PJ Media

The Tea Party movement is conservative in one sense, liberal in another, and outside those categories in a third, supremely important sense.

First, just as with the original American Revolution, the Tea Party movement is a rising in defense of property rights. The colonists were not nearly as exercised over England’s other oppressions as they were over its assertion of the taxing power and its confiscations-by-Parliamentary-decree of this and that (cf. the Pine Tree Flag). Property rights are a quintessentially conservative theme.

Second, the Tea Parties represent a demand that the people be heard in the face of the unsubtle attempts to silence all opposition to the Obamunist agenda. We haven’t yet experienced overt censorship, but the Left’s tactics of intimidation, coupled to the Old Media’s obvious allegiance to the Obama Administration, have made the standard news organs about as useful to the common man as Pravda was to the average Russian during the Soviet regime. Freedom of expression, of course, is a classically liberal theme.

But third and towering above those other, lesser conceptions, the Tea Parties are an assertion of popular sovereignty. Washington is being put on notice that its authority derives, by Constitutional principle, from the consent of the governed, and that the governed are withdrawing their consent. This libertarian motif, first expressed in the Declaration of Independence and multiply instantiated in the Constitution, is at the heart of all American political thought. Without it, the United States would be just one more satrapy in which the State can do what it pleases, when it pleases, to whomever it pleases, without fear of resistance, reproof, or rebuff.

But as with all communications, the significance of this one will inhere in the response it gets. We shall see.