There is no denying Christopher Hitchens’s skill as a public figure: he is seldom at a loss for words, sometimes entertaining, and occasionally even right. But he keeps getting important things wrong because, throughout his political wanderings, there persists a strange loyalty to an obscure bloodthirsty revolutionary and to the ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution. For Hitchens—now honored throughout the neoconservative Right—remains what he has been throughout his public life, a disciple of Leon Trotsky and a talented writer and polemicist—perhaps the most talented polemicist the Bolshevik tradition has produced in the West.
Given Hitchens’s current role as a neocon fellow traveler, it is instructive (not to mention fun) to recall with whom he used to travel.