As the countryside becomes more rural so commerce thins, and the hoardings grow rustic. On the side of one old wooden building is a hand-painted invitation to try the local ‘Sweet Honey’. A mile further along is a huge sign, in bold sans serif capitals, that reads, simply, ‘GUNS’.

It is 2 November 2013. The day before – All Saints’ Day – a twenty-three-year-old man called Paul Anthony Ciancia entered Terminal 3 of Los Angeles International Airport and shot dead a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer. Seven other people were injured. Ciancia was armed with a semi-automatic .223-calibre Smith & Wesson M&P-15 rifle, five 30-round magazines, and hundreds of additional rounds of boxed ammunition. After a brief rampage he was himself shot, not fatally, by law enforcement officers. On him they found a note claiming that he wanted to kill TSA officers (‘pigs’) and referring to the ‘NWO’, or New World Order – one of the many conspiracy theories about government dominance and threats to liberty currently circulating in the United States.

Route 67’s roadside buildings and hoardings are cultural Morse code – dots and dashes of America, flashing past like celluloid spooling through a projector.

Two days earlier, driving on an academic busman’s holiday into Bloomington, Indiana, an exquisite, tucked-away university town of the kind that so surprises foreigners to the United States, we’d seen the country in a different aspect. The urban and suburban detritus had given way to forests – scarlet, russet, golden, shimmering in the afternoon light. After seven years of splendour on the heavily wooded north-east coast, I thought I’d grown accustomed to America’s Fall. But this was new. This was a display so grand, so perfected that it left one grasping after notions of the sublime.

By midnight it was gone, shredded by a Halloween storm so fierce that it brought down trees, forced the cancellation of trick or treating, and dampened the University’s weekend homecoming celebrations.

The electricity in the air also charged the evening’s political conversation. It was only days after the president had signed into law the legislation that finally ended the government shutdown that had crippled the country since 1 October. ‘How could we have done that to ourselves?’ our American companions asked. ‘Are we mad?’ The New York Times carried a front-page feature arguing calculation, not temporary insanity. ‘A crisis months in the planning’ was the headline. Its letters column crackled with indignation. One New York cardiologist wrote: ‘“A crisis months in the planning” reads like news coverage of a plot to overthrow the United States government schemed up in some dark alley in a foreign land. Or to overthrow part of it anyway – the Affordable Care Act.’

Senator John McCain directed his customary ire at his own Republican colleagues: ‘It is one of the most shameful chapters I have seen in the years I’ve spent in the Senate.’ It was shameful, and it wasted months of government time, cost billions, and consumed the political energy that might otherwise have been spent on debate or – heaven forfend – action, maybe even legislation, to fix America’s immigration mess or any one of the other problems – unemployment, inequity in education provision, infrastructural decay – that cry out for remedy.

For once, the academic conversation we enjoyed in Bloomington didn’t feel like enclave indulgence or privilege. Public anger about the government shut-down was widespread, non-partisan, and ongoing. And if Europe’s criticism of it and its international ripple effect smacked of schadenfreude, no one was saying so. This was an own goal, no question.

You have to poke into America’s pockets, not just note the deterioration – or even the ostentation – of its overcoat to find the restorative energies of the republic.

‘Public anger about the government shut-down was widespread, non-partisan, and ongoing.’

On the day after Halloween, I went wandering around the campus of this unexpected research jewel of American higher education. I would have been satisfied with externals: the grand forecourt of a famed music school, or the labelling (gratifying to a eucalypt-inoculated Australian) of the great trees that, even storm-damaged, left me dizzy, staring upward through their crimson into a washed-blue sky. Acer rubrum, red sunset maple, Acer saccharum, sugar maple, sycamore (plane tree), red oak.

But another flash of red – the coil of a great metal sculpture – beckoned me towards the University Art Museum. I had been told that its collection was remarkable, as was the 1982 building that now housed it, designed by I.M. Pei, and jutting up in odd angular sympathy with the rest of the more classically conceived campus. The architecture – not a right angle in it – ­was indeed extraordinary, challenging even, but it was the exhibition, Advancing American Art, blazoned across the entrance, that drew me in.

