For most of the Cold War, Americans worried about how they were perceived abroad. The phrase “the Ugly American” entered the national vocabulary as a warning: a reminder that arrogance abroad could damage the United States' reputation more effectively than any adversary. The caricature was familiar—loud, arrogant, impatient with local customs, and convinced that American power rendered courtesy unnecessary.
🎧 Listen to the narrated version of The Ugly Americans Among Us (7 minutes, 27 seconds).
For decades, the stereotype belonged to the traveler, not the citizen. It described Americans overseas, not Americans at home.
A recent poll suggests that distinction may no longer hold.
When asked about the moral character of their fellow citizens, a large share of Americans now say that the people on the other side of the political divide are not merely wrong but morally bad. Not misguided, not mistaken—just plain bad. It is a striking judgment, and a revealing one. Nations do not usually describe their domestic political disagreements in the language of moral contamination unless something deeper has begun to erode.
At first glance, the finding might seem like another data point in America’s endless political quarrel. Yet the timing is difficult to ignore. The poll arrives early in the second year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, a period in which political life has increasingly been conducted as performance—an arena of loyalty tests, public humiliations, and declarations of victory that often bear only a passing resemblance to governing.
Under those conditions, the old warning about the Ugly American begins to sound less like a foreign-policy concern and more like a civic diagnosis.
The problem, it turns out, may not be how Americans behave when they travel.
It may be how they have begun to behave toward one another at home.
The change did not occur in a vacuum. Political cultures rarely transform themselves spontaneously; they absorb the tone set by those who lead them. Over the past year, Donald Trump’s second presidency has turned political conflict into a form of public spectacle—an arena in which loyalty is praised, humiliation is rewarded, and victory is often declared long before any governing has occurred. In such an atmosphere, disagreement no longer appears as the ordinary friction of democratic life. It begins to look like moral treachery. And when politics is conducted that way from the top down, it should surprise no one that citizens gradually begin to mirror the same posture toward one another.
In that sense, the poll tells us something deeper than who Americans vote for. It tells us how Americans have begun to see one another. A republic can survive domestic political disagreement; indeed, disagreement is the oxygen of democratic life. What it cannot easily survive is the belief that one’s political opponents are not merely wrong but morally illegitimate. Once that belief takes hold, politics stops being an argument about policy and becomes a contest over virtue.
The tone of national politics has moved steadily in that direction. The governing style of Trump’s second presidency has made performance the central currency of public life. Policies are introduced as spectacles, victories are declared before consequences are understood, and loyalty is rewarded more visibly than competence. Under those conditions, the incentives of politics change. Outrage travels faster than deliberation. Humiliation earns more applause than compromise. The political arena begins to resemble a stage rather than a forum.
Seen from that perspective, recent events in Washington feel less like isolated controversies and more like expressions of a single governing instinct. Tariffs are announced with theatrical certainty only to collide with the arithmetic of global markets. Sanctions are imposed or lifted with dramatic flourish as part of a broader effort to compel adversaries into negotiations framed as personal victories. Oil flows, diplomatic crises, and even military pressure become instruments in a larger performance of strength.
None of this is entirely new. Presidents have always used pressure abroad and rhetoric at home to demonstrate resolve. What is different is the degree to which policy formulation—or lack thereof—itself has become part of the spectacle. Decisions appear designed not to achieve strategic objectives but to reinforce a narrative of dominance: threaten first, escalate publicly, and then present any concession extracted from an opponent as proof of triumph.
When politics operates this way, the line between governance and theater begins to blur. Citizens absorb the same cues that political leaders broadcast. If public life is framed as a struggle between the righteous and the corrupt, between patriots and enemies, it becomes easier for ordinary voters to adopt the same language when describing their neighbors. The corruption of politics trickles downward.
This is where the old phrase about the Ugly American takes on a new meaning. For decades, it described a stereotype of Americans abroad—citizens who carried their country’s power with them but not always its humility. Today, the ugliness appears less in foreign airports than in domestic conversation. Americans increasingly speak about one another with a tone once reserved for adversaries.
The consequences are not merely rhetorical. A society that begins to view fellow citizens as moral threats will eventually organize its politics around that belief. Laws are written differently, institutions are treated differently, and the ordinary restraints of democratic life begin to loosen. Politics becomes less about persuasion and more about conquest.
That is the quiet warning embedded in the poll. It does not simply measure partisan anger. It measures the erosion of a civic assumption that once undergirded American democracy: the belief that one’s political opponents were still fellow citizens, still participants in the same national experiment.
If that assumption disappears, the republic will not collapse overnight. Institutions will continue to function, elections will be held, and public life will proceed with the appearance of normality. But something essential will have shifted beneath the surface. The country will begin to resemble a place where victory matters more than legitimacy, and performance matters more than governance.
The Ugly Americans, it turns out, were never just travelers.
They were warnings.
And warnings, when ignored long enough, eventually become descriptions.
— Dunneagin
Civics Unhinged
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A note on the shelf. These essays are part of an ongoing chronicle of American politics, democratic institutions, and the peculiar age through which we are presently living. The collected volumes—and the occasional standalone work—remain available through the Fourthwall shop, best read with something warm in the cup.