Finland: Europe’s rising Tea Parties

The problem with globalization, aside from megalomania, is that it
stretches the culture to its thinnest and brings it to its maximum least
potential: everyone a John Lennon, everyone a Marx, everyone an Oprah,
everyone an Obama. Then it snaps. What you had at the beginning was Lord
Nelson. What you get at the end is “American Idol.” At the beginning
you get Jefferson. At the end you get Joe Biden.

In England’s case, which is our case as well, it took the tribe around
the world and actually well into the universe. Then it snaps, and there
is nothing left. We as a species are biochemical and cannot live on
soaring rhetoric and political abstraction: We need a place on the earth
among people like ourselves. As the greatest living American novelist,
Lee Smith’s, character Grace says, we need place: Place tells us who we
are.

Otherwise we are a horde, detached and aloft; an abstraction awaiting Don Draper’s new idea; and that is why the Tea Party awakened in the United States. Very specifically, it was at first about states and regions, not noisy Congress and ridiculously pretentious budget spats geared to the news cycle. Texas, Virginia, Utah, Idaho and Alaska spoke up most vociferously and demanded that they in their place of earth in the American abstraction have their say. Texas Gov. Rick Perry expressed it with the most succinct clarity: “states’ rights, states’ rights, states’ rights.” And now it is catching on in Europe.

As The New York Times reports, in the general election in Finland last weekend, “the nationalist and populist True Finn Party emerged from political obscurity after largely campaigning on the evils of the European Union and its bailouts of Greece and Ireland. It claimed 39 seats in Finland’s Parliament — almost eight times the number it won in the 2007 election — and it is likely to become a partner in any coalition government.”

For the Times, it is the new terror that dare not speak its name, but its name is Tea Party. And: “Finland is not alone. Anti-European Union and anti-immigration parties have been on the rise in Sweden, Italy, Hungary and the Netherlands in the past year, and more may follow. It is a worrisome trend for supporters of the union, and for efforts to safeguard the euro by offering emergency loans to the weakest member nations and to better coordinate budget and spending policies in the countries that use it.”

Not a surprise that the Finns turned first. They are said to be as tough as boiled owl and singularly held off Stalin in the Winter War. Now they hold off the mediocrity which is the EU.