What did I expect? Provincial boosterism? A flourish of competition with the Ivy League art museums? I should have known better. Advancing American Art was a fascinating lesson in American history, and a cautionary tale.

In 1946, Joseph LeRoy Davidson, a visual arts specialist in Washington’s State Department, put together a collection of works by contemporary American artists, with the intention of using them as postwar propaganda. The travelling exhibition was to show the world that US culture was in the ascendant – diverse, democratic, and liberated from its European roots. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs William B. Benton declared that the art program would serve as testimony ‘to all those abroad who thought of the United States as a nation of materialists, that the same country which produces brilliant scientists and engineers also produces creative artists.’

The collection, of seventy-nine oils and another seventy-three works in mixed media, was to circulate in embassies and institutions around the globe, and become, like the Department’s Voice of America radio programs, a beacon of US cultural diplomacy.

A grand design. Yet within a year the whole project was aborted, Davidson’s position abolished, and the works sold off at auction as war surplus. Why? Because politics intervened and America’s cultural antennae began to contract inwards. Senator Joseph McCarthy was gaining influence. The Cold War chill was coming. Many of the artists in the collection were postwar immigrants with foreign-sounding names. Their art was an aesthetic challenge to some, a moral affront to others. President Truman weighed in by expressing his disdain for ‘so-called modern art’. The abstract works he dismissed as the ‘scrambled egg school’, and other works as‘merely the vaporings of half-baked lazy people’.Others joined the clamour. The whole project was lambasted, its conceivers excoriated and the artists dismissed as frauds and decadents. (And yes, the echoes of Nazi rejection of European Modernism were loud.)

Almost seventy years on, the works have been painstakingly reassembled to tell their tale. The exhibition, Art Interrupted, which opened in 2012 at Auburn University in Alabama, has now been hosted by three other institutions, in Oklahoma, Indiana, and Georgia, and made possible by grants from the Henry Luce Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.

One could just settle back and enjoy the ironies of it all, and indulge some armchair criticism: the collection is not a triumphant display of American artistic genius. The works are interesting, some of them wonderful, others illustrative if uninspiring. But that is not the point. The genius lies in this carefully curated example (the catalogue, published by the Georgia Museum of Art, is splendid) of America’s persistent capacity for self-reflection, for self-scrutiny. Regardless of its reflex, vaunted exceptionalism, America keeps asking hard questions of itself, and at a time when the forces that combined in the mid-twentieth century to give it a period of repression and intolerance are recrudescing in mutated forms – rejecting science, scorning rational argument, and displaying a callousness about the unemployed or the poor that takes one’s breath away.

It is odd, and profoundly disturbing, that inertia should seem to be the prevailing mode in a country so stereotypically energetic, so customarily inventive. The political stalemate in Washington feeds paranoia about the decline of US power (or ‘greatness’, as they would prefer to put it) rather than an inclination to examine causes. Things just seem to happen.

The scandal of the National Security Agency’s blanket data collection and consequent violation of privacy rights just seemed to happen – as though by some process of accelerated inevitability. Not so, as Edward Snowden made all too clear. And in February 2014, US judge in the District of Columbia, Richard Leon (an appointee of George W. Bush) ruled that the collection violates the reasonable expectation of privacy guaranteed to Americans by the Constitution. James Madison, father of the Constitution, would be aghast, he wrote. Leon’s ruling has been stayed, probably for months, pending an appeal. So more inertia. But debate as well, even if it does not penetrate the fog of populist media. ‘The Government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack’, Leon argues in his ruling. A start, I think. A crumb. Would Leon be writing so freely, or with impunity, in Putin’s Russia?

One of the tragic by-products of the NSA’s overreach is that it provides some justification, even if spurious, for the fear and loathing of government and for the conspiracy theories that clutter and deform US political debate. Sad, lethal Paul Ciancia, with his automatic rifle and hatred of the government authority most accessible to him, the TSA, is just one in a long, tragic line of men who have turned their impacted inadequacies and fears into a political crusade. Before the Transport Security Administration, it was often FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and its agents that provided the target for attack.

