The American Problem: Comfort With Moral Contempt

Posted on | March 9, 2026 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

“The (American) problem runs deeper. Americans are not just skeptical of institutions. Many appear increasingly likely to judge their fellow citizens as morally bad. That is a different and more corrosive problem. Distrust can make people cautious. Moral contempt makes cooperation feel naive, compromise feel dangerous, and reform feel futile. They dehumanize so that cruelty becomes manageable.”

Kyle Saunders Ph.D.

This past week, the Pew Research Center, trusted source of high-quality research, released a public-facing study destined to shock (if not surprise) public policy leaders nationwide. In a survey of 25 nations across the planet “more people said that others in their country have somewhat or very good morals than say their compatriots display somewhat or very bad levels of morality” – except one nation, the United States.

To be specific, 53% of the American respondents described the morals and ethics of others living in the country as bad, while 47% labeled them as good. For contrast, 92% of citizens in our northern neighbor, Canada, believed its neighbor’s morals and ethics to be good, with only 8% labeled them bad.

Back in December, 2025, Professor Saunders, Professor of Political Science at Colorado State University, wrote that our nation appeared to have settled into a “low-trust equilibrium”, which was bad enough. As he explained back then, “My earlier piece argued that low institutional trust warps political cognition. High-trust environments produce debates about effects: Will this work? Who benefits? Low-trust environments produce debates about motives: What are they really after? Who is this meant to punish?”

But the recent Pew results have shifted his analysis. Pew’s prior work tracking changing perceptions comparing 2016 to 2022 had detected that “growing numbers of both Republicans and Democrats describing people in the other party as immoral.” As he sees it now, “Distrusting your government is a political position. Concluding that your fellow citizens are morally deficient is closer to a civilizational verdict…That’s a different animal.”

Connecting the social and political dots is Saunders job. And as an American political scientist, he doesn’t like what he sees. In his words, “This isn’t just ‘think Democrats are bad’ or ‘think Republicans are bad.’ It’s ‘I think Americans are bad.’ The target has generalized. The moral condemnation has leaked out of its partisan container and settled into the air everyone breathes.”

Professor Saunders isn’t the first to raise these concerns. In the classic 2010 New Yorker article titled “Tocqueville in America” by literary critic James Wood, the writer picked apart some of Tocqueville’s less flattering observations about the nation he visited as a French aristocratic traveler in 1831. Considering the epic two volume “Democracy in America,” he prophetically lets loose with these words, “In the book’s second volume, he warns that modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny, because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and to the selfishness of individualism… In such conditions, we might…meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one…”

This weeks billionaire numbers and their political impact do nothing to reassure. The top 1% in the U.S. now possess $56 trillion. and 300 billionaires and their families made 19% of all U.S. 2024 political contributions with roughly 2/3 going to Republican candidates.

Sadly, Wood’s words remind us of another influential essayist, Kenneth Burke, whose 1939 masterpiece, The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, is required reading for graduate students from English to Philosophy, and from Political Science to History and Religious Studies. The piece’s main focus involves a critical analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“my struggle”) which includes this stark warning. Leaders of the free world, Burke says, “need to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man…concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”

Professor Saunders believes that humans “dehumanize so that cruelty becomes manageable.” He sees dehumanization as a strategy, a first move with a targeted endpoint. For him, “Dehumanization isn’t the result of violence, hatred, or moral failure. It’s a precondition — a cognitive reorganization that makes harm possible by eliminating the friction that would otherwise prevent it. People don’t dehumanize because they’re already cruel. It’s a prerequisite first step on the path to cruelty.”