Having read most of his Minority Report columns in The Nation, watching his devolution from a post-Trotskyite to a Thatcherite to a Bushite, with minimally plausible reasons for all of them, a dirty fighter at each stage, was important for my gradual abandonment of materialism and into a position that is much farther left than I started out being when I read his first column. He was a good example of a certain kind of tony, elite decadence and the bottom side of the would-be intelligentsia of the English Speaking Peoples.
There are reasons that the left as it generally appears today is entirely impotent. The praise of Christopher Hitchens this week provides lots of stuff for a diagnostic study. One that won't be done. Which is tragic.
