How Matt first encountered Christopher Hitchens ... Matt’s new book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment ... Why Matt thinks Cornel West’s Vietnam-Afghanistan analogy is flawed ... What’s worth preserving in the left-liberal tradition? ... Matt: Identity politics is a “toxin” ... Was affirmative action ever necessary? ... Matt: I wish the left would rediscover Hitchens’s universalism ... Hitchens’s “fearless liberalism” ...