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The question of the hour is raised by Ronald Wright, the essayist who wrote A Short History of Progress. It is simple, even if the answer isn't: "What is America?"

Here are some possible answers: A "city upon a hill" (the Puritan leader John Winthrop, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, none with attribution to the Book of Matthew). "Sweet land of liberty" (from a 19th-century anthem, still popular today). The "last best hope for mankind" (the characterization by George W. Bush in recent months, no attribution to Thomas Jefferson).

Or this, from black writer Langston Hughes of the last century: "America never was America to me."

• What is America? A Short History of the New World Order, by Ronald Wright, Knopf Canada, 368 pages, $29.95

Those are some of the answers I rummaged up from my own memory, and they are meant to show the eloquent innocence, the ennobling sense of possibility and the heartbreaking betrayal of my native land. Wright's answer, in a book whose title is that very question, is a bit more combative and complex, even if he is able to engage the question in a crisp little volume that, in hardback, is no bigger in the hand than a trade paperback.

In an argument that shows, if nothing else, that the United States is both an idea and a place, he paints a dark, brooding landscape where no prospect pleases, where man is vile, where villainy is described as virtue and where militarism and mendacity are the oxygen of civic life. It is a place where "wealth and freedom would be built on the slaughter of one race and the enslavement of another."

Now it is possible to try to refute Wright by saying that he is a blind man and that the United States is an elephant, and I will leave it to others to make that case, as surely they will be glad to do from the predictable precincts. That argument will surely posit that Wright took the grab-bag of facts that make up a nation's life, shook it vigorously and let fall only those elements that make the United States look like such a grotesque distortion of human values and virtues that it is a wonder anyone would want to live there at all. Or, as Elbert Hubbard, the U.S. writer and philosopher, argued in a different context, Wright separated the wheat from the chaff - and then published the chaff.

Chaff - except that Wright is asking inescapable moral questions.

“ This is a provocative, well-argued book, all the more important that it be read below the 49th parallel because it will be so thoroughly unsettling there ”

This is a disturbing book, suitable for the age of W., when Canadians, who are supposed to be our best friends, can tell a CBC poll that the country that most stands out as a negative force in the world doesn't come from the (de)famed "axis of evil" - a phrase, coined by a Canadian, meant to describe North Korea, Iran and Iraq - but from the nation that sits across from them along the greatest undefended border in the world. Kind of makes you sit up and wonder - and take the Wright argument with real urgency.

Here's that argument: The new world order is a New World order, built in the United States by a nation that, from the start, employed militarism and religious extremism to steal and murder its way to prosperity. "As white migrants both displaced and absorbed the original Americans," he writes, "a new culture came into being: a rapacious hybrid dependent on expansion - part European, part indigenous, yet neither."

A few sentences later comes the nub of the argument: "The nation did not wake up one morning and find that it was suddenly imperial; it always has been so."

This book is part social criticism, part historical revisionism. The social criticism is implicit and not unfamiliar. Wright contends that the United States is a prisoner of its own "archaic, aggressive and colonial culture," and as a result still clings to the death penalty when most civilized nations have abandoned it, still denies universal health care to its citizens when other industrialized nations have long since provided it, still allows almost anyone to walk the streets with a gun and still stuffs almost 1 per cent of its population into prison. These four spokes to the argument are thoroughly unremarkable, as anyone who spent 30 minutes at a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton rally this spring can attest.

The historical revisionism is another matter. It is surely true that before 1492 there flourished in America a rich, healthy and sophisticated society that has all but been scraped from the Earth. It is true, too, that the wealth of America was built, at least in part, on the labour of the slave, or the poor, or the immigrant. It is true that, as Wright puts it, "America could not bear to take a hard look at itself, especially the inconvenient truths of slavery, dispossession and genocide." All true, too true, sad but true.

But it is also true that while the lives of many native Americans and African Americans could be described and explained that way - again, no argument here - the lives of many millions of Americans cannot be explained that way. (One of them, Obama, has just been nominated for president of the United States.) This is not the place for an elegy on U.S. opportunity, or the culture of possibility, or the thread of idealism that has held together the American tapestry. It is merely the place to acknowledge that these elements exist and are not illegitimate.

This is a provocative, well-argued book, all the more important that it be read below the 49th parallel because it will be so thoroughly unsettling there. It raises important questions, and answers some of them imperfectly or incompletely, but the exercise of making the argument (and the exercise of absorbing it) makes this volume eminently (and imminently) worthwhile. Humbling, too.

Ronald Wright's answers will surely spawn questions about a people whose values and history are Shakespearean, in that they are a "mingled yarn, good and ill together." (Is it worth noting that that line is from All's Well That Ends Well?) In my case, Wright made me wonder about a series of questions he didn't ask but instead prompted in my own mind: Was Woodrow Wilson a lout for being a racist at home or a hero for being an idealist abroad? Was Richard Nixon a criminal for Watergate or a visionary for China? Did John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address of 1961, mobilize the United States for selfishness (the Cold War) or for selflessness (the Peace Corps)?

The fact that I could answer "yes" to all six makes my point. Even in a country with great separations between black and white, little is black and white.

In the end, or at least five pages from the end of his book, Wright, in a display of intellectual honesty, acknowledges the difficulties inherent in his easy question: "All of us, Americans and outsiders, must live with this land of paradox: a democracy hobbled by theocracy and plutocracy; a 'peace-loving' country at war almost constantly for four hundred years; a nation both well-meaning and rapacious, welcoming and suspicious, devout and materialistic, friendly and fearful, innocent and corrupt, libertarian and repressive, individualistic and conformist, generous and grasping, imperial and parochial, modern and archaic."

There. Maybe he did answer the question, after all. Though the tramp through the argument was troubling, it was rewarding as well. A paradox, there, suitable for this land of paradox.

David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winner.