Aside from the fact that a number of folks on the list know Hitchens-- so nothing is more fascinating than a celebrity you know and can gossip about first hand - we have the added element of apostacy and defection. Whether Hitchens will move the whole spectrum to a Horowitz-style position is interesting although I think unlikely. He didn't have the partisanship on the left to become a lapdog on the Right.
But the fact is that Hitchens departure from the Nation, like any political break, does emphasize fracture points in the political world. A lot of folks on the Left and this list have gone out of their way to not only disagree with progressives who thought Milosevic's, the Taliban's and Hussein's thuggery were bad enough to deserve intervention, but have read them out of the left altogether.
I talked to a nice young woman about 26 years old the other night who spends her every waking hour working with unions and working to elect progressives through the Working Families Party. She met a prominent member of this list a few years ago and found herself dismissed as an "imperialist" barely worth talking to because she supported intervention in Kosovo-- note she was not talking abstractly but had lived in Kosovo in the mid-90s and saw the pain of the population first hand. She had been a member of DSA but, along with other experiences, this dismissal and issue has left her a little bit disheartened by dealing with what is perceived as "the left."
It's one thing for folks to trash me as a cruise missile liberal or whatever, since a bit of rough-and-tumble with contemporaries is par for the course, but it really bothers me that young activists are attacked this way.
Hitchens is being both personally high-handed but also reacting to the high-handed ideological litmus testing around the left on these issues. It's a bad situation and while Hitchens is a poor poster child for the problem, his exit from what he sees as his progressive home parallels many others alienation from it.
-- Nathan Newman