Alexis de Toqueville was so enthralled by the nine months he spent in the United States in 1831 that he wrote two fat volumes. He admired the vigour of its democratic institutions and the entrepreneurial spirit of its people, which was transforming a wilderness into a polished civilisation. And he approved of the way that the country’s potential vices were moderated by its commonplace virtues, particularly its civic pride and religious observance. The proud French aristocrat was happy to call himself “half Yankee”. But in the 1840s and 1850s de Tocqueville’s views on America took a darker turn, as a new collection of his writings makes clear. (“Tocqueville on America After 1840: Letters and Other Writings”). Public life was dominated by people who lacked “moderation, sometimes probity, above all education”. America’s sense of “exaggerated pride in its strength” was promoting military adventurism. “Primitivism” stalked the land. “What is certain is that, for some years, you have strangely abused the advantages given to you by God,” he chided.

It is presumptuous to mention oneself alongside the author of the greatest book written about America. But during the 13 years that the author of this column has spent in the United States, he too has found his initial exuberance clouded by darker thoughts. When he arrived in 1996, America was lord of all it surveyed, the world’s only remaining superpower, convinced of its supreme benevolence, and the engine of a productivity miracle that left Europeans in awe. Social pathologies such as violent crime were being brought under control; almost half of households owned shares. The place had an air of what Mark Twain once called “the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces”. Today, this serene confidence has long gone. Americans are more pessimistic than the Indians or Chinese, worried that their children will not enjoy the opportunities that they have taken for granted. Xenophobia is on the rise, as is nostalgia for a time of stable families and solid values. California, the state that has always reached the future first, is preparing to pay its bills with IOUs.

America has had an inauspicious start to the 21st century, to put it mildly. The Iraq war revealed the fragility of the “unipolar moment”. America sullied not just its moral authority, thanks to Abu Ghraib and “enhanced interrogation”, but also its reputation for competence, thanks to faulty intelligence about WMD and a botched occupation. The economic crisis has revealed the fragility of its financial system. Great investment banks have crumbled to dust. Financial wizards have been exposed as frauds or fools. A country that once lectured the world on the “Washington consensus” of deregulation and privatisation is busy re-regulating Wall Street and nationalising Detroit. America has got ever deeper into debt, unable to kick the habit of living beyond its means. The cost of entitlements has been rising vertiginously, and will do so even faster as the baby-boomers retire. The federal deficit is likely to average a trillion dollars a year over the next decade.

Sober projections suggest that by 2027, if federal revenues remain at around 18% of GDP—the level people are accustomed to—they will not even cover the cost of government-run health programmes, Social Security and debt interest. Everything else will require more borrowing. Foreigners, who currently hold around half of US Treasury debt, up from 18% in 1990, will not finance Uncle Sam’s self-indulgence for ever. But we should guard against substituting irrational pessimism for irrational exuberance. Yes, America will face competition from developing countries and from an enlarging and deepening European Union. But it brings great resources to the fight. China’s authoritarian regime is brittle. About 40% of India’s people are illiterate, and its pool of trained talent is limited. America will be spared the demographic disasters awaiting Europe and China, thanks to its high birth rate and genius for absorbing newcomers.

De Tocqueville, in his optimistic phase, said that “the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” America has succeeded brilliantly in repairing the ancestral fault of racism. Thirty-six years after Richard Nixon casually remarked that “there are times when an abortion is necessary…when you have a black and a white,” America elected the child of a black father and a white mother to the presidency. The new administration is trying to correct some of the excesses of the Bush years, much as Ronald Reagan corrected the excesses of the Carter years. Barack Obama wants to tackle health-care costs and rebuild the economy on the rock of solid education and a sound infrastructure rather than the sands of financial speculation.

Whether Mr Obama can deliver on his promises is open to doubt: his inspiring rhetoric is marred by a willingness to compromise with his party’s free-spending establishment in Congress. But there is fortunately a more solid reason for optimism. That is the country’s taste for entrepreneurial capitalism, a taste that arrived with the first settlers and is becoming an ever greater resource, as the global economy is shaken by wave upon wave of disruptive technologies. America still has a genius for incubating entrepreneurs and giving those entrepreneurs the wherewithal to turn bright ideas into global behemoths. America’s biggest company, Wal-Mart, was founded only in 1962; its sexiest, Google, was conceived in a Californian dorm room at about the time that your columnist arrived on these shores. Even as de Tocqueville despaired about the future of his half-adopted country in the 1840s and 1850s, the likes of Carnegie and Rockefeller were about to unleash the greatest productivity miracle the world has seen. That is the America that still promises much. That great Republic.

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