When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Evan Osnos was living away from the United States for a decade, he often found himself making a case for his home country, despite the grave mistakes it had made throughout history.
But when he returned to the US, he found a divided nation that was driven by rage and fear.
In his new book, Wildland: The Making of America's Fury, Osnos goes in search of an explanation.
Travelling to three places in which he has lived: Greenwich, Connecticut; Chicago; Clarksburg, West Virginia, Osnos follows the lives of ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of 21st century America.
Photo: Pete Marovich Images
Listen to the full interview
Wildland is a firefighting term, he told Jim Mora.
“Wildland is the terrain that bursts into flame in a wildfire. It's the dried out, accumulated fuel that builds up and builds up until eventually a spark sets it on fire.
“And to me that actually is the story of American political culture over the last two decades has been a growing sense of untended, unaddressed problems that eventually ignited in the way that we now see it every day.”
He describes much of what happens in Washington as “self-immolation”.
“We are just day after day, trapped in these internecine fights.
“The reason that happened is partly because the parties themselves and the people who are running for office began to put themselves above anything else.
“And so, they're willing to take really horrifying steps against the country's overall interest in order to advance their position.”
He gives the example of the 2013 government shut down.
“When I moved back to Washington from China, the first day I started work, the government shutdown. It was 2013 and there hadn't been a government shutdown in 17 years and here we were, the government was, just by choice, because of Republican decisions, shutting down.”
The whole process cost $US24 billion, he says.
“I ended up calculating that it would have been enough money to send a rover to Mars and back something like seven or eight times over.”
Contemporary American politics is characterised by “poisonous ambition,” he says, which has in turn led to a collapse in trust.
He was on hand as a reporter for The New Yorker during the riots on Capitol Hill, a stark emblem collapsing levels of trust.
“As you begin to dig into the backdrop of these people who had been doing such violence, not only to the physical place of the Capitol and threatening people, but really to the self-narrative of American democracy as a stable, predictable transfer of power, what you begin to see is that their lives had been shaped and in many cases their distortions of mind, the lies they'd come to believe about Donald Trump winning the election, had grown out of these forms of dysfunction and institutional failure in their lives and ways in which they felt as if they had lost pace with the with American progress.”
Along with the institutional failure he charts in the book has been increasing acceptance of greed and inequality.
“I think the distinguishing feature of this period is that greed ran amok, and it managed to infect every corner of our politics and ultimately, it undermined faith in economic fairness of any kind.
“The difference between the greed of today and the greed of the Gilded Age a century ago is that today we have these modern tools that allow you to express it in and refine it, and ultimately make good on it to a degree that the predecessors would have only dreamed of.”
Photo: Bloomsbury
The centre cannot hold in America anymore, he says.
“The Democrats and Republicans used to represent modulating functions that they actually would take this, you know, broad spectrum of ideas on either side, run them through the party machinery and come up with a sort of common sensical version.
“But the nature of our system now, particularly primary elections, in which the most extreme voters are rewarded for participating, that has actually pushed the parties further and farther apart. “
Trust in the American system has been in freefall for half a century, he says.
“There's just an extraordinary statistic that I think captures a lot of this, which is that in 1964 in the United States 77 percent of Americans said they trusted the government.
“And if you fast forward half a century to 2014, that number collapses to just 18 percent.”
And American mobility has also stalled, Osnos says. Americans are now stuck.
“In the 1950s Americans, on the whole, about one fifth of us got up every year and moved to a different place, it was one of the highest levels of that kind of movement of any country in the world.
“People were moving to the suburbs for a larger house or a new job or in search of a spouse. And that has ground to a halt, actually, the number has dropped to the lowest point since records were kept.”
At the same time social mobility has stalled, he says.
“The ability to rise from one class to another has also ground to a halt. And so there is that feeling of being, as one scholar puts it in the book, of being stuck in place. And I think that's an important feature of this time.”
Despite writing several hundred pages detailing America’s problems, he retains some sense of optimism.
“I've lived abroad for much of my adult life and I have worked in authoritarian countries, mostly in China and in Iraq, and Egypt, and so on.
“And I think one of the things that I'm struck by is that we have this system, that's fragile let's face it, but it is a reliable tool in the United States to be able to chuck out the president after four years and give ourselves a do over.”
The turnout in the 2020 election gives cause for optimism, he says.
“We have to remind ourselves where we were a year ago, Americans came out in larger numbers than they had ever before in the 2020 election and sought to try to bring us back on to a more recognisable course.
“And that is encouraging it doesn't solve your problems, but at least it's an instrument that allows you to begin to address them.”
America is weakening and China is on the rise but he doesn’t believe any one country will urge victorious in the next century.
"I don't think that's the way the world will be organised. I think we're moving into a period of much greater multi-polar power, where there are other contenders that are able to define their own identity and don't have to put themselves so distinctly into one camp or another.
“And part of that is because neither one of these two powers has bathed themselves in glory in the last few years. I mean, the truth is that China has moved into a more authoritarian direction, it's committed more human rights abuses against members of its own population. It's also alienating countries in the neighbourhood.”
And a weaker US might be good for the world order, he says.
“So, it's a fact that the United States is weakened. I think that's just absolutely true. But I would also say that perhaps the idea of a bit of a humbled United States of America that is more self-examining would be a good thing. It may not be a bad thing, actually.”