What the media misses about the tea-party movement

Across the country, the Tea Party is leading a great and historic corrective. It is pulling both parties not to the right but to the middle — to a place of fiscal sanity and sustainability. The Tea Party is slowly but surely reversing an 80-year trend in which a center-left governing coalition in Washington has imposed its will on a center-right country. With the Tea Party’s help, the country is pushing back and saying “enough” to D.C.’s decadence that has given us a $17 trillion debt, an economy with zero wage growth since 1989 and safety net programs that are on the verge of collapse.

The status quo apologists are so eager to belittle the Tea Party because they know its appeal is mainstream. Ronald Reagan (echoing Richard Nixon) called it the silent majority. Tom Coburn called it the rumble. But our founders called it America. The real Tea Party is just another name for our national aversion to centralized power, a core conviction that inspired our founders and is rooted in a deep understanding of history and human nature.

In 2014, the win-loss stories will continue but the real “narrative” looks less like a CNN headline and more like Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” — a timeless critique of revolutionary excess.