Next week, I’ll fly to the US. Whenever I travel there, I am struck that it is a nation of extremes: great wealth with overt poverty; inspiring ideals of equality with undeniable racism; capitalism at its best in innovation, technology and progress, with clear evidence of capture, rent-seeking and cronyism.
The wealth and power the United States has amassed over the past 250 years is unparalleled in human history. Both have been used for enormous good and harm since 1776.
But I hope the demise of the United States is not inevitable because, perhaps more than any other nation, it has articulated and embodied fundamental truths that lead to human flourishing. Many examples exist where America has hypocritically abused those very truths. But that does not undermine the claims themselves.
The 1776 Declaration of Independence famously claims all “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. This view of humanity as equal in inherent dignity has been, however imperfect its application, the foundation on which the modern world has achieved extraordinary peace, prosperity and stability.
The founding of America was not merely a tax revolt, nor simply a complaint about bad administration. It was a claim about the nature of the human person and therefore about the limits of power. The declaration asserts that rights come before government, authority is delegated and that the state is not the source of human dignity.
That is why America’s present crisis is so serious. Its problem is not simply that it is divided, indebted, over-entertained, badly governed or geopolitically stretched, as can be said of much of the West. Its deeper problem is that it increasingly struggles to explain the moral foundations of its own freedom.
That is what makes Vance’s Communion interesting. In his review of the memoir for the Guardian, Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) writes, “It is not too much of a stretch to see this book as a vision of the modern West”.
The impoverished child of Appalachia became a Marine, a Yale Law graduate, a bestselling author, a senator and then Vice-President. The American dream at its best. Yet the story Vance now tells is not one of simple arrival, but of return: back to faith, back to moral limits, back to the question of what a human life is actually for.
The book contains a telling line, where Vance confesses that, as a parent, “I knew exactly how to help my kid get into a good college but was woefully underprepared to make him a good man”.
That is not only a personal admission, but a sentiment many will recognise. A society can teach its children how to “succeed”. But if it cannot tell them what goodness is, what freedom is for or what kind of people they should become, its days are numbered.
America’s founding claim was that human beings are endowed by their Creator with rights. Yet the modern West behaves as though human beings are self-creating bundles of appetite, identity, productivity and consumption. This contradiction cannot be sustained.
The tragedy is that these insights emerge from a man deeply ensconced in the Trumpian political world, whose belligerence, corruption and contempt for constitutional restraint are themselves symptoms of America’s decline.
The great danger for America is not only that it is paralysed by debt, corrupted by cronyism, torn apart by political hatred. These are symptoms, not causes. The deeper danger is that it has forgotten the core truths that sustain a vision for a flourishing humanity.
For 250 years, the United States has given the world extraordinary examples of enterprise, courage, invention and liberty. It has also given the world no shortage of arrogance, excess, abuse and hypocrisy.
But the answer to hypocrisy is not to abandon the ideal. At 250, America, and the wider West it has so profoundly influenced, is teetering. To renew itself, it must repent of its hypocrisy and return to the radical truths stated at its founding.
Jonathan Ayling is a strategy consultant and professional director. He is the former chief executive of the Free Speech Union (NZ), an Act Party supporter and donor, and has worked as a ministerial staffer and senior Parliamentary adviser in both Government and Opposition.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.