When he ran for office, many held Barack Obama up as evidence of how far society had come, of a new “colorblind” or “post-racial” politics.⁸⁴ In hindsight, he seems to hark back to the world as described by Carlyle in his lectures on heroism, with the Great Man a fixed point, a “living rock amid all rushings-down.”⁸⁵ Without heroes, the world was “bottomless and shoreless.” Great Men gave purpose to history, laying down markers through their great acts that others could follow.

As the confidence of the ’90s gave way to the uncertainty of the ’00s, trailing the wreckage of terror attacks and foreign wars and economic crashes, it was easy to feel adrift. Where was the living rock amid the flux?

In 2008, new age-guru Deepak Chopra said that “the X factor which sets Barack Obama aside as a unique candidate is his hard-won self-awareness.”⁸⁶ In knowing himself, decreed Chopra, Obama could set the United States on “the journey back to self-awareness as a people.” As much a spiritual as a political leader, Obama raised the possibility of “a quantum leap in American consciousness.”⁸⁷ For Chopra, Obama was that self-knowing man, modeler and pattern to others, the rock on whom so many hopes rested.

A number of journalists and commentators sought to place Obama historically, crediting him with a special ability—like Lincoln or Roosevelt—to understand his political moment, but perhaps his real skill was this more mystical ability to project self-knowledge.

In The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes, Chopra goes into more detail about the ways in which heroes can change the world, one of them being to master “creativity.” He uses the analogy of the “imaginal cells” in a caterpillar which, at a certain point, begin to rebel against the insect’s normal cells, “replicating and spreading.” This violent back-and-forth—or dialectical movement, though Chopra doesn’t quote Hegel or Marx—is what gives way to a new synthesis, all of the clustered cells working together as “the actual transformation takes place—a caterpillar takes the quantum leap and becomes something entirely new and innovative, a beautiful butterfly.”⁸⁸

New Labour claiming that society had “changed fundamentally” only conveyed a sense of urgent vagueness, whereas when Obama spoke about his own mixed story he embodied change in himself, butterfly-like. His certain and self-knowing masculinity was the evidence of change’s possibility.

Obama launched his first campaign for president the year I started university, in 2007. At the time, I remember reading Coleridge’s description of the imagination as the “infinite I AM.”⁸⁹ Half-understanding what he meant, I thought it sounded like a new age mantra, a command to place your private experience in a cosmic perspective. Or, more blasphemously, to remake the universe in your own image, stamping your identity (“I AM I AM”) on every rock, tree, and puddle.

But watching Obama on the campaign trail, Coleridge’s words made an abrupt sense. Obama knew himself, and when he spoke, the “imaginal” and “normal” cells of politics, previously disordered, rearranged themselves around him. For a moment, I could see the world—for all its flagrant chaos and violence—through his awed experience of it, personal and infinite.