Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens: Darlings of the right

The story of American writers and artists who decamped to Paris is a familiar one that’s been recently recast in golden hues by Woody Allen in “Midnight in Paris.” The story of British intellectuals who decamped to the United States is less familiar — and perhaps less colorful. In recent years it has consisted mainly of writers and professors. They prosper in part because of deep-seated American Anglophilism. We hear an Oxford accent and conclude the individual must be more educated, charming — and articulate — than we are. It might be true. Simon Schama, the British historian, recalls that English students practiced debating as well as impersonating 19th century orators. The tradition of debating has all but disappeared from American education, and this may have left us more tongued-tied than our British brethren.

Schama joined the floodlet of British intellectuals who moved to the United States, and now he teaches at Columbia University. Herein lies a question: to what extent do the Brits energize American intellectual life, and, especially, give voice and backbone to conservatives? To be sure, the British ex-pats are not uniformly conservatives — consider Schama himself or the late Tony Judt, both of whom leaned left. Yet — to use economic terms — the issue may be one of demand, not supply. In an era when many conservatives pray at the alter of Ronald Regan and Ayn Rand, celebrate guns-in-every house, challenge evolution and climate warming, champion life for the unborn and the death penalty for the born, they have a greater need for credible intellectuals than the left.

This need shows in the trajectory of two British-American journalists who emerged from similar Oxbridge milieus, enjoyed similar gifts of fluidity in prose and talk, and recently died within months of each other: Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn. While they both moved to New York, and wrote for the same leftist journals, their careers unfolded very differently. Cockburn remained a leftist and physically, if not culturally, moved to the margins. He settled in a hamlet of Northern California — hours from any airport — where he published attacks on the American empire and put out a small newsletter. Hitchens largely broke with the left, settled in Washington, DC, enthusiastically backed the Iraq war, and became a Vanity Fair favorite and an omnipresence on talk TV and the lecture circuit. Indeed, he was one of the most recognized intellectuals of our time. Cockburn peddled his unreviewed books from the trunk of his car. Hitchens wrote best-sellers and palled around with the great and not-so-great....