Robert Wright is postulating a general rightward-leaning tendency amongst the best-known of the 'new atheists'. He has a quick piece of evidence for this putative tendency, and then an argument as to why it isn't surprising. The quick piece of evidence comes in Wright's opening paragraph:
It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?
It's 'hawkish views', you see. Well, Christopher can take care of himself, but as regards the general connection this presupposes, the claim that only a so-called 'dove' - about the war on terror, about terrorism itself, about the likely futures of Iraq respectively with and without Saddam Hussein - could be counted as being on the left is a terrible slur on the left and pronounces a grim forecast about its future.
Wright then goes on to trace a general connection between 'new atheist' rightward-leaningness, on the one hand, and an overemphasis on religion as the cause of political problems - the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Islamic radicalism, terrorism – on the other. For him, it's facts on the ground, rather, and 'interests', that lie behind these problematic phenomena; they are what must be addressed by all right-thinking, that is, kosher, non-hawkish left-wingers.
This is greenhorn stuff. Yes, anyone with an education on the left - one is tempted to say, anyone with any serious political education at all - knows that religious doctrines, ethnic and nationalist ideologies, are not free-standing, that they interact in significant ways with material interests and background social conditions and can be powerfully affected by these. It must also be said, however, that there is a history on the left of underestimating the power of ideologies, including both religion and nationalism, and a whole generation (and more) of the left spent time and intellectual effort trying to absorb this failure and to remedy it. You won't get a neat set of alignments by just muttering 'religion' here and 'interests' there. Where both are in play, both are in play, and what counts are the more precise causal lines and influences in one direction or the other. So far as terrorism is concerned, there is no way you can get from facts on the ground and interests to terrorism without the intervening variables of ideology and strategic choice. If being on the left leads you to overlook or downplay this fact then the left you are on is verkrappt.
