Charles Kesler is a Senior Fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute, as well as their editor for the esteemed Claremont Review Of Books.  Recently he wrote a short but very good article about the aims of the Tea Party.  An edited summary follows:

The original tea party was neither a political organization nor a populist movement, but one … the young John Adams judged so intrepid and consequential as to mark “an epocha in history.”

The British government agreed. Lord North warned the British Parliament that  “We are now to establish our authority, or give it up entirely.” We all know how that turned out.

Both the old and the new Tea Party stand for resistance to unconstitutional power.  In 1773 the Tea Partiers opposed the Tea Act, which violated their rights as Englishmen and as men. Their counterparts today fight against Obamacare, a much worse law.

If the Tea Party is revolutionary, it is so only in the traditional American sense: it wants to revolve back, to return to the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence as the basis of government.  This is the deepest reason why the Obama Administration has reacted to this Tea Party as Lord North did to the original.  If Obamacare is overturned, then liberals will have lost control of the future and hence of their legitimacy; and if they lose the future, they will lose the present, too.  So the Tea Party must be stopped at all costs.

The full article is here.