Imagine if aggrieved bushfire victims in Australia began shooting CFA volunteers. Trust is the intangible, invisible glue in a community, and trust in America is becoming rarer.

In late 2013, in the state where I have lived, intermittently, for the past seven years, New Jersey voters enthusiastically re-elected their ebullient governor, Chris Christie. That was before the scandal over who knew what and when about the now notorious closing of two of the three traffic lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee. Chris Christie was seen as a possible 2016 Republican presidential saviour – a tell-it-all-as-it-is politician, as unlike the hapless Mitt Romney as could be, a bloke who could embrace Barack Obama after Hurricane Sandy and get away with it (at least among the Republicans who do not identify with the extreme Tea Party caucus), an able and wily politician who had some chance of beating Hillary Clinton if she were to run.

‘Trust is the intangible, invisible glue in a community, and trust in America is becoming rarer.’

Conservative columnist David Brooks was, when last I read him, still holding out hopes of Christie’s candidature, if a little desperately. But the vultures are circling, and the word ‘corruption’ is more and more often annexed to the name Christie. New Jersey should be inured to corruption. So many of its former officials are now in jail for it. But in the New Year, plausible deniability began to sound like weasel words. In February the New York Review of Books headlined an article, by Elizabeth Drew, with ‘Is Christie Using Nixon’s Playbook?’

Corruption’s bedfellow is money, and money infects every level of American political life. Judges and sheriffs need it to get elected – and re-elected. Politicians have to attract and spend fortunes to secure and retain their positions in the power structure. Republican minority Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Democrat majority leader Harry Reid both are both looking distractedly over their shoulders at potential challengers – some from their own side – this year. Imagine how much could be achieved if they were free, willing and able to get down to the hard business of governing the country. And perhaps don’t try imagining what good could be done with the untold millions that will flow, unaccounted, through super PACs and other slush funds over the course of the next two years. Eliminate measles in Africa? No way: have to finance getting out the vote in West Virginia.

The money trail runs in parallel towards both political parties. In 2012 a total of 266 super PACs (unleashed in part by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision), spent $546.5 million, seventy-eight per cent of it not to support candidates but to oppose them. And that represents only a fraction of the money spent to bankroll the electoral process. A profound structural problem with potential to white-ant American democracy? Yes, I think so. And that’s before one even begins to itemise the many craven attempts to skew electoral results by imposing onerous conditions on potential voters. Or worry about the hugely disproportionate number of black men in jail, many for minor offences, who are effectively disenfranchised – for life.

It is too easy, in America, to be overwhelmed by dysfunction and ill will. Yet that is not the way daily life registers. The counterbalance is unfailing, routine American courtesy, a still extraordinary, free, vocal media, even in these hard times for journalism, and an abiding commitment to the ideals and aspirations of the republic – fulfilled or still unfulfilled. You see and hear it in every public speech made by Barack Obama. It is there in the wry New Jersey Transit conductor who remembers your face and smiles as she punches your ticket. It is there in the commitment to education, and the willingness to re-examine. To think again.

In late November, I happened into a photographic exhibition in New York. It was cold outside, winter already snapping, so we lingered. Simply titled Vietnam, The Real War, it was a perfectly curated and catalogued history of the war as seen and experienced by photographers who worked with the Associated Press. Some of the images were the famous ones, photographs that shifted public opinion at home and perhaps altered the course of the war. All of them made you stop, to cry or think, or just stand still.

‘How has it been received?’ I asked the attendant. ‘The response has been amazing,’ she told me, with no gush. She seemed surprised herself. ‘It’s so confronting,’ she said. ‘But I think people really want to know.’

Decades too late? Perhaps. Yet there it was. Stark, uncompromising, revelatory, vulnerable, and yet intellectually questing. Exactly what I expect, and what I find, in America.

Sweet honey.