The USA in 2025, as viewed by the world from the fairways of Bethpage Black

In the middle of a day full of college football on Saturday, I remembered that the biennial Ryder Cup professional men’s golf tournament was taking place and decided to flip over to see how it was going. I knew that the tournament, which pits a hand-selected team of American golfers against a team of Europeans for three days of match-play, was being held at Bethpage State Golf Club on Long Island, and I had a sinking suspicion there might be some spectator issues, but wasn’t prepared for what transpired.

As described in this phenomenally depressing column from The Guardian by Bryan Armen Graham, we don’t need to despair that our federal government is embarrassing America on the international stage — our citizenry is trying its best to do its worst, as well.

As Graham explains, the folks who paid hundreds of dollars per day to attend the tournament and stand feet from the greatest golfers in the world decided to use that privilege to act like they were instead at WWE Raw and harass the athletes to the point that New York State troopers had to be called in to protect Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy halfway through his round on Saturday, a day after the president also decided to fly in and sully the tournament with his presence.

I highly recommend reading Graham’s entire piece, but this was the passage that really punched me in the gut after witnessing the right’s decay since 2015:

…treating Bethpage as a one-off misses the larger point. What happened here didn’t invent the tone of American life so much as reflect what’s been an incremental breakdown in public behavior. The country now lives in all-caps, from school-board meetings that sound like street rallies and comment sections that have spilled into the street. The algorithm bankrolls outrage, the put-down is political vernacular and the culture applauds “saying the quiet part out loud”. In 2025 you can say almost anything in public and be cheered for it (unless you’re Jimmy Kimmel). Put a rope line and a microphone in front of that mix and you get exactly what you got at the Ryder Cup: people testing boundaries not because the moment needs them to, but because they’ve been told volume is virtue. 

Graham notes that “golf, in the US particularly, has always been a sport for white conservatives,” and being that this was on Long Island I’m guessing that the vast majority of the spectators in the gallery (and quite likely the most vocal of the lot) were in that mold. As a NASCAR fan I see the same group — though likely a bit lower on the socio-economic ladder — at multiple races each year.

Now, I’ve always been a bit perturbed by the buttoned-up, lily-white world of pro golf, regardless of the slight opening up of the sport that Tiger Woods brought to the sport in the 1990s & 2000s, but while I would like a little more “fun” injected into the game I also understand that the athletes are the show, not the spectators, and that a certain basic level of decorum should be observed by fans.

However, the vulgarity, toxic jingoism and vitriol spewed by the “home fans,” all as their favored American team dug themselves a hole they ultimately couldn’t climb out of on Sunday, showed a global audience that the ongoing campaign of hate being conducted by our government since January isn’t an anomaly, but is instead simply a symptom of an illness that has solidly taken hold of far too many in our country.

Graham nails the diagnosis of the illness, one which seems to have infected one-third of the country. As for its cure? I don’t know if it’s been invented yet. And if it does exist, I’m sure the current FDA would ban it.