It seems that I have to scoop the un-scoopable Andrew Sullivan on his appearance on Washington Journal with Christopher Hitchens. The boys were clearly the worse for wear owing to the unseemly hour at which the show is shot, but they managed to keep a stiff upper lip and soldier on. The most significant event was Hitch’s admission that he’s no longer a socialist, a question that host Brian Lamb has been taunting him with for some ten years now. He equivocated a bit, declaring that it’s not really possible for anyone to be a socialist these days since there’s no world-wide socialist movement, no prospect of one in the future, and no coherent socialist critique of capitalism, so it’s not really a personal choice.
The only areas of disagreement between the two were religion and health care; Sully’s a Roman Catholic and Hitch is an “anti-theist.” They traded the standard strawmen on this question in a particularly amusing way. Sully’s big on the free-market system of health care we have in the United States, and credits it for the anti-HIV drugs that are keeping him alive, while Hitch is nostalgic for the National Health, which was working fine twenty years ago when he left England.
Finally, the call-in audience was true to form for Complaint-Span: loony as all get-out. It was a fun show.