Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges. ~Peter Hitchens

I don’t know how many other people outside Chicago know these things, but I would be willing to bet that if all Obama voters knew his close ties to the Daley machine and his relationship with Tony Rezko they would not be very troubled. That may be more bothersome in its way than mass ignorance, but I think Mr. Hitchens here mistakes their lack of response to Obama’s cues for some cynical acknowledgement of the less glamorous details of the man’s career. It was, I suspect, silence kept out of deference to the President-elect combined with amazement that he had, in fact, won. Mr. Hitchens is falling into the trap of believing the hype about Obama, but interpreting it in a negative way. I suppose I might be inclined to the same interpretation, if I believed it, but I don’t. It is important to bear in mind that Obama’s election may be historic in certain respects, but it is not nearly as significant as his foes fear and his friends hope. As I have been stressing all year, the thing that disturbs me about Obama is not that he represents some dramatic change in American politics, but that he represents depressing, miserable continuity:

If you have a high opinion of the Washington establishment and bipartisan consensus politics, Obama’s election should come as a relief. If you believe, as I do, that most of our policy failures stretching back beyond the last eight years are the product of a failed establishment and a bankrupt consensus, an Obama administration represents the perpetuation of a system that is fundamentally broken.

The more provocative parts of Hitchens’ article have drawn rebukes from Alex Massie and Clive Davis. Hitchens wrote:

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim [bold mine-DL], suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

Mr. Hitchens invests Obama’s election with far too much importance and credits it with representing some significant break with what came before it. At the same time, he lavishes praise on pre-Obama America in grossly exaggerated terms that imitate American anti-European rhetoric that portrays the Old World as a deep, yawning chasm of godlessness ringed by nothing more than mosques and (godless) Frenchmen. Yes, he acknowledged that things had been getting worse over the years, but he seems to treat Obama’s election as a kind of tipping point, when it is much more likely to be a tremendous disappointment to those who think it means “that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war.” Having heard this claim, the comedian here would say, “You mean America is finally going to start defending traditional societies, settled peoples and real cultural and political diversity?” If America “switched sides” at some point in the past, it was decades ago.

Until Obama’s victory, America was “totally committed” to preserving its national sovereignty? Where have I been? I was under the distinct impression that successive administrations for the last twenty years or so have led the United States into free trade agreements and the WTO, ignored border security, fought multiple wars in the name of the credibility of the United Nations, and more or less openly encouraged the flouting of our immigration laws. With total commitment like that, who needs betrayal?

America was unabashedly Christian? Under an administration that was at pains to stress that Muslims and Christians worship the same God (theologically speaking, this is nonsense), that ignored the plight of Near Eastern Christians that it helped to exacerbate with its wars, and that quashed the recognition of the genocide of the Armenians to satisfy Ankara’s blackmail demands, to name just a few episodes, America has been anything but unabashedly Christian for quite some time. Let’s not even mention prevailing American attitudes toward Russians in Chechnya and Serbs in Kosovo in the previous decade. On the other hand, the world is still significantly Christian with over two billion Christians worldwide.