What America Means To Me

Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

Sir Winston Churchill

What America means to me is both a simple question and a complicated one. Simple, because I‘ve had a deep and abiding love for the country since the first moment I set foot there as a nine-year-old boy. Complicated, because the America I loved then is not the America I see today, and the story of that change is, in many ways, the story of my own life.

As a proud Brit, for much of my childhood America was an almost mythical place. It was the land of cowboys and astronauts, of skyscrapers and highways, of Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali, JR and Bobby Ewing. In the mid-1970s, as Britain lurched through strikes, power cuts and a lingering post-imperial gloom, America appeared to me (through the television set in our living room, at least) as a place of light and energy. My own country was in a funk after a humiliating bailout from the IMF in 1976: the three-day week, queues for petrol, rubbish piling up in the streets during strikes, and a chilling, pervasive sense of national decline. For a child growing up in that climate, the contrast could not have been sharper. Britain seemed tired, grey, apologetic. America seemed vast, confident, and full of colour and promise.

In 1976, the bicentennial year of American independence, my family took what was the first overseas holiday of my life as my father needed to attend a board meeting of the bank for which he worked. I was nine years old, a wide-eyed, pint-sized visitor from a weary and struggling Britain, when I landed in Detroit. Detroit! At that time still a thriving symbol of American industry, confidence and ambition. Standing in the street, looking up at the gleaming structures that split the sky in a way I’d never seen before, is a memory that has stayed with me ever since.

From Detroit, we travelled to New York, Boston and, finally, FINALLY, down to Disney World in Florida where a lifelong love affair was cemented. The fact that it was 1976 gave that first trip an added dimension. America was celebrating its 200th birthday. Flags were everywhere, parades filled the streets, fireworks lit the skies. To a boy from a country that had grown accustomed to apologising for its past, the sheer pride of it all was intoxicating. Americans were not embarrassed by who they were. They revelled in it. They believed, unselfconsciously, that theirs was a nation worth celebrating.

From that moment, America became not just another country on the map, but something much more personal and, as I grew and learned more about its history, its foundational principles and the values for which it so resolutely stood, it became a living, breathing experiment in which I felt invested, even from afar.

In the years that followed, I returned often, before fate and an unpredictable career path would eventually make America my home for the best part of a decade—my youngest daughter (born in Greenwich, CT) the proud holder of an American passport. During my years in America I travelled across the country: from the crowded avenues of Manhattan to the wide-open plains of Texas, from the neon of Las Vegas to the quiet dignity of small-town America. I came to know Americans not as the loud and sometimes obnoxious caricatures often portrayed in popular culture, but as people: warm, generous, endlessly curious, and unfailingly welcoming to me, a foreigner in their midst. I fell in love not only with the country’s landscapes and cities but with its people, who carried within them the energy and optimism that had so enchanted me as a child.

And yet, as I sit here surveying America half a century after I first set foot on its shores, I can’t help but notice how much has changed. The Detroit I visited in 1976—a place that seemed to embody America’s unbreakable vitality—has today become a byword for decline. The United States itself, in the years since its bicentennial, has travelled a path that feels eerily parallel. Where once there was confidence, now there is division. Where once there was faith—in God, in institutions, in each other—now there is scepticism, fragmentation, and mistrust. The America that in 1976 proclaimed itself still young at 200 now approaches its 250th year burdened with doubts about its future

This essay, then, is both a love letter and a lament. It’s the story of how a Brit—someone who’s spent a lifetime admiring, watching, and learning from America—has understood its meaning. It’s a reflection on the arc from 1976 to 2026, from Bicentennial to Quarter-Millennium, and the lessons that arc may hold for the future.

It’s impossible, given my chosen profession, not to see part of the story through that lens: the rise of debt, the corrosion of easy money, the way in which monetary policy has distorted not only financial markets but the very fabric of society. But finance is only part of it. The deeper truth, as I see it, is that America’s decline is political, societal, and spiritual. It is a story of how a great people, in whom I still place enormous faith, have been failed by leaders, institutions, and ideas that have lost their way.

And yet—I want to be clear—this is not a story without hope. To love America is to believe, still, in its capacity for renewal. Its greatness has always been less about its government than its people, less about its past than its future. Even now, when the divisions seem sharper than ever, I believe that America retains a unique ability to reinvent itself—eventually. As Winston Churchill was famously purported to explain, Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

I believe this to be true. But I also believe that while the path back to what America once represented is essential for the entire Western world, it will not be easy. It may even require a collapse of the current order before something better can emerge.

