Cross-Atlantic extremism

By M.S.

I HAVE long had a sneaking suspicion that Tea Party voters and eurosceptics are more or less the same sorts of people, born on different sides of the Atlantic. Both are traditionalist movements driven by economic anxiety and mistrust of centralised government power. Both have received a huge political boost due to the financial crisis (or, as it played out in Europe, the euro crisis), with eurosceptic parties expected to reap large gains in this May's European Parliament elections. This week, I got a new opportunity to test my thesis. The Dutch-based research group Motivaction International has just come out with a new study of eurosceptic voters across five countries, showing that they share certain traits and values. So I asked Martijn Lampert, Motivaction's research director, whether they could extend this comparison to America's Tea Party voters. It turned out the eurosceptics data was drawn from a 20-country survey that also included 2,185 Americans, and the comparison is pretty interesting. It suggests that I'm partly right, but mostly wrong. Eurosceptics and Tea Party supporters appear similar in certain respects: they value order and tradition, and they don't trust government or banks. But in the ways that Americans stereotypically differ from Europeans, Tea Party supporters seem to be super-American, while eurosceptic voters are ultra-European.

We'll get to how in a moment. First, a methodological note. Europe's eurosceptic voters are easy to identify: they're simply the people who vote for eurosceptic parties. (Motivaction studied supporters of eurosceptic parties in five countries: Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Liga Nord in Italy, Flemish Interest in Belgium, the National Front in France, and the UK Independence Party in Britain.) Tea Party supporters, however, are a bit harder to identify, because they form a somewhat fluid group of Republican voters. Motivaction had not specifically asked people whether they supported the Tea Party movement. To isolate them for the purposes of this comparison, they selected the respondents who voted for Republicans in the last election and who, in response to the question, "Which of the following topics in your country make you feel the most concerned?" checked "decency and values" and "politics and government".

This selected a group that, on other questions, seems to correspond to people we would think of as Tea Party supporters. For instance, 63% of this group had checked "immigration and naturalisation" as an issue of top concern, while just 20% of other Republicans had. Asked about the "most urgent" problems in the banking sector, 57% said "governments having to rescue banks", while 41% of other Republicans did (the same percentage as Democrats). Of these voters, 39% had a favorable view of Sarah Palin, while 27% of the other Republicans did. They had less trust in government leaders than other Republicans did, and were less concerned about the environment. These differences on immigration, government and the environment line up with expected differences between Tea Party voters and other Republicans, according to Pew polling. We seem to have pretty much the right group of voters here, and while we might not want to draw any far-reaching conclusions about the Tea Party movement itself from this data, we can use it to suggest some points of comparison to eurosceptic voters. Because of the methodological issues, though, I'm going to call the American group "value-politics Republicans" rather than Tea Partiers.

Let's start with some similarities. Both value-politics Republicans and eurosceptics were more likely than their average compatriots to say they liked their lives to be "organised and predictable" (68% v 54% for the Americans, 63% v 55% for the Europeans). Both groups were more likely than average to think there was "too little emphasis on traditional values" in their countries (86% v 61% in America, 75% v 58% in Europe). Both groups share some views on the family (65% of value-politics Republicans agreed that the father should be the head of the household, against a US average of 43%; for the eurosceptics, starting from a much more progressive European baseline, the difference was 26% v 21%). Both distrust government at significantly higher rates than the national baseline (89% to 69% in America, 86% to 67% in Europe), and both are more concerned about governments bailing out banks (57% to 41% in America, 36% to 28% in Europe). Both groups were sharply less concerned about environmental issues than average.

This might lead one to think that we're talking about very similar movements: traditionalists with conservative values who distrust governments and banks. But the differences between the groups are perhaps more interesting. The value-politics Republicans are much more religious than the average American: 68% pray regularly, compared to a US average of 37%, and significantly more said spirituality was an important part of their life. The eurosceptic voters, however, are less likely than the average European to pray (9% to 14%) or value spirituality (20% to 28%). Value-politics Republicans were much more likely than average Americans to trust the police and the military, while eurosceptics were less likely than average to trust the police, and had normal European attitudes towards the military. On these issues, we seem to be dealing with super-Americans and ultra-Europeans.

Another difference concerns a set of values having to do with fatalism. Most polls, including the Pew Global Attitudes surveys, find that Americans tend to be less fatalistic than Europeans, are more optimistic and believe that people can shape their own destinies. On this axis, the eurosceptics were ultra-European: they were more likely than average to agree that people have a destiny which they can "never deny or escape" (44% to 35%), and feel that "the future holds nothing for me" (40% to 33%). Value-politics Republicans, meanwhile, were super-American: 28% to 34% on destiny, 29% to 33% on hopelessness.

The sharpest differences came in the area of economic beliefs. Value-politics Republicans are largely unconcerned with inequality and are actively opposed to redistribution. Just 30% said they thought "the difference between high and low incomes should be smaller", against a US average of 53%; 42% disagreed that "wealth should be distributed more equally", against a US average of 17%. Eurosceptics, meanwhile, diverged little from the more egalitarian European norms on these questions: 72% v 70% on income inequality, 12% v 6% against wealth redistribution. And value-politics Republicans were more likely than the average American to trust multinational corporations (26% to 17%), while eurosceptics were close to the European average of 14%.

Motivaction also posed a question about what institutions people trust with control over the money supply: "Who do you think should create most of the money: governments, central banks, or private/commercial banks?" Value-politics Republicans were much more likely than average Americans to think that private banks should be the ones creating money (34% v 17%), and less likely to think governments should do the job (15% v 26%). (Oddly, despite Tea Party Republicans' hostility towards the Federal Reserve, the number selecting "central banks" was about average.) Eurosceptics, on the other hand, were similar to average Europeans on this question, with 33% favouring government and 10% favoring commercial banks.

Finally, one rather piquant result emerged. In Motivaction's polling, exactly the same percentage of Europeans and Americans agreed that "one of the most enjoyable things in life is buying something new" (33%). But value-politics Republicans were less likely to agree (22%), while eurosceptics were more so (40%).

Again, we can't entirely identify these value-politics Republicans with Tea Party supporters, but they're close enough to suggest themes for comparison. Value-politics Republicans are similar to eurosceptic voters in that they value tradition and order, distrust government, hate bank bailouts and don't care much about the environment. But where value-politics Republicans are religious and family-oriented, eurosceptics tend towards secular consumerism. Value-politics Republicans tend to be unconcerned about inequality and hostile to redistribution, while eurosceptics, like other Europeans, are pro-redistribution egalitarians. And while value-politics Republicans focus their anxiety over the financial crisis against government, eurosceptics are just as hostile to multinational corporations and the private financial sector.

At some level, this is all telling us what we already know. 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.