Hitchens has always been an ass. An English guy with an upper class accent learned at Oxford who talks about how blue collar Americans are ignorant religous rubes, yes, that's just what socialism has to be associated with for American workers. He even managed to fluster Brian Lamb with his shock-the-boobs nonsense. Good riddance to him.
He was called an heir to Gore Vidal at some point. A good comparison, Vidal's bourgeois extravagant lifestyle and manner is alien to blue collar Americans in a way that bourgeois-born Pat Buchanan certainly is not. Gore is more subtle and less erratic but they are cut from the same cloth nonetheless.