I'd rather avoid most political issues with this blog, but reading Christopher Hitchens' column in slate is almost a perfect case study in the evolution of a crank.

You start out with Hitchens pre-9/11. Liberal, strong-minded, but generally acknowledged to be a thorough researcher, and an excellent if eccentric analyst (he probably made no friends with Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice). My favorite was The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

But with 9/11 something happened to Hitch. He started writing about the war in Iraq like it was intimately related to the war on terror, defended the president's rationale, and subsequently has continued to defend the administration's actions long after it has become clear that they created a total disaster. Not only does he defend them though, he seems to have totally lost all perspective, he doesn't seem to be able to accept facts that contradict his opinion, and has essentially become a crank.

His latest column in Slate is another one of these post hoc justifications for the war, now the story is that Iraq would have collapsed into civil war eventually anyway, so it's not really the fault of the invasion and occupation.

Whether or not you think this rationalization is totally crazy, it fits with the generalized pattern of an evolving crank. Remember the story of how he flipped out at a dinner party after someone refused to be critical of Howard Dean? (That link by the way has a compelling argument for this evolution of Hitch). Or these columns in which he says Al Qaeda is desparate and did us a "favor" on 9/11, Abu Ghraib wasn't bad (because Saddam was worse), not to mention flipping off studio audiences and his somewhat insane defense of the administration's outing of Valerie Plame.

Whether or not you agree with the war, it should be possible to agree that Hitch's pattern of behavior has gotten progressively more and more irrational, to the point where there's only one word left to describe him. Hitch has become a crank. How did this happen? Ezra Klein's explanation is that Hitch latched onto this war as a kind of "great moment" in history and he decided he was going to be on the right side of it no matter what. This desire to be "right" no matter what the facts say, might be a critical component of crank formation. As the facts evolve and show that occupying Iraq has been a disaster, Hitch can't let go of his initial hypothesis because he believes fervently that he was right or in the rightness of the war on terror as a whole. In his mind the facts be damned, this is a war for our existence and nothing should stop our execution of it.

At some point we may have to start talking about how defenders of this war have become denialists. There is something fundamentally dishonest about the people who suggest that everything in Iraq is going fine, conditions are improving, or that make patently false claims like Iraq is safer than Detroit to try to diminish the significance of the daily violence in that country. As I've said though, I'd rather avoid have the definition of denialism devolve into one that simply describes those that oppose your ideas which is how people would see an attack on the Iraq war supporters using that label. It really is about how people fudge debates, hide facts and deceptively argue positions that the facts do not support. T

These days, Hitch has started arguing like a denialist though. And his behavior, and his protection of an overvalued idea (that the war was right and good no matter what), have unfortunately turned him into an unreasonable man. It's a case study in the evolution of a crank.

Labels: Christopher Hitchens, general discussion