On the night of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the Princeton campus erupted in ecstatic shrieks and sighs. I had not voted for Obama, and I hated much of what he stood for (“marriage equality”, “the right to choose”, “data”, all that). But as students streaked by the window, I felt a touch of faith, like the dour Englishman in Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy who cannot help but be moved when confronted by a Neapolitan religious procession in all its mad fervour.
Similar bacchic rites occurred wherever America’s young elites cluster. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie captured the mood with her novel Americanah, in which a young couple living near Yale (one a graduate student, the other a blogger) is saved from break-up by the Obama campaign. When Barack won his smashing victory in the Iowa primaries, the couple “made love, for the first time in weeks, and Obama was there with them, like an unspoken prayer, a third emotional presence.”
