Read: The economist who would fix the American dream

This hold that the U.S. has on the British political debate mirrors that which it seems to have on a raft of British politicos who went there and came back radicalized (or indeed simply stayed there, never to return). While I’d like to claim credit for this observation, it is, like most journalistic insights, something someone else noted once upon a time, which I can no longer find. It was a line that stuck and, once lodged, began to chime again and again.

An endless number of influential British figures have been enthralled by their experience across the Atlantic, including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and ex-Labour Party leader Ed Miliband on the left, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the right. Both Brown and Miliband are huge fans of the U.S. because it made them feel free, their friend and former adviser Stewart Wood told me. And yet they both thought individual liberty had been prized too highly over equality, he noted. Tony Blair liked the U.S. preference for private enterprise over public works, Wood said, while Brown loved its “Madisonian constitutionalism.” For Johnson, born and brought up in the U.S. in his early childhood, the country represents liberty and energy, verve and vigor. He may be high European in his cultural tastes—preferring ancient Greek and the classics to Hollywood—but the idea of America stirs him.

Gerard Baker, the British editor at large of The Wall Street Journal, has spoken of his own political evolution from left-wing student to arch capitalist after visiting both the Soviet Union and the U.S. in the 1980s. In 1986, he traveled to Moscow and was struck by its “drab uniformity.” A few months later he went to New York, “with all its colour and diversity.” Baker recalled that “whatever remaining doubts I might have had about the relative virtues of the capitalist system versus the communist system were removed.” Christopher Hitchens is another obvious example, transformed from outspoken Marxist opponent of U.S. foreign policy to iconoclastic supporter of American intervention.

Having spent quite a bit of time in the U.S. over the years, I felt as if I understood intellectually how this might happen. You don’t have to live in the U.S. to know that it is a land of wealth and poverty, opportunity and prejudice, freedom and mass incarceration. If any one of these things happens to be a particular passion, seeing how views might harden is easy. In the U.S., after all, none of these things is very far from the surface—unlike the English class system, endless and subtle in its hold, America wears its complexities for all to see, projecting them to the world in an endless diet of film and music, on Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime.

Yet only on a recent trip to the U.S. did I begin to feel America’s peculiar effect, not just understand it. I had no great epiphanies. I did not discover something profound after a week driving through the Midwest and its surround. That the car is king, food is fast, and race is an issue are not observations likely to win me a Pulitzer. But what I did notice on this trip was a feeling in myself that I think explains the U.S.’s radicalizing power: on the one hand, a sense of awe at the country’s energy and positivity, its enduring ability to regenerate itself; and on the other, a sense of abandoned hopelessness that runs very close.