In March 2008, when Obama and Hillary Clinton were still fighting over the Democratic nomination, a number of incendiary recordings were leaked to the press. In them, Obama’s old pastor from Chicago, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright—the man who had performed Barack and Michelle’s marriage ceremony—was critical of US foreign policy and the legacy of white supremacy, calling the United States a racist country and shouting: “God damn America!”¹⁰³

It was as if someone had suddenly unmuted the TV. Hysteria ensued. Clinton remarked that Wright “would not have been my pastor”¹⁰⁴ (which was hardly surprising). She asked Obama if by attending Trinity Church he had endorsed Wright’s views? Behind all the “rosepink sentimentalism”—to use Carlyle’s phrase—of Hope and Change, what did he really think? The pressure built on Obama to justify himself, to do what he had not done and talk explicitly about race.

The speech he gave was called “A More Perfect Union.” Standing in front of a shimmering blue velvet curtain interspersed with the Stars and Stripes, he drew again on his mixed-race heritage, talking about his father, who had come to America from “one of the world’s poorest nations,” and his grandmother, who “worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth.”

This narrative, as usual, was couched in terms that were “at once unique and universal, black and more than black.” He sketched out a history of the union: the Founding Fathers had affirmed “equal citizenship under the law” while building their economy on the labor of slaves; since then the United States had failed to live up to its constitutional promise many times, but if it was to achieve its destiny—to wipe clean the “original sin of slavery”—its citizens would have to believe in the “improbable experiment” of a “more perfect union.”

In other words, the path would be long and painful but waiting at the end of it was Obama himself:

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas…I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Though I’m the son of a yellow woman from Indonesia and a white man from Devon, with aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews of many races and hues scattered across at least three continents, I couldn’t see the connection between his words and my background.

What I heard wasn’t a specific I am but an “infinite I AM.” He was less a person than a crucible in which all manner of grievance and hurt had been melted down to forge a new, continent-spanning soul.

Obama’s utopian language tapped into that of writers like the early-twentieth-century Mexican statesman and philosopher José Vasconcelos, who prophesied the coming of a raza cósmica (cosmic race) that would inherit the best qualities of every race. Vasconcelos called it “the matrix race of a new civilization.”¹⁰⁵ Obama made clear this prophecy could only be fulfilled in America, the one “country on Earth” where his story was possible.

Perhaps this unblemished faith in America was all that could have overcome the white terror exposed by Wright’s sermons. In making himself the superheroic, mixed creation of U.S. history’s better side, Obama was no longer a threatening Other or a harbinger of racial mongrelization. He was manifest destiny itself.

Tony Blair had talked in anodyne fashion about a “new era of race relations,” but Obama was—e pluribus unum—the superhuman embodiment of multiculturalism, containing within himself all races—black, white, yellow, and brown. Writing after the election in the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg singled out this speech as central to his success: “In its combination of objectivity and empathy, it persuaded Americans of all colors that he understood them.”¹⁰⁶

I would put it another way: it succeeded in persuading Americans—mainly white—that they wouldn’t need to wrap their minds around the complexities of history, its real and enduring hurts, because Obama’s expanding consciousness would be large enough to wrap itself around them, to raise them all up together.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama had set out the basis of this argument, reflecting on his famous speech at the 2004 Democratic Conference: “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s a United States of America.” This “seemed to strike a chord,” he wrote two years later. People wanted to be “freed from the past of Jim Crow and slavery, Japanese internment camps and Mexican braceros.”¹⁰⁷

Obama could skate over the different reasons that white people and people of color might have for wanting to escape the past because his argument was grounded in his own mixed-race experience: “In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America…I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.”¹⁰⁸

He had no choice but to believe in an all-embracing, contradictory vision of America that reconciled everyone within him, because he loved both his black pastor—in spite of his fiery anti-American rhetoric—and his white grandma—in spite of her occasionally racist remarks. And voters, in placing their faith in Obama, could embrace that contradiction too, freeing themselves from the pain of conscious deliberation. This was in line with a Victorian vision—laid out by Carlyle and enunciated by Matthew Arnold, among others—of making “the State more and more the expression, as we say, of our best self, which is not manifold, and vulgar, and unstable, and contentious, and ever-varying, but one, and noble, and secure, and peaceful, and the same for all mankind.”¹⁰⁹ Obama was the hero capable of expressing the State in himself, of lifting the past’s tragic, contentious burden and so transcending it.