Tea is served.

• Author: Kesler, Charles R.
• Position: American Thought

THE TEA PARTY movement is named, of course, for the famous event in late 1773 when cases of tea were dumped unceremoniously into Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party--a carefully orchestrated strike against a commodity that was being taxed and sold by a monopoly provider--was intended as a one-time thing, though it ended up being an important link in the chain of events that led to the American Revolution. Today's Tea Party, on the other hand, has ambitions to become an ongoing force--maybe even the major force--in American conservatism, and it strives for a revolution of its own, a return to a more limited, more constitutional form of government. If I had to judge its performance so far, I would say that it has been courageous and right in its diagnosis of the problems facing American politics, but somewhat off in its prescriptions.

When I say the Tea Party is correct in its diagnosis, I mean it is correct in its very clear sense that ObamaCare is not just another costly, bureaucratic, top-down, regulatory scheme, of which we have, alas, so many. There is something genuinely tyrannical--despite the good intentions of many of its supporters--about ObamaCare. It threatens not only to ruin our medical care system, but indirectly and directly--and sooner as well as later--to subvert our form of government and way of life, fundamentally changing the relationship between citizens and government

In a way, you can see how dangerous ObamaCare is by noticing how it has brought out the worst in liberals--which is evident in how they have responded to the Tea Party. Liberal impatience with partisanship--that is, with people who oppose their plans--arises from the fact that in contemporary liberalism, there is no publicly acknowledged right of revolution.

That may seem like a strange thing to say but, if one looks at some of the political theorists who were most important to modern or statist liberalism--Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Germany, say, or Woodrow Wilson here in the U.S.--they usually are quite explicit in rejecting a right of revolution. In their view, a people always has--in the long ran--the government it deserves. So, there is no right of the people to "abolish," as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, the prevailing form of government and substitute a better one. In particular, there is no conceivable right to overturn contemporary liberalism itself; as liberals today are so fond of saying, there is no turning back the clock.

To liberals, the Tea Party appears, well, bonkers, precisely because it recalls the American Revolution and, in doing so, implies that it might not be such a bad thing to have another revolution--or at least a second installment of the original--in order to roll back the bad government that is damaging the safety and happiness of the American people.

This is the position, for instance, of Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of The New York Tunes Book Review and author of The Death of Conservatism. For Tanenhaus, conservatism is good insofar as it consolidates and preserves the liberal order. If conservatism turns revolutionary, i.e., attempts to roll back the liberal order, then it exceeds its commission--it goes off the reservation, so to speak --because liberalism stands for progress and progress is final.

Pres. Barack Obama himself made this point...