America Isn’t Evil. It’s Structurally Sick.

Brian Daitzman is the Editor of The Intellectualist. Subscribe to his Substack.

Europeans watching the United States often assume cruelty explains its chaos. But Americans are not uniquely vicious or morally deficient. They are living inside a political, economic, and media system that concentrates power, distorts reality, and withholds agency—producing outcomes that look like malice from the outside but are better understood as the predictable behavior of a society under sustained structural stress.

Across Europe, a question is being asked with growing frequency and unease: What is wrong with the United States? In quieter moments, the question sharpens into something harsher—are Americans a bad people? The question is understandable. From the outside, the country appears volatile, cruel, and increasingly indifferent to democratic norms. Its politics feel performative, its media combative, its institutions erratic.

Yet this framing mistakes moral character for structural condition.

The United States is not an evil society. It is a structurally sick one, and its population is living with the predictable consequences of that sickness.

To explain how Americans arrived here is not to excuse every choice made along the way. It is to reject the lazy moralism that substitutes collective blame for an honest accounting of power, incentives, and constrained agency. This is not an argument for despair, nor a blueprint for reform, but a necessary diagnosis—because no society can repair what it refuses to accurately name.

Systems under sustained stress behave in recognizably similar ways, regardless of culture. When large portions of a population experience material precarity, declining health, loss of autonomy, and political powerlessness, the outcomes are not mysterious. Anger rises. Trust collapses. Demagogues flourish. People search for meaning, identity, and explanation wherever they can find them.

Stress does not create pathology on its own. It reveals the strength—or weakness—of the structures meant to absorb it.

In the United States, stress is filtered through an information environment that does not clarify reality but actively distorts it. A significant share of Americans consume content labeled “news” that does not perform the function of news. Rather than explaining policy, demystifying institutions, or holding power accountable, this content is engineered to provoke emotional arousal—disgust, resentment, fear, and a sense of embattled identity. Fox News is the clearest and most consequential example, not because it is merely biased or provocative, but because it pioneered a durable model: partisan infotainment optimized for outrage, monetized confusion, and political alignment.

The effect is not simply misinformation. It is misdirection.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, partisan media ecosystems were associated with lower vaccination uptake and higher excess mortality. Conspiracy theories migrated from fringe spaces into mass consumption. January 6th—an event visible to the world in real time—was reimagined by millions of Americans as either justified, exaggerated, or fictitious. None of this required the audience to be malicious. It required them to be repeatedly misinformed, emotionally activated, and given a simple story about who was to blame.

A population does not need to be evil to be led astray; it only needs to be systematically confused...