US standoff was fallout from the financial crisis – and it’s not over

Stephanie L. Mudge -Research Fellow at SPERI

One implication is that we should probably expect things to get worse before they get better. The Democrats, Tea Party Republicans, and their respective intelligentsias will continue to interpret more or less everything (including the causes of the last crisis, the allocation of blame, and the meaning of the outcome) in totally different ways.

Another, perhaps less obvious, implication is that, while Europe’s political leadership would like to put as much distance between itself and American politics as possible at the moment, its own problems aren’t really that different.

Even as Washington’s political standoff dominated American media, for instance, French news focused on the rising electoral fortunes of the far-right Front National. The truly disturbing rise of Golden Dawn in Greece has been another recent front-page item in Europe. In Germany just last month, a new anti-Europe party with far-right leanings (the Alternative for Germany) came surprisingly close to securing parliamentary seats. In other words, the financial crisis has left extremism and anti-political alienation in its wake on both sides of the Atlantic; the Tea Party is just the American version.

So far the US political system has been able to absorb the problem by incorporating Tea Party representatives into mainstream democratic politics, which is a headache for the world, the White House, and the Republican Party, but also a way of tempering what otherwise might be a much more radical movement. The Tea Party, like all social movements, is actually many groups that have come together under one umbrella against a common set of enemies (Obama, the Democratic Party, “liberals,” the “Washington establishment,” and of course, the US government). So far its most frightening factions are more likely to be found in demonstrations than in the House of Representatives.

In this sense, the instability on display in American politics in the past few weeks (which we may well see again in early 2014) is comparable to uncertainties around the rise of far right parties, anti-political, and extremist groups in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Finland, and elsewhere. The important difference is not some vague American “exceptionalism,” but rather a difference of democratic institutions (that is: parliamentary versus presidential, multi-party versus two party). And, of course, the international economic importance of the United States and the almighty dollar.

The central question confronting the US and its European counterparts is very much the same: whether democracy can continue to absorb the ongoing political fallout of the financial crisis. You don’t have to be much of a historian to know we’ve been here before. Hopefully we won’t lose sight of this in the scramble to tsk-tsk the failings of American politics.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.