"Hitchens ... directs his argument at his fellow leftists, those turtlenecked worrywarts who hate welfare reform and the bond market and still get hoppin' mad about Sacco and Vanzetti," writes Andrew Ferguson in Fortune.
I skimmed No One Left to Lie To again and like to imagine one of those conservatives residing in their conservative city reading this:
"But, as we are endlessly instructed, while rich people will *not* work unless they are given money, poor people will *only* work if they are not. (These are the two modern meanings of the term "incentive": a tax break on the one hand and the threat of the workhouse on the other.) And, once the Democratic party had adopted this theology, the poor had no one to whom they could turn. The immediate consequence of this was probably an intended one: the creation of a large helot underclass disciplined by fear and scarcity, subject to endless surveillance, and used as a weapon against any American worker lucky enough to hold a steady or unionized job."
So maybe the right's "fondness" for Hitchens is analogous to the way the left admired - maybe too strong a word - David Stockman, who was a budget director for Reagan and helped to discredit Reaganomics? Does this relate to the point Foucault is making in some weird way? Am I way off the mark?
>from REMARKS ON MARX, Michel Foucault interviewed by Duccio Trombadori
>[Semiotext(e), 1991]
>
>Duccio Trombadori: But still apropos of polemics, you have also stated
>clearly that you don't like and will not accept those kinds of arguments
>"which mimic war and parody justice." Could you explain to me more clearly
>what you meant by saying this?
>
>Michel Foucault: What is tiresome in ideological arguments is that one is
>necessarily swept away by the "model of war." That is to say that when you
>find yourself facing someone with ideas different from your own, you are
>always led to identify that person as an enemy (of your class, your
>society, etc.). And we know that it is necessary to wage combat against the
>enemy until triumphing over him. This grand theme of ideological struggle
>has really disturbed me. First of all because the theoretical coordinates
>of each of us are often, no, always, confused and fluctuating, especially
>if they are observed in their genesis.
>
>Furthermore: might not this "struggle" that one tries to wage against the
>"enemy" only be a way of making a petty dispute without much importance
>seem more serious than it really is? I mean, don't certain intellectuals
>hope to lend themselves greater political weight with their "ideological
>struggle" than they really have? A book is consumed very quickly, you know.
>An article, well.... What is more serious: acting out a struggle against
>the "enemy," or investigating, together or perhaps divergently, the
>important problems that are posed? And then I'll tell you: I find this
>"model of war" not only a bit ridiculous but also rather dangerous. Because
>by virtue of saying or thinking "I'm fighting against the enemy," if one
>day you found yourself in a position of strength, and in a situation of
>real war, in front of this blasted "enemy," wouldn't you actually treat him
>as one? Taking that route leads directly to oppression, no matter who takes
>it: that's the real danger. I understand how pleasing it can be for some
>intellectuals to try to be taken seriously by a party or a society by
>acting out a "war" against an ideological adversary: but that is disturbing
>above all because of what it could provoke. Wouldn't it be much better
>instead to think that those with whom you disagree are perhaps mistaken; or
>perhaps that you haven't understood what they intended to say?