reaching beyond U.S. borders, while Occupy Wall Street is an American movement that transformed into a genuine international phenomenon within just a matter of weeks?
If we can manage to avoid partisan accusations and snide quips, an honest assessment reveals core similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy. Both have emerged as genuine social protest movements. Both are concerned with the current economic malaise. Both vent their anger at powerful institutions. And both became tremendously successful, garnering millions of supporters in a relatively brief period of time. Yet one has remained an exclusively American movement, while the other is quickly spreading around the entire world.
One obvious explanation is the symbols and framing devices adopted by the Tea Party movement, beginning with its very name. The Tea Party has proudly draped itself in American symbolism, which of course limits its appeal elsewhere. But that cannot explain it completely.
Symbols are flexible. People can adapt. A genuine anti-government movement will hop borders. Just look at the Arab Spring.
What’s more, the Tea Party’s initial focus had the potential to be an international draw. Indeed, some of the issues driving the Tea Party are quite similar to the ones fueling the Occupy movement, particularly rage against the economic mess. People elsewhere in the world could have adopted the Tea Party movement and refashioned it with their own national or even international symbolism. Greece in particular is a nation where citizens have very real reasons to be outraged at their government’s irresponsible economic policies.
But unlike the Arab Spring, the Tea Party anti-government movement has not crossed any national borders, and it almost certainly never will. Meanwhile the Occupy movement internationalized in near record time.
Why?
I believe much of it has to do with the attitudes that most people in the developed world hold towards public institutions. While both the Tea Party and Occupy movements are prone towards revolutionary rhetoric at times, and both blame large institutions for the economic crisis, there is a fundamental philosophical difference between them.
The Tea Party Movement points the finger at government, believing its profligate ways are to blame for the current economic downturn. This is part of a larger anti-government sentiment that is popular in the Untied States. Libertarianism and more vulgar anti-government attitudes are on the rise. Growing numbers of Americans define government as inherently coercive and inefficient.
Elsewhere in the developed world, however, this sentiment is not nearly as popular.
In Europe and Japan, where memories of actual fascism are still alive and well, most people cherish republican government as something that should represent their interests. They tend not to smear their governments with false labels that imply vicious self-interest and brutal repression. So though the words were uttered by American Abraham Lincoln nearly 150 years ago, it seems to be mostly non-Americans who still generally accept the premise that their governments are of the people, by the people, and for the people, and that they should be held to that standard.
And of course in the Arab world, repressive governments really are the norm, not a paranoid fantasy. Many of the Arab Spring protestors risked their lives to advocate the kind of representative government that many Tea Partiers claim is ruining the U.S. economy.
In contrast, the Occupy movement does not generally seem to be blaming government for causing the current economic calamity. If anything, members are angry at governments around the world for standing by and doing nothing while financial institutions ran amok and caused all of this. In response then, they’re not asking government to do less, they’re asking it to do more, demanding that their governments resume working in the public interest.
The Occupy movement is voicing popular concern that many privately run institutions, particularly immense financial corporations, have acted in their own interest to the detriment of us 
all. And they are calling upon their public institutions, republican governments, to protect the citizenry by reigning in these privately run, self-interested, irresponsible institutions.
The reason the Tea Party movement has absolutely no hope of ever transcending America is not because it shrouds itself in American symbolism. The reason is that its philosophy rests upon a fierce hostility towards modern representative government that most people around the world do not share. Meanwhile, the Occupy movement voices a suspicion of large corporations, particularly in the financial sector, which is a concern that clearly resonates around the globe.