AMERICA’s politicians may not agree on much, but they know the model they do not want to follow: Europe. The continent’s very name conjures up visions of credit downgrades and tax hikes, of empty treasuries and ancient squares wreathed in tear gas, as welfare-addled protesters demand that richer countries fund their right to retire at 55.

Some Republicans pretend that America is halfway to Mediterranean dysfunction. Debt is “burying the future for our kids and our grandkids”, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said on March 3rd, explaining why his party had just allowed crude spending cuts known as the sequester to kick in. Defending the sequester in the absence of smarter cuts, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a former vice-presidential candidate, said that Greece showed that books can be cooked “for only so long”.

Democrats, meanwhile, hint that American conservatives are just a toga party away from defending the sort of crony capitalism that has inspired protests from Porto to Piraeus. On the day the sequester took effect Barack Obama declared that Republicans could have stopped the cuts, but chose to put “special interest tax breaks for the well-off and well-connected” first.

America is not Europe, and is not about to suffer that continent’s fate for lots of reasons, starting with the existence of a broad national consensus about the need to stay globally competitive and to fix the public finances, even if right and left cannot agree how best to achieve those goals. But though America does not show many of the symptoms of decline that Europe does, it increasingly shares a problem that lies behind the euro zone’s difficulties: division.

Many European politicians like to reach for technical explanations for the new populist parties and the angry protests shaking their union, notably the core that uses the euro. They talk of the currency’s flawed design and how all could be fixed with new rules to bind rich and poor members. After a previous posting in Brussels, Lexington has a simpler explanation. Europeans, at least for now, do not like each other enough to make a deeper union work.

A question posed worldwide by the Pew Research Centre over several years offers a good example of Europe’s clashing social contracts. It asks whether success is down to hard work or forces beyond citizens’ control. In Pew’s most recent global poll, in 2012, most Germans, Britons and Czechs agreed that most people can succeed if they work hard. French, Greek and Italian respondents mostly disagreed. Such cynical fatalism explains the southern demands for “solidarity” that set north European teeth on edge. If voters think success is undeserved, cash for all sounds like simple justice. The same Pew poll suggests that America is both exceptional and more united than some fear. In Britain, the European country showing the most faith in meritocracy, 57% linked hard work with success. Fully 77% of Americans made that same link, and theirs was a cross-party, classless faith, expressed by at least 70% of all surveyed, whether Democrats or Republicans, low-paid or wealthy.

A shared social contract is one reason why America’s fiscal and political union is in better shape than Europe’s fledgling version. It is why Mr Obama, while defending government programmes, praises personal responsibility and insists that a “basic” safety net, far from creating dependency, frees Americans to take risks. Yet America should fear the spread of the crudest poison paralysing Europe: mutual dislike between citizens.

Republicans bear considerable blame, after years spent dividing America into taxpaying “makers” and welfare-dependent “takers”. They have allowed their zeal for austerity to be tinged with regional antipathies. After Hurricane Sandy hit (mostly Democratic) northeastern states, House Republicans were slow to approve disaster funds, treating northeastern colleagues like “third-world beggars”, complained a New York Republican, Peter King. In the sequester crisis, Republicans’ selective hostility to spending has become a caricature. A new House Republican proposal, juggling money within sequester limits, would shift funds to the FBI, embassy security, prison guards, border agents, customs officers and forest-fire fighting—as if the only good federal workers sport uniforms and badges. Raúl Labrador, an Idaho congressman, claimed that the cuts could be painless had Mr Obama not set out to make Republican districts suffer. Several cheered any chance to cut spending, even boneheadedly. Mike Pompeo, from Kansas, called the sequester a “home run”.

Presidents shouldn’t play divide and conquer

Democrats have stoked divisions in return. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ leader in the House, questioned whether Mr Pompeo was on “Team America”. Worse, Mr Obama hints that America’s deficits might be tamed with painless tax rises. He has accused Republicans of choosing to slash spending on schools and the armed forces rather than touch tax breaks for “big oil companies” and what he likes to call “loopholes for corporate jet owners”: his description for a rule covering private planes, whose abolition would raise a piffling $300m a year. Mr Obama likes to think he is more reasonable than his Republican foes. But the president is stirring up dislike, just like them.

It is much harder to find painless spending cuts and painless tax rises than duelling Republicans and Democrats suggest. Both sides’ fibs rest on ill-concealed contempt for an undeserving other: the feckless poor, the immoral rich, those who live in states of the wrong partisan hue. Mutual dislike is the dirty secret that best explains European paralysis. American politicians have no business stoking it in their far more ambitious union.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington