What strange times we live in, when admitted Socialists can manage to outflank ostensible “conservatives” to their starboard side. Witness Christopher Hitchens rake Francis Fukuyama over the rhetorical coals and marvel that “Right” and “Left” no longer mean anything; instead, we ought to divide people up rougly into categories of “Get It” and “Don’t Get It”:
However, it must also be said that Fukuyama himself made it hard for people to concentrate on his words. There appears to be an arsenal of clichés and stock expressions located somewhere inside his word processor, so that he has only to touch the keyboard for one of them to spring abruptly onto the page. Thus, in the first paragraph, we are told that Iraq has become “a magnet” for jihadists, later that democracy-promotion has been attacked both from the left and (gasp) the right, later that neocons have issues with “overreaching,” and soon after that “it is not an accident” that many neoconservatives started out as “Trotskyites.”
Go ye and read the whole thing, for it is good.
