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Christopher Hitchens and the Necessity of Universalism


I.    The most alarming political trends today – the rise of nationalist authoritarianism, the spread of identity politics, the dysfunction and political violence in the United States, an...

Many nationalists regard Hitchens’s brand of universalism – which emphasized the importance of strong international institutions and rejected absolute state sovereignty – as a form of globalist imperialism which attempts to force governments under the boot of a tyrannical new world order. But the importance of universalism has never been clearer: from strengthening the alliance against Russian aggression in Ukraine to supporting pro-democracy protesters in Tehran, Hong Kong, Yangon, Minsk, and Moscow to abandoning the identitarianism and other forms of mindless tribalism that have deepened the political fractures in liberal democratic societies. Yet this hasn’t stopped right-wing nationalists and prominent left-wingers (like Jeremy Corbyn, Glenn Greenwald, George Galloway) from declaring that the institutions of the “postwar global order” are just the latest iteration of Western imperialism to be riveted upon the world.

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