So this is what America means to me: the memory of a boy’s awe in 1976; the affection of an adult who has lived among Americans and counted them as friends; the concern of a man who has watched the country drift towards a dangerous precipice; and the hope of someone who still believes that, in the end, America can reclaim its soul.

It’s impossible for me to think about America’s story without looking at it through the lens of my own profession. Finance has been my world, and over the last fifty years the country’s economic choices have played a central role in shaping its fortunes—for better and for worse.

The United States emerged from the 1970s battered by inflation, oil shocks and the aftershocks of leaving the gold standard. Yet, by the 1980s, Paul Volcker’s determination to squeeze out inflation, painful though it was, laid the groundwork for a long period of stability and growth. Ronald Reagan’s America projected optimism and strength, not just politically but economically. To many observers, it seemed as though the US had regained its footing.

But beneath the surface, new distortions were taking hold. Debt began to rise—slowly at first, then faster. In the 1990s, prosperity seemed secure, helped along by the technology boom and the peace dividend after the Cold War. Yet even then, the foundations were shifting. Easy money and a growing belief that central banks could control the cycle planted seeds that would sprout later.

The 2000s revealed just how fragile things had become. The dot-com bubble showed the dangers of speculative excess, but it was the 2008 financial crisis that laid bare the full consequences of decades of cheap credit, leverage and complacency. The response—doubling down with a series of massive bailouts and unprecedented monetary intervention—may have stopped the system from collapsing but it also entrenched a dangerous precedent. Risk was socialised, while the rewards remained private.

Since then, the reliance on artificially low interest rates and ever-expanding debt has only deepened. Entire markets have become conditioned to expect intervention. Companies that might otherwise have failed have been kept alive, distorting competition. Asset prices have soared, enriching those who already owned them, while ordinary Americans found it harder to build wealth.

This has been, in my view, one of the most damaging legacies of the last half-century. Monetary policy, designed to stabilise the system, has instead hollowed out much of the middle class. It has contributed to inequality, fueled anger, and left millions feeling as though the system no longer works for them. When I look at the political and social divisions that have widened in recent years, I simply can’t separate them from these economic realities.

The numbers speak for themselves. Federal debt has climbed to levels once thought unthinkable. Trillions of dollars of stimulus, layered on top of already massive deficits, have created an environment where debt service itself is becoming a central threat. Inflation, thought to be a problem solved decades ago, has returned with force. Demographics are shifting too—an ageing population placing increasing strain on social programmes that were never designed for today’s realities.

Amidst all this, what strikes me most is how the sense of responsibility has eroded. America once accepted that difficult choices had to be made: that inflation had to be brought under control, that deficits couldn’t grow unchecked. Today, politics punishes honesty. Leaders on both sides of the aisle find it easier to promise more than to confront hard truths. And so the cycle continues, each bailout, each rate cut, each fiscal package adding to the burden that will eventually have to be faced.

For all its innovation and dynamism, America has allowed its financial system to drift into something unsustainable. And in that drift, it has mirrored Detroit’s decline: strength squandered, challenges deferred, adaptation delayed.

No country can escape the weight of arithmetic forever, and America is no exception. For decades the numbers have been moving in the wrong direction, and now the consequences are impossible to ignore.

Inflation is the most visible symptom. For much of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, Americans became accustomed to a world in which prices rose only modestly. It bred complacency, the belief that inflation had been tamed once and for all (a beliefe deliberately fueled and reinforced by a complicit and entrenched Federal Reserve). The last few years have shown how misplaced that belief was and how deceptive and disingenuous the Fed’s repeated assurances were. Trillions of dollars of monetary and fiscal stimulus, combined with supply shocks and geopolitical tensions, pushed prices higher. For ordinary Americans, that has meant shrinking purchasing power, tighter household budgets, and a growing sense that the future may not be as secure as the past.

Debt, however, is the deeper, more pernicious problem.

