The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

Hitchens is praising what he saw as the United States’ distinctive civic and cultural “generosity”: an openness that attracts outsiders and allows immigrants, exiles, and dissenters to remake themselves without being permanently defined by origin, class, or creed. By calling the country “historically magnetic,” he frames America less as an ethnicity than as an idea with pull—an experiment that has repeatedly drawn people who wanted wider intellectual, political, or personal latitude. The plainspoken qualifier “to put it simply” suggests he is distilling a complex judgment (often made amid his criticisms of U.S. policy) into a core admiration: the capacity to absorb newcomers and extend opportunity, protection, and a public sphere large enough for argument.