As astute observers of exceptional America - Hume, Burke, Tocqueville and especially Jefferson - have always known, 1776 was about a rotation and return to proven principles of self-government, not a revolution.
Rebellion would tear apart the newly built hilltop city and spin the new nation into an unknowable future. America's original Tea Party patriots, unlike the French regicides that came a few years later, insisted that king and Parliament had torn up a constitutional order that could only be reinstated by an act of separation and repair. As Thomas Jefferson put it, a far-away king and Parliament had introduced unacceptable civil novelties: Troops were quartered in civilian homes, colonial burgesses were forced to meet in unaccustomed places and inconvenient times, and made to operate under changed rules; and nettlesome taxes were laid without colonial approval.
These usurpations of long-established colonial rights and responsibilities were undertaken without consent, and were therefore illegal under natural law and established practice. The radicalism - the abrupt, unnecessary, unasked-for uprooting of governing traditions - was committed by the head of government, not by the "rebels."
The same dynamics can be found at this weekend's Tea Party convention in Nashville. Like America's founders, Tea Party folk are not asking for strange new ways to run their country. They want - mainly - what works and what they know. They know that an annual deficit of 10 per cent to 11 per cent of GDP is a Third World strategy for ruin. They know that 85 per cent of their neighbours are content with the country's current health-care policies. They know taxing, regulating and scolding U.S. job makers is no way to end a recession.
In this deep, fundamental and original sense, America is a small-"c" conservative nation. It does change, and quite dramatically so, given enough time. The 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia could have been personified by a continent-bestriding young Hercules, richer, possessed of more technical savvy and better armed than almost any of his mature cousins across the sea. But the giant did not grow by conquest (except of a figurative sort) or by sudden fits and starts; rather by unplanned, undirected natural, albeit extraordinarily rapid, evolution. The one exception to this general rule was the War Between the States, also known as the Civil War - a revolution so bloody and violent that nothing like it may ever again occur if America remains true to her traditions.
America's permanent exceptional civil dynamic is prudent change - never by revolution, always by a reforming pragmatic evolution moderated by balanced powers, competing "special interests" and (just) two well-organized big-tent political factions. The guiding stars are a commonly understood collection of unwritten natural rights as expressed in a near-sacred pair of founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the chief axiom of both being that government is limited and residual sovereignty remains forever with the people, never the rulers.
If you understand this historical reality, you know why the Tea Party movement is consistent with all successful U.S. political movements. Its sentinels alert us that a distant, self-righteous and tutelary central power is attempting to fundamentally change America; not just without reflective consent, but profoundly contrary to many well-measured indexes of public opinion.
With bold arrogance unfamiliar to U.S. politics, President Barack Obama did not waste the opportunity created by crisis and distraction to temporarily advance his radical agenda. But he and his unrepresentative allies in Congress did not change the cadence of Hercules's march; ponderous, two steps forward, one back, never in a hurry.
The Tea Partiers know success will only come if they work with the Republican Party. They know their opinions, values and mores are dismissed and derided by the radicals in power. But like the hedgehog, they know one other very big thing: They can change everything - nearly everything - back. They are well on the way, helping to win elections in Virginia, New Jersey and quite wonderfully (literally so; an outcome before which all America stood wonderstruck) in Massachusetts.
These victories have confounded the left's pundits, who said, early days, that the Tea Party effort would be short-lived, momentarily fuelled by media attention during the town meetings on health "reform." The Chicago boys hoped Tea Party members would fight among themselves over tangled priorities for gun rights, unborn babies and religious freedom.
In fact, the Tea Party leaders assembled in Nashville are learning voter registration technique, communication technique, election law and - ah, the irony - community organization. They have a charismatic force in Sarah Palin, and a unified focus on spending, taxes and debt. Most important, they have a single, simple goal: Throw the rascals out.
Tradition holds that the tune played while British troops stacked their arms in front of the victorious colonials during the Yorktown surrender was The World Turned Upside Down. Thanks in part to the Tea Party, we'll hear it again in November.
Tom Velk is a professor of economics and director of the North American Studies program at McGill University.