How Other Countries Stayed Kind While America Turned on Itself

Not all declines are economic. Some are emotional. And in America, civility is one of the most urgent—and most invisible—casualties of our time.

This post summarizes my academic paper, While America Fractured, Others Held the Line: The Global Emotional Culture Gap. It’s not a policy blueprint or a self-help guide. It’s a theoretical exploration of emotional norms across cultures and what they reveal about the unraveling of public life in the United States. The piece was written for people who study culture, shape it, or try to hold it together—scholars, policymakers, educators, institutional leaders, and anyone else who suspects that something about the way we relate to one another is slipping. The full paper is linked at the end. What follows here is a distillation; not just of the argument, but of what’s at stake.

We’ve all seen it. Shorter fuses, sharper tongues, frayed patience. The stranger who barks at the flight attendant. The neighbor who snaps over a noise complaint. The comment section that spirals by the second. What used to register as abnormal is now routine. And what we used to call rude now barely registers at all. That shift isn’t just anecdotal. It’s structural. We’re not just experiencing more tension—we’re becoming a culture where tension is the default. Where grace feels rare. Where emotional escalation is expected.

But here’s the key question: Is this just the way modern life goes? Or is it more uniquely American than we’d like to admit?

Why American Civility Cracked

To understand the emotional culture gap, we have to stop treating civility like a personality trait and start recognizing it as a social contract. For generations, American emotional life was governed—sometimes rigidly, sometimes aspirationally—by norms of politeness, self-regulation, and public composure. These weren’t just manners. They were emotional guardrails. They helped strangers coexist. They helped communities function without constant mediation. They were, in many ways, the emotional infrastructure of democracy.

That infrastructure is now cracking.

The reasons are layered. First, there’s the decline of interpersonal trust. People don’t assume good intentions anymore. They assume risk. Decades of political polarization, institutional erosion, and economic fragility have worn down the shared expectation that others will treat us fairly, or even decently. Without trust, restraint feels foolish. Courtesy feels unreciprocated. People become more defensive, more vigilant, more primed to protect themselves, emotionally and otherwise.

Then there’s the role of digital platforms. Social media didn’t just speed up communication; it rewired the conditions under which emotions are shared. Outrage travels farther than empathy. Sarcasm is rewarded. Nuance is punished. The online world incentivizes the very behaviors that undermine civility in the offline one. It trains us to perform emotion, not regulate it. To escalate, not pause. And because our digital habits don’t stay online, they begin to reshape how we interact in stores, in meetings, in families, in traffic. Emotional reactivity becomes the cultural norm, not the exception.

Add to that the shift in how we define authenticity. Somewhere along the way, emotional transparency became a stand-in for truth. Holding back, even when it’s for the good of others, started to look like deception or repression. But when emotional expression is valorized and emotional regulation is dismissed as fake, we lose the ability to navigate difference without injury. And when every feeling is treated as a fact, disagreement becomes a threat. Conflict becomes personal. Restraint becomes suspect.

All of this has been compounded by political modeling. In recent years, American public life has been dominated by figures who abandon civility entirely—who mock, provoke, exaggerate, outright lie, and lash out without consequence. And what was once condemned as indecent has become framed, by some, as honest or bold. Emotional volatility becomes a brand. And followers absorb it, consciously or not, as permission.

Finally, there’s the sheer toll of stress. After years of collective trauma—terrorism, recession, pandemic, mass violence, political chaos—many people are simply depleted. And depleted people don’t have access to their best regulation tools. They snap. They shut down. They withdraw. In that state, kindness feels costly. Courtesy feels exhausting. The emotional labor that civility requires starts to feel unsustainable.

What Other Nations Are Still Getting Right

But here’s what makes this all the more striking: other nations, facing many of the same global disruptions, haven’t spiraled in the same way. Why? Because their emotional norms are scaffolded differently. In collectivist societies, self-regulation is framed not as personal virtue but as social responsibility. In high-trust societies, grace is rewarded, not punished. Emotional effort isn’t seen as naïve, it’s seen as necessary.

In Japan, the idea of meiwaku—of not burdening others—shapes how people manage public emotion. Even in tight quarters, restraint is expected. It’s not stoicism; it’s courtesy. In Sweden and Norway, disagreement doesn’t immediately escalate into threat because emotional norms still enforce composure and mutual respect. These countries aren’t immune to stress. But their emotional expectations still function.

Which leads to a hard but necessary truth: our current emotional culture isn’t simply a reflection of modern life—it’s the result of choices. Choices informed by greed and egocentric self-service. Choices in how we’ve designed our digital environments. Choices in how we lead and legislate. Choices in what we elevate, excuse, and reward in public behavior. And choices in what we no longer teach, model, or expect from one another.

That doesn’t mean we can’t reclaim it. But it does mean that civility will have to be rebuilt, not remembered. It won’t come back by accident. It has to be reintroduced—intentionally, structurally, and emotionally—as something worth protecting. Not because it makes us more polite. But because it makes us more human.

You can read the full paper, While America Fractured, Others Held the Line: A Global Look at Civility and the Emotional Culture Gap. While it’s written in academic language, its implications are personal, political, and global. It’s now available on Academia.edu, and I’ve linked it below if you’d like to download it directly.

Because this isn’t just about manners. It’s about the emotional architecture of our shared lives—and what happens when the scaffolding gives out.