Federal debt has ballooned past levels that would once have been thought politically impossible. State and local governments are strained and corporate borrowing has surged, fueled by years of near-zero rates. Households, too, have carried rising burdens, whether through mortgages, student loans or credit cards, resulting in a system in which almost every corner of the economy is more leveraged than it ought to be and, despite a facade of wealth (much of which is simply built on credit), the strata that lie below are crumbling.

The service cost of that debt is now rising sharply. With interest rates no longer at historic lows, the US government faces the prospect of spending more on interest payments than on defence or social security. That isn’t a theoretical concern—it’s already materialising in budget projections. It leaves policymakers with fewer options, and it makes each new crisis harder to navigate.

Layered on top of this is demographics. The post-war baby boom created a vast working-age population that fueled growth, consumption, and tax revenue. That generation is now retiring, drawing on social programmes at precisely the moment when the younger workforce is smaller and under greater financial pressure. Social Security and Medicare were never designed for such an imbalance, and without reform, their costs will swamp public finances.

Predctably,  expecting such reform to be a choice made rather than an arithmetic imposition is a fool’s errand.

Put plainly: America has promised more than it can afford, and it has delayed reckoning with that fact for too long. The arithmetic will assert itself, one way or another. Either through higher taxes, reduced benefits, inflation that erodes obligations in real terms, or some combination of all three. None of those paths are politically attractive, which is why the can has been kicked down the road for decades. But the road is running out. Fast.

This, to me, is one of the central truths of America’s current moment. The political polarisation, the anger and the mistrust are all sharpened by economics. When people feel that their standard of living is slipping, when they see debt piling up with no clear plan to manage it, when they fear their children will inherit something worse rather than better, faith in institutions corrodes. And once that faith is gone, it is very hard to restore.

The numbers themselves don’t lie. What matters is whether America still has the courage to confront them honestly.

Economics alone doesn’t explain America’s present troubles and, while debt, inflation and demographics are critical, they intersect with something deeper: the erosion of meaning and the weakening of the ties that once held American communities together.

For much of America’s history, faith was woven into the fabric of daily life. Churches weren’t just places of worship; they were gathering points, anchors of local identity, and sources of continuity across generations. That network of shared belief and community gave the country a strength that was difficult to measure in statistics but undeniable in its effect.

Over the past few decades, that anchor has loosened. Church attendance has fallen steadily, particularly among the young. In its place, other sources of cohesion have weakened too. Neighbourhoods are less stable, families more dispersed and institutions less trusted, while technology has given people new ways to connect but has also isolated them, drawing attention away from the tangible and immediate into the abstract and virtual. Social media, in particular, has deepened the problem, amplifying division and rewarding outrage over dialogue.

The result is a society where many feel unmoored. Without a shared framework of values or belief, debates that might once have been resolved through compromise now become existential struggles. Politics substitutes for faith and identity takes the place of community, while the national conversation splinters into competing tribes, each convinced of its own virtue, each more suspicious of the other.

Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, writing in his remarkable book Morality, offered a withering but unerringly accurate assessment of the slide in culture and, though he wasn’t specifically referencing the United States exclusively, if the cap fits...:

“The idols of today are unmistakable: self-esteem without achievement, sex without consequences, wealth without responsibility, pleasure without struggle and experience without commitment.”

This spiritual drift is, in my view, at least as important as the financial challenges.

A nation cannot sustain itself on economics alone. It needs a sense of purpose, of cohesion, of moral direction. The United States was built not only on Enlightenment principles but on a broadly shared Christian ethic that shaped its culture and institutions and, as that ethic has receded, the void has not remained empty, instead being filled by consumerism, partisanship, and a restless search for identity that rarely satisfies.

This, I believe, lies at the heart of America’s current malaise: a loss of faith—not only in God, but in each other. A loss of trust—not only in institutions, but in the very idea of a shared future. Without that, even the strongest economy will feel hollow. With it, even adversity can be endured.

Looking ahead, the question is not whether America will change, but how. The pressures building beneath the surface—economic, political, and spiritual—cannot be ignored indefinitely. They will resolve themselves one way or another. The only uncertainty is whether the resolution comes through managed renewal or through crisis.

One possibility is that the existing order simply buckles under its own weight. The political system has grown so polarised that basic governance has become difficult. If that continues, it isn’t hard to imagine a scenario where the federal government finds itself unable to function effectively, forcing states and regions to assume more authority. Secession, once unthinkable, is no longer beyond the edge of public debate. A second civil conflict, though very different in form to the first, is no longer the impossibility it was for so long if trust in national institutions breaks down entirely.

