"Didn't Just See How Identity Politics Could Warp a Person's Ideas and Principles—He Understood That It Could Replace Them Altogether"

"Identity politics is a powerful tool for demagogues on the Left and the Right because, as Hitchens put it in a 2008 article, it acts as a 'fetter upon free thought.' It coaxes people into seeing themselves as representatives of a group rather than individuals, and it punishes them for deviating from the group’s orthodoxies. In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens explains what this looks like in practice: 'People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for.'"

Matt Johnson at Quillette imagines Christopher Hitchens in 2020.