“The last time a nation had such an obsession with flags was the 1930s – and that didn’t end well.” —- anonymous —-

Economists Brückner and Grüner correlate crummy economies and the rise of nationalism. Krugman points out their findings here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17krugman.html

“…When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments — and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.”

“That’s the message of a recent paper by the economists Markus Brückner and Hans Peter Grüner, who find a striking correlation between economic performance and political extremism in advanced nations: in both America and Europe, periods of low economic growth tend to be associated with a rising vote for right-wing and nationalist political parties. The rise of the Tea Party, in other words, was exactly what we should have expected in the wake of the economic crisis….”
- Paul Krugman -