Political switch hitters

The neoconservatives, mostly former Trotskyites, had the good fortune of changing their minds about almost everything starting in the mid-1960s, just as the political fortunes of the left began to collapse. Today they are far richer and more influential as right-wing New York Jewish intellectuals than they had ever been in their previous incarnation. Their pithy lines are widely quoted, and they're the subjects of books and even films. Not many current Trotskyites can say the same.

The most exquisite sense of timing surely belongs to Arianna Huffington. Huffington exploded onto the scene as a Newt Gingrich ally in the mid-1990s, playing host to glamorous salons and running the Center for Effective Compassion. She defected from the right about the time Gingrich's revolution began imploding, and she reemerged as a left-wing gadfly at the end of the decade. In 2000, at a time when liberals were disgusted with Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party, Huffington was running "shadow conventions" where she could rail against the emptiness and pointlessness of partisan politics.

A couple years later, liberals figured out that partisan ennui may not make for such an effective tactic in the face of Bush's ruthless partisanship, and they began focusing on winning the election. Huffington was there to fight the good partisan fight on behalf of John Kerry. Today her coterie is wealthier, more famous and more beautiful than ever.

Anticipating these shifts in the zeitgeist is not so easy. After 9/11, writer Christopher Hitchens, the left-wing demagogue turned right-wing demagogue, transferred his allegiance to the GOP. In those heady days of moral clarity, Hitchens' old allies were on the defensive, and Bush allies were riding high. He seemed to be having a grand time excoriating Islamo-fascists and waxing eloquent about the plight of the Kurds.

Yet, in retrospect, Hitchens made the mistake of buying into the GOP not when it was at low tide, as the neoconservatives had done, but at the peak of its popularity. Things have not gone so well recently, and now he's stuck with less romantic assignments: defending the innocence of Karl Rove, insisting the invasion of Iraq was not really bungled beyond repair and gamely pointing out that we're torturing far fewer people than Saddam Hussein ever did. Hitchens seems to be having less fun these days. On the plus side, at least he still has a job.