Andrew Jackson takes the oath of office on March 4, 1829. The seventh U.S. president opposed strong central government and powerful business elites.Library of Congress
Wearing a Tea Party Nation T-shirt against her Florida tan, Janet Mixon runs the tips of manicured lava-red nails through shoulder-length hair white as magnolias and explains how she came to join an insurgency that is scaring the established American political class silly.
"Our Constitution is being shredded to pieces," blankly states the 58-year-old citrus farmer from the Gulf Coast. "It's been happening for a long time and we just sat back. But then this administration got in and it got into so many things so fast."
For Lynn O'Bryan, who closed her St. Louis, Mo., children's store when the recession took hold, the decision to make the journey to the first-ever Tea Party convention came after months of watching self-interested politicians in Washington ignoring the popular will.
"It feels like as a country we're self-destructing from the inside," offers Ms. O'Bryan, 52, who, like her husband, forked out the $549 convention fee plus travel expenses to come to Nashville "to learn how to be more involved."
Ms. Mixon and Ms. O'Bryan, neither of whom was politically active before last year, are among hundreds of thousands of newly minted American militants who have coalesced outside the established party system around a set of small-government principles. They have been emboldened by each battle won in the movement's short and remarkable existence, from those at the local level on up to the election last month of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown, which deprived President Barack Obama of a Democratic supermajority in the Senate.
Though their gripes are not always coherent - they're against Mr. Obama's "government-run" health-care proposal, but cling to publicly funded Medicare for seniors - the Tea Partiers are promising to shake up U.S. politics in ways that leave almost no elected official safe. Indeed, often dismissed by liberal foes as Republican-financed "Astroturf" - or fake grassroots - the hundreds of Tea Partiers gathered here seem as mad, if not madder, at the GOP.
They intend to stay angry - at least for the election cycle that culminates with this fall's midterm elections. The Tea Partiers' strong anti-incumbency inclination means that dozens of senators, congressman, governors and judges from both sides of the aisle are facing the toughest re-election battles of their careers.
Ms. Mixon, who was sent to Nashville by her local Manatee County Tea Party group "to report to our people on what we're supposed to do next," is gearing up to defeat moderate Florida Republican Governor Charlie Crist in his bid to become the party's U.S. Senate candidate this fall. Instead, she's supporting Mr. Crist's primary challenger, Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles, who has successfully courted Tea Partiers across the state.
"We had liked Charlie Crist before. But then he started taking all this stimulus money," says Ms. Mixon of the $787-billion recovery package enacted by Mr. Obama's administration last year. "It's a sign to all Republicans: 'You are not safe.'" Still, as it progresses from the anarchic roots and unruly rallies that drew all strains of American malcontents last year - some bearing arms and wielding racist slogans directed at Mr. Obama - into a more organized political force, the Tea Party is not immune to its own internal politics. The convention is itself a sign of that, as several of the movement's leading lights withdrew from the event on learning of its for-profit status.
The Tea Partiers here aren't letting that spoil their fun. The Nashville event, held at the sprawling 4.5-million square-foot indoor oasis of palm trees and waterfalls known as the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, is a more genteel affair compared with last year's gatherings of rabble-rousers. There are no Obama-as-the-Joker posters. The raciest T-shirt reads: "Keep the change. I'll keep my FREEDOM, my GUNS and my MONEY." One kiosk even sells sterling silver "tea bag" pendants for $89.99.
Instead of the army boots and fatigues so common at last summer's rallies, the look here is small-town chic. There's even a dress-up dinner tonight with Sarah Palin, a Tea Party goddess, as the keynote speaker. No one seems a bit miffed that Ms. Palin is reportedly pocketing a $100,000 fee for the gig. Maybe that's because she's promised them the money "will go right back into the cause" (though she still hasn't said how).
While the organizers of the Nashville event aimed to keep the dialogue focused on a series of "first principles" required of candidates seeking Tea Party backing - including lower taxes, states' rights and national security - they have also provided a forum for Christian and anti-immigration crusaders to vent their views.
"People who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. The name is Barack Hussein Obama," seethed former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, who opened the convention.
"We've gone from one nation under God, to a nation that denies God," warned, from the same podium, Rick Scarborough, a Southern Baptist pastor from Texas whose group Vision America works to defeat candidates who support abortion rights and gay marriage.
To be sure, Tea Partiers are almost exclusively devout, white Christians. But Ms. O'Bryan, like most Tea Partiers, did not join the movement to advance a socially conservative agenda. Like the 1773 Boston Tea Party from which they take their name and inspiration, modern-day Tea Partiers are revolting against what they see as an oppressive ruling class.
Since the American Revolution, populism based on a suspicion of big government and big business alike has been a potent and recurring force in U.S. politics. It has repeatedly shaped the outcomes of elections and public policy - from President Andrew Jackson's move to break up the Second Bank of the United States in 1832, shattering its owners' accumulation of economic power, to Ross Perot's presidential bid in 1992, which helped defeat Republican George H.W. Bush and hand Bill Clinton the White House.
It is fitting that the first convention of the modern Tea Party movement is being held in Nashville. The city was the perch from which Jackson launched his political career in opposition to strong central government and powerful business elites.
The seventh U.S. president, serving from 1829 to 1837, Jackson had two nicknames. The first, Old Hickory, evoked his toughness and provided the name for the Gaylord Opryland's swankiest restaