Debunking the aura of the superpower, Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate and oracle of the New York Times, identified a problem Americans hadn't faced up to yet: "We had a values breakdown — a national epidemic of get-rich-quickism and something-for-nothingism." This wasn't the usual lame, envy-led flagellation of bankers. Rather, it was a reminder of the Greatest Generation, who grew up in the Depression of the 1930s and then won the war; of leaders who were not afraid to ask Americans to make sacrifices and of a generation that was ready to do so, for the good of the country, thus earning a capacity for global leadership. Krugman called on his fellow countrymen to show "a willingness to postpone gratification, invest for the future, work harder than the next guy". For a moment, the Princeton professor sounded like a Revivalist preacher.

A similar call for pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps could be heard from the opposite end of the political spectrum. Over the past year, the Tea Party has forced its way into the American political mainstream. The movement has made headlines in Europe, mainly because it involuntarily feeds the stereotype of the crude American from the flyover states: cheap jeans, ill-fitting baseball caps with corny slogans, truck-driver facial hair; someone who is either inexplicably fat or skinny and in any case belongs to a section of predominately white lower-middle-class people filled with rage, racism and religious bigotry. (Some of the placards crudely accused President Obama of being a "Kenyan reject".) The groomed-senator look is not theirs, nor do they communicate in the rhetoric of the East Coast political intelligentsia. Nor is it merely a matter of image. To my European sensibility the Tea Party's simplistic stance on abortion, immigration and religion will probably always remain alien.

And yet, observing a recent small-scale gathering of Tea Parties in Washington, I couldn't help but think that a movement like this isn't so much a terrifying phenomenon as a telling one. Most of them had less in common with Terry Jones, the Koran-burning pastor of Florida, than with James Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Large parts of their agenda are determined by bread-and-butter issues: taxes, states' rights, dislike of political bigwigs, held together by an uninhibited will to engage in the citizen's right to speak to power without feeling inhibited. (Is this the reason why grown men coyly dress up as George Washington?)

"Dissent is patriotic," read a poster at the gathering. Somehow, this is the most upbeat indication of America's habit of reconstituting itself in bad times. It certainly is a good sign that this is coming as much from the fringes and grassroots of American consciousness as from the intellectual and political elites.