[WS:] Bigoted provincialism has always been here, no? The likes of Mark Twain or HL Mencken made their literary careers by deriding it.
I think it is more of the "emperor has no clothes" phenomenon. The war-ravaged Europe looked into the FDR US that saved it from the Nazi hordes and saw a prosperous country with a fairly progressive in those times system. Hence the infatuation. The "hippie revolution" in the sixties and the movie industry helped maintaining that infatuation. But then came the communication and transportation revolution which brought the images of the real US to remote places around the world. And as they say, familiarity breeds contempt. In this case, people around the world started seeing how ugly this country is - and has been - beneath the rosy images manufactured by Hollywood. The coverage of the Katrina - especially the images of the poor sections of New Orleans - were a real eye opener for a lot of folks around the world. Ad to it the fact that life improved considerably in the last fifty or so years in many places - and it is easy to see why "Amerika" ceased to be a mythical land of milk and honey and looks more like a shithole. And of course the patent idiocy of the US politics and its troglodyte political caste - especially since Reagan - provides ample evidence supporting these perceptions.
Wojtek