out of pride or fear or what have you) to note and register negative behavior, that negative behavior tends to be repeated. That's why I think it's important to bring it up.

I mean no disrespect to anyone here or anywhere, but I would argue that Ronald Reagan was not a great man. I think that there are certain things you can do that get your name scratched off that list. Deliberately and unapologetically aiding and supporting terrorists (financially or politically) is, for me, one of those things. And please, I'd appreciate it if no one mentions the Cold War, as if we couldn't have won it without funding terrorism and mass murder across the globe. In my opinion, that's an argument that's insulting to America and American ingenuity.

|6.9.04 @ 1:40AM|#

Rick, and Raimondo,

Don't you get it? It was really a compliment to Reagan! You know, the kind made by insult? :)

|6.9.04 @ 1:41AM|#

Rick,

That WAS an excellent rebuttal. I would only argue that a book exposing Mother Teresa as a destructive fraud WAS completely and absolutely necessary. But his points regarding Hitchens' contradictions and sloppiness were right on. I think he (Hitchens) probably wrote that essay in less time than it takes to read it.

|6.9.04 @ 3:29AM|#

Pedant, yes I agree with Tutu, at least in the case of Reagan, who was actively working in support of the aparteid regime, speaking out about how it was abolishing discrimination when it was doing no such thing.

But to answer your underlying question, what's different about Bush's "with us or with the terrorist" formulation is its definition of "us." Included under Bush's "us" were not everyone who opposed terrorism and supported taking action against it, but only those people who agreed with his specific policy proposals for fighting it.

|6.9.04 @ 4:01AM|#

Do these people have editors?

> not that there are any non-ballistic missiles

Yes, there are. Any rocket in which the engine fires for its entire journey, such as a RPG or an AA missle, is not ballistic.

> South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war.
No, South Africa fought on the Allied side in WWII.

> Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs
What were sold TOW anti-tank rockets -- NOT heavy weapons (i.e. tanks and artillery pieces).

If Hitchens definition of "stupid" is making errors of fact while speaking extemporaneously, what would he call someone who makes such errors in a written (and presumably researched) essay calling someone else stupid?

M.

|6.9.04 @ 5:36AM|#

In the 80s Hitchens was against the Soviet Union per se, but he was a useful idiot nonetheless. He wouldn't accept that the third world People's Armies were just a wedge for the USSR to bring one country after another under totalitarianism. It looks like he's still peeved that that old dummy Reagan saw things more clearly back then than he did.

|6.9.04 @ 5:38AM|#

This muppet states that Reagan lacked the intellectual and moral courage of Margaret Thatcher? He has to be kidding me. Reagan fought communism and totalitarianism for about 40 years of his life, facing death threats and mockery from the chattering classes and the left. He devoted his life to a (just and right) cause despite the fact that hardly anyone appreciated it. He did it because he knew it was right.

If that isn't moral and intellectual courage, I don't know what the hell is.

|6.9.04 @ 6:28AM|#

We owe a great debt to Ronald Reagan for defeating communism. Unfortunatly, we'll literally be paying off that (national) debt until we all die and maybe then some.

|6.9.04 @ 7:36AM|#

I am genuinely taken aback by the sheer venom of Hitchens. Come off it Hitchens, can't you give even one bit of credit to the late president for helping push over the Soviet Union? Or is there an element of envy lurking behind the contempt? Makes you wonder.

Disappointing from someone I rate as a fine writer.

|6.9.04 @ 9:11AM|#

Just finished Hitchens' piece and I am now thoroughly nauseated. It was a bit like watching a shamed letch pleasuring himself to the thought of his own irrelevance.

|6.9.04 @ 9:41AM|#

It is no mere coincidence that the highIQ intellectuals who demand highIQ presidents also are Statists, always thinking "if only we had a cabal of geniuses, we could rule the world properly".

|6.9.04 @ 9:52AM|#

Eddie, more on Reagan's moral and intellectual courage here: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/06/09/reagans_heart_of_darkness/

But then, what could more courageous than an American who was openly anti-communist? That IS stirring.

|6.9.04 @ 11:03AM|#

So joe, you approved of/agreed with Tutu's black-and-white "You are either with us or with the apartheid government" formulation?

Huh.

|6.9.04 @ 11:05AM|#

Wow. You were right, Tim. I take it back. This article was pure obfuscatory genius.

|6.9.04 @ 11:50AM|#

Raimondo does a really nice job demolishing the Hitchens piece, piece by piece:

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/

He is absolutely on the top of his game in this one.

|6.9.04 @ 12:44PM|#

Hitchens doesn�t seem to think much of Kerry, and, apparently, Kerry is just as stupid as Bush. He certainly had a lot of words for Reagan though. You can't take jabs at an American icon on the event of his death without provoking the anger of the idiot masses, and I suppose that's what Hitchens wanted to do. When Hitchens was still a young pup, the idiot masses broke his little heart, so it doesn't surprise me to see Hitchens take pot shots at our hero now that he's dead. I had to read it twice before it sunk in, it�s almost an apology.