Another perhaps  more likely, though no less problematic possibility is a more gradual fragmentation. Rather than a single dramatic rupture, the country could drift into a looser union: states asserting more independence, alliances forming along cultural or economic lines, and the federal centre losing its dominance. In some respects, this is already happening as states chart their own courses on taxation, regulation, and social policy. The risk is that such a drift creates a patchwork America with widening disparities and fewer unifying bonds.

A third path is renewal through collapse. History offers many examples of nations that had to endure a period of severe breakdown before rebuilding on stronger foundations. America may yet prove to be one of them.

A financial crisis larger than 2008, a political deadlock that paralyses Washington, or a societal shock that forces hard choices—all could act as catalysts for change. Painful though such a reset would be, it could clear the ground for something more sustainable.

And then there is the hopeful scenario: that America rediscovers its centre before collapse becomes unavoidable. That it finds leaders with the courage to confront the realities of debt and demographics. That it rebuilds trust in institutions, re-establishes the principle of compromise, and rekindles the sense of common purpose that has always been its greatest strength.

The truth is that all these futures are possible. Which one unfolds depends on whether America can face its problems honestly. Denial and delay will only make the eventual reckoning harsher, while honesty and courage could still allow for renewal without catastrophe.

For all the challenges, I don’t believe America’s story is finished. Its history is one of resilience, of renewal born out of crisis, of a capacity to adapt when adaptation seems impossible. Time and again, the country has been written off, only to reinvent itself in ways that surprise the world and, no matter how bleak things may currently seem, I see absolutely no reason to think that capacity has vanished forever.

If there is to be renewal, it will not come from Washington alone. It will come, as it always has, from the people themselves. From families and communities deciding that what unites them matters more than what divides them. From states and towns that find new ways to govern effectively when the federal system falters. From individuals rediscovering that freedom without responsibility is hollow.

A return to faith may yet play a part in that renewal.

There are early signs that some young Americans, having grown up in the vacuum left by declining religious life, are searching for something more enduring than consumerism or identity politics. If that search leads them back to Christianity, it could provide a moral framework strong enough to rebuild communities that feel fractured. Faith has always been one of America’s deepest wells of strength. It could be again.

In my own search for understanding this past year—not just of America, but of the entire world post-Covid—the issue of faith has been a somewhat surprising constant, cropping up time and again in conversations with people for whom I understood faith to be far from central in their thoughts or their lives.

Equally important is America finding a way—any way—to  move back toward the political centre.

The country cannot survive indefinitely in a state of permanent tribal war. Compromise, however unfashionable, is the only path to stability and that requires leaders who are willing to disappoint their own side in the service of the nation as a whole. Whether such leaders will emerge is as uncertain as it seems unlikely just now, but history suggests that moments of crisis have a way of producing figures who rise to the occasion.

We can but hope.

The path back will not be easy. It may take a shock—financial, political, or social—to break the current deadlock and force a reckoning. It may feel, for a time, as though the project itself is burning down. But even that need not be the end because sometimes collapse is the necessary prelude to renewal. Sometimes it’s the fire that clears the ground for new growth.

But what gives me hope, above all else, are the American people themselves.

The warmth and generosity I first encountered as a boy remain, even if they are harder to see beneath the noise of division. The optimism—the belief that problems can be solved and that tomorrow can and will be better than today—still runs deep and, while it seems to be buried at times, it hasn’t disappeared.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, the question is whether it can recover the spirit it displayed at its 200th: pride without arrogance, confidence without hubris, unity without uniformity.

If it can, then the years ahead, however difficult, may yet mark not the end of a story, but the beginning of a new chapter. The outcome matters not just to Americans, but to the entire world because, without a benevolent, righteous and fair America at its centre to counter the forces that would tear it apart, the wider world faces a prolonged period of tumult, turbulence and disarray.

To me, America has always been more than a place. It’s an idea, a promise, a hope. I believed in it when I first set foot in Detroit in 1976 and, as hard as it has become to hold onto that belief, I believe in it still.

To give up on America, to me, is to give up on the Western world and I’m simply not ready to do that yet because I believe that, in the end, America will find a way to reclaim its soul.

Any other outcome is simply unthinkable.