ABSTRACT
Hollander documents the significance of the election of the country’s first Black president and offers a Kleinian/Bionian perspective on the role of leaders and group dynamics to consider Obama’s impact during the early stage of his presidency. She posits different ways of calculating whether he will carve out a genuine challenge to the neoliberal/neoconservative alliance whose ideology has penetrated the collective psyche or instead implement the progressive discourse of his campaign. Hollander elaborates the ideology of American exceptionalism that has been internalized by most citizens who are unprepared to diagnose the signs of threat to the country’s democratic institutions, ideologies and practices. More citizens suffer psychological uprootedness as the country’s stability is threatened by new global alignments, which reflect intensifying conflicts over natural resources that drive an accelerating climate crisis. Hollander assesses how disruptions in daily life and declining expectations for the future produce a variety of right-wing political movements. She suggests that contemporary subjectivities are divided between despair, which facilitates the continued rightward direction of the country, and hope, which comes with critical consciousness and activism on behalf of social justice.