Especially when compared to the genius of American intellectuals, the wisdom of idiots can be an awesome thing to behold. American intellectuals fought Reagan�s policies every step of the way. They denounced his deregulation, they denounced his tax cuts, they denounced his deficit, they denounced his military build up, and now that the Evil Empire is through, they claim that even if Reagan had done nothing, it all would have happened anyway. Wasn�t it Hitchens� hero who said that only an intellectual could fall for an argument like that?

amr|6.9.04 @ 12:54PM|#

Ken,
Thank you for eloquently saying what I tried to get at.

My short summary:
"Reagan was stupid. I was sure of that then and I'm sure of that now. But this idiot did damned good. Despite? Because? I don't know."

|6.10.04 @ 7:58AM|#

>> South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war.
>No, South Africa fought on the Allied side in WWII.

That's why Hitch said _leadership_. The Nats who came to power in 1948, just after WWII, had in many cases been huge fans of the Nazis.

|6.11.04 @ 3:24AM|#

Regarding an interview with Hitchens a few years back in Reason: What is maddening but all-too typical with Hitchens is a combination of broad shots at "the left" utterly lacking in nuance or development, frequent self-referential comments (granted, this is an interview, but this self-indulgent style persists in his columns) both trumpeting his cleverness and his defiant separation from his old friends on the left, glib references to Marx and other well known intellectuals (recall Dylan's sarcastic line, "You've been through all of F. Scott Fitgzerald's books, You're very well read, its well known"), and, above all, a failure to follow through on any train of thought. I remember feeling this disappointment intensely when eagerly opening his book on the trials of Henry Kissinger (before he had announced his "bold" break with the Nation and the Left), thinking this may be very useful for a future international law class. What I found was a series of digressions and obiter dicta that never made a sustained case. Later on, I experienced the same sensation when glancing at two other works that held initial appeal to me, The Missionary Position on Mother Theresa and No One Left to Lie To about the abominable Clinton. Again, there was no there there, it was Hitchens being pleased with himself about breaking from others--the idea that one needed to move beyond posturing and construct an argument was apparently not a concern of his. It is for these reasons, that I've long considered him a second rate mind, at best; witty, which is why he has long appeared on the fringes of the pundit class; more so now that he can be billed as a brave dissident from the all-powerful left.

The maddening bit on this piece in Reason is there is Zero (!) mention of a long libertarian left tradition known as anarchism. Somehow, this fact wasn't seen as relevant even when talking about the Port Huron Statement and the New Left of the '60s (that was explicitly motivated by anti-Marxist, libertarian left views) or the newer social justice globalization movement. One might wonder as well how one justifies a massive use of deadly state power to bring about a desired (I suppose Hitchens would have to call this "libertarian") system in Iraq (the interview was before the war but Hitchens' views on Iraq were already becoming clear).

Yes, he can be quite witty, I suppose he is well read (been through all of Karl Marx's and George Orwells books) but I see no intellectual depth.

|6.11.04 @ 6:01AM|#

Christopher Hitchens is right. RR is the most over-rated president in history.

He's the GOP's stand-in for Roosevelt and they maintain that he won the Cold War. It's an absurd claim and an insult to every person who served in the U.S. military or paid taxes. The fact is, the U.S. didn't win the Cold War so much as the Communists and doctrinaire incompetence lost it. It was the same doctrinaire incompetence that resulted in Chernobyl, where the Soviets actually 'nuked' themselves. That was the beginning of the end, when the Soviet people realized that the greatest danger of nuclear attack wasn't from the West, but from their own third-rate nuclear technology and the retrograde political system that produced it. The Soviet Union was never in danger of a first strike nuclear attack from the U.S. They did, however, succeed in bombing themselves. The Soviet Union collapsed from pressure within, not any external threat. Their economy was a shambles and they couldn't even feed their people. Ronald Reagan's Star-Wars program had nothing to do with it.

remmet|6.11.04 @ 10:10AM|#

Dr RK Light, contra a Reagan myth-debunker: "I'm sure you like preening yourself of being oh so smart and -- like all jack-ass worshippers -- somehow outside Plato's Cave looking back at the those "dummies" stuck gazing upon shadows, but, alas, Reagan was a highly intelligent man..."

Can you say, Hoist on your own petard?

Reagan, the closet "intellectualist" ("a person can be eminently intelligent and well-read without being, thank god, an intellectual") too canny to "preen of" his consumption of Chambers and Hayek lest he be spurned at the polls by the public he seeks to awe? A pity Rush Limbough has become so identified with scholarship and research.

The contortions performed by the Right to concoct a hero to worship are the only amusements to be found in an otherwise bathetic week of national senility.