Who Am I?

Christopher Hitchens

I'm Christopher Hitchens, the well-known writer and social critic. After 20 years, I've just filed my last "Minority Report" column for The Nation.

The proximate cause of my decision to stop is that journal's—and, more generally, the left's—response to 9/11. As I write, "When I began work for The Nation over two decades ago, [publisher] Victor Navasky described the magazine as a debating ground between liberals and radicals, which was, I thought, well judged. In the past few weeks, though, I have come to realize that the magazine itself takes a side in this argument, and is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."

That sort of sentiment has prompted other Nation writers to respond pointedly. Here's Alexander Cockburn, for instance, in a Washington Post story about my departure: "Hitch is no longer the beautiful slender young man of the Left. Now he's just another middle-aged porker of the Right."

Well, not exactly. As this in-depth interview that ran in Reason's November 2001 issue makes clear, the alternative to "the left" is not axiomatically "the right." The ideological spectrum is far more complicated than that, and so is my intellectual journey. This interview, conducted before last fall's terrorist attacks, makes all that clear—and it also spells out why I'm no longer a socialist, why I think moral authoritarianism is on the rise, and why I secretly wanted Margaret Thatcher to become England's prime minister.

As someone who has attacked popular figures ranging from Mother Teresa to Henry Kissinger to Bill Clinton in book-length essays, I'm comfortable being a pariah, even or perhaps especially among former comrades. It's no accident, after all, that my latest book is Why Orwell Matters.