Christopher Hitchens is earning his title as one of the few remaining public intellectuals, if for no other reason than his opinions, aside from those declaiming against theists, are coolly unguarded and beholden to no one. Which is to say, he never gets too excited about what he likes, nor too impassioned about what he dislikes (again, except his wholesale disregard for organized, or even unorganized, religion). But mostly he comes off like a cranky old professor who knows the chariot is pulled by passionate coursers and demands a reasonable charioteer to keep things healthy. Thus, despite his endorsement of Obama, his post-election essay in Slate is not all vaguely self-congratulatory, like the one written by Frank Rich. Hitchens is generally annoyed by the starry-eyed media right now.

Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don’t think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen by Obama to be on his team?

My favorite part is this:

There is an element of the “wannabe” about all this—something that suggests that, if the clock were to be rolled back, every living white person would now automatically stand with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and with John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. All the evidence we have is to the contrary: Abraham Lincoln ringingly denounced John Brown, and John F. Kennedy (he of the last young and pretty family to occupy the Executive Mansion) was embarrassed and annoyed by the March on Washington. In other words, there is something pain-free and self-congratulatory about the Obama surge. This has happened before, of course, with the high-sounding talk about the “New Frontier,” the “Great Society,” and “Morning in America.” It’s just that this time it’s more than usually not affordable. There are many causes of the subprime and derivative horror show that has destroyed our trust in the idea of credit, but one way of defining it would be to say that everybody was promised everything, and almost everybody fell for the populist bait.

And remember, Hitchens endorsed Obama. He’s just sickened by the messianic connotations, the ones that have yet to abate, of the man’s election.