Separated At Birth?

Here’s a really of what once united the Tea Party and Euroskeptic, and what now divides them. The financial crisis spawned them both, but culture on both sides of the Atlantic now offers two different phenomena:

The initial impulses driving the Tea Party movement and the growth of eurosceptic parties had a great deal in common: anger at economic disasters rooted in collusion between governments and the financial sector, fear of large-scale expansions of the powers of distant governments (Washington or Brussels), antipathy to immigration. But the political cultures and circumstances of Europe and America have routed the reactions in very different directions. Indeed, for all the ways in which the Tea Party has come to stand for the “party of ‘no’”, there is a fundamental American-style optimism at its heart: a faith in God and self; a belief in the general fairness of the order of things; a trust in hard work, etc. It’s an optimism that may be naive, but it’s optimism all the same.

Meanwhile, eurosceptics are motivated by a more dramatic version of European pessimism: a distrust in top-down schemes, a preference for secular pleasures over spiritual pursuits, etc. The financial crisis was a tremendous shock that scattered all the world’s marbles. But which way those marbles roll, wherever you are, depends on how the ground slopes.