Chasing the Red, White and Blue David Cohen Picador USA, 312pp, £16.99 ISBN 0312261543

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont made their celebrated tour of America. They were young, aristocratic and rather solemn. (When he admitted that he visited "beautiful women", Tocqueville felt obliged to add "solely for the purpose of resting ourselves, I swear".) His goal was to study American prisons, then admired by idealists in Europe. In nine months, the two young Frenchmen travelled in 17 of the then 24 states, by carriage, steamboat and on horseback, from New England to New Orleans, and from the comparative urbanity of New York to the wild, newly settled frontier of Michigan. They interviewed statesmen, clergymen, learned men, farmers and businessmen, as well as beautiful women.

The classic that resulted from this epic journey, Democracy in America, is remarkably fair, as well as shrewd. Tocqueville was no radical, but he was appalled by slavery, and said so. However, his grand theme was the equality of America. He opened his book with the statement that "no novelty in the United States struck me more vividly during my stay there than the equality of conditions". Not equality of opportunity, but equality of condition. The more he studied American society, he said, "the more I saw equality of conditions as the creative element from which each particular fact derived, and all my observations constantly returned to this nodal point".

In 1997, the young British/South African journalist David Cohen went to the US to spend three years, based at Columbia University in New York, on a Harkness scholarship. He decided to follow in Tocqueville and Beaumont's footsteps, from New York to Flint, Michigan, then down the Ohio River, where Tocqueville had observed the contrast between slavery on the left bank and the thriving free-soil farmers on the right. Then on, by way of the Mississippi Delta, to New Orleans and back across the Deep South by way of Mobile and Montgomery, where he was especially interested in the contrast between the older denominations, with their social conscience, and the hard indifference to social conditions among the growing conservative, Christian fundamentalist churches. He allowed himself to deviate from Tocqueville's route to visit the Mexican fruit pickers of California's Central Valley and the millionaires of Silicon Valley, ending his circuit in Washington.

In Flint, where Tocqueville encountered an idyllic frontier community in the virgin forest, Cohen found the ruins of the industrial empire. That was where General Motors once offered highly paid union jobs, which turned production workers into middle-class citizens. Now the union has been battered. The jobs have gone to Mexico. The dream is a bad memory.

In the Delta, he did not visit the decaying cotton plantations, but hung out with poor black gamblers in the state's tawdry new casinos. In New York, he met a female real estate broker who had just collected $480,000 in commission on a single deal, and a Hispanic broker in the Bronx who cannot afford a licence and spends more than half of his income on rent.

Cohen's theme, supported by interviews alternating with devastating statistics, is the exact opposite of the comforting conclusion Tocqueville drew. Where, in 1831, what struck a visiting European was the astonishing equality of Americans, what amazed Cohen was the inequality, the unfairness and hardness. "Today, in the new economy, the trend is inexorably away from the equality of conditions that Tocqueville saw . . . It makes for a tougher, more driven, more one-track, but ultimately lonelier America."

Cohen starts from some "disturbing facts" that he finds hard to square with the "egalitarian, compassionate" vision of Tocqueville - and, he might have added, treasured by most Americans. First, 40 per cent of American children are living in or near poverty (the American child poverty rate is two to three times higher than that in most other western countries). Second, inequality is dramatically on the rise in America. Between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, the average income of the richest fifth of families increased by 30 per cent. The real incomes of the poorest fifth fell by 21 per cent.

That this was happening at a time of record budget surpluses, and before the onset of recession and a Republican administration, suggests that Americans have the means but not the will to help the poor. Few Americans are aware of the growing class inequality in their society. And class inequality it is. Cohen points out that, once upon a time, almost all New Yorkers sent their children to the public (or state) schools, which were then as good as any in the world, public or private. Now, not only bankers and celebrities send their children to private schools, but so do elected officials, including five out of seven members of the city's board of education.

What is perhaps even sadder than the death of an American egalitarianism that was once, and not that long ago, the light of the world is that foreigners, whether they are poor Central Americans who still believe they have a chance, or new Labour politicians who have less excuse for ignorance, continue to buy uncritically the bedraggled rhetoric of the Big Apple and the American dream.

Godfrey Hodgson is working on a new book, Prospering But Puzzled, a survey of what has happened in the United States over the past 25 years

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