States of flux

Former Today presenter James Naughtie has penned an anxious love letter to America in the time of Trump.

trains, both as the most civilised way to travel and as offering unrivalled pictures of a country and of social change. “One of the best ways to feel America’s contemporary sense of loss,” he writes, “is to get onto the railroads.”

Once it was the railroads that “built the country, gave it iron sinews” – gave it a sense too, one might say, of its vastness, variety, yet cohesion also. Now he sees the misery of poverty in Mississippi alongside Mark Twain’s river, from which, by way of Huckleberry Finn, Hemingway said all American literature derives; the nervous apprehension of New Orleans which has never recovered and may never recover from the Hurricane Katrina disaster; then back to Chicago which he also loves but which, though “the Great American City... for good or ill” nevertheless “speaks powerfully of America’s urban malaise”.

Throughout the journey he talks to other passengers, and catches the mixture of pride, uncertainty, reverence for the idea of America and the fear that this idea is irremediably tarnished which characterises the Great Republic today.

Of course he deals with Trump; less, however, with the man himself than with what he represents or what he calls, after a talk with one prominent conservative, the “toxic mix” which is

”the true flavour of Trump’s America... a genuine feeling that people who have been forgotten are getting some attention again, but one that’s infected with a lust for antagonism, partisanship and frequently... conspiratorial thinking”.

Naughtie has sympathy and regard for Hillary Clinton, whom he has also, I think, known for a long time, but he recognises that her description of “half of