Free Radical - Christopher Hitchens - Interview

Reason, Nov, 2001 by Rhys Southan

REASON: The right and the left have joined together in a war against pleasure. What caused this?

Hitchens: The most politically encouraging event on the horizon--which is a very bleak one politically-is the possibility of fusion or synthesis of some of the positions of what is to be called left and some of what is to be called libertarian. The critical junction could be, and in some ways already is, the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs is an attempt by force, by the state, at mass behavior modification. Among other things, it is a denial of medical rights, and certainly a denial of all civil and political rights. It involves a collusion with the most gruesome possible allies in the Third World. It's very hard for me to say that there's an issue more important than that at the moment. It may sound like a hysterical thing to say, but I really think it's much more important than welfare policy, for example. It's self-evidently a very, very important matter. Important enough, perhaps, to create this synthesis I've been looking for, or help to do that.

REASON: What are the signs that political fusion between some libertarians and some leftists is happening?

Hitchens: One reason the War on Drugs goes on in defiance of all reason is that it has created an enormous clientele of people who in one way or another depend upon it for their careers or for their jobs. That's true of congressmen who can't really get funding for their district unless it's in some way related to anti-drug activity. There's all kinds of funding that can be smuggled through customs as anti-drug money-all the way to the vast squads of people who are paid to try to put the traffic down, and so forth. So what's impressive is how many people whose job it has been to enforce this war are coming out now and saying that it's obviously, at best, a waste of time.

The other encouraging sign is that those in the political-intellectual class who've gone public about it have tended to be on what would conventionally have been called the right. Some of them are fairly mainstream Republicans, like the governor of New Mexico. National Review, under the ownership of William Buckley, published a special issue devoted to exposing the fallacies and appalling consequences of the War on Drugs. I thought that should have been The Nation that did that. I now wouldn't care so much about the precedence in that. It wouldn't matter to me who was first any longer. I don't have any allegiances like that anymore. I don't ask what people's politics are. I ask what their principles are.

REASON: Has your own shift in principles changed your relationship with The Nation?

Hitchens: For a while it did. I thought at one point that I might have to resign from the magazine. That was over, in general, its defense of Bill Clinton in office, which I still think was a historic mistake made by left-liberals in this country. It completely squandered the claim of a magazine like The Nation to be a journal of opposition. By supporting Clinton, The Nation became a journal more or less of the consensus. And of the rightward moving consensus at that, because I don't think there's any way of describing Bill Clinton as an enemy of conservatism.