Left or right, it doesn’t much matter: it sure is a bracing feeling for the chair-bound intellectual to imagine himself the drivetrain in the engine of history. Or at the very least a prophet, standing on the correct side of history and looking down upon moral midgets who insist the world is more complicated than all that. Consider Christopher Hitchens: the former Trotskyist wrote, following his 2002 resignation as a Nation columnist, that by not embracing things like the Iraq War, “The Nation joined the amoral side…. I say that they stand for neutralism where no such thing is possible or desirable, and I say the hell with it.”