I just found this, from Tony Judt, in the NYRB:
“With our growing income inequities and child poverty; our underperforming schools and disgracefully inadequate health services; our mendacious politicians and crude, partisan media; our suspect voting machines and our gerrymandered congressional districts; our bellicose religiosity and our cult of guns and executions; our cavalier unconcern for institutions, treaties, and laws—our own and other people’s: we should not be surprised that America has ceased to be an example to the world. The real tragedy is that we are no longer an example to ourselves. America’s born-again president insists that we are engaged in the war of Good against Evil, that American values ‘are right and true for every person in every society.’ Perhaps. But the time has come to set aside the Book of Revelation and recall the admonition of the Gospels: For what shall it profit a country if it gain the whole world but lose its own soul?”
It’s different, of course, if an American says it. One of the differences is the sentence in the middle: “The real tragedy is that we are no longer an example to ourselves.” You wouldn’t say that, or feel it, if you didn’t love the USA. You don’t have to be an American, but you have to have drunk from the hope of America.
In this country, people may be spitting that hope out. There probably is a specifically British form of anti-Americanism which arises from the fact that we are implicated in the Republican catastrophe, but we can’t really feel that the worst aspect is that it means Americans can’t feel good about themselves. It is inevitable that we should fell the greatest tragedy is that it will affect us in all sorts of horrible ways. Being dragged into a war that is not in our interests is only a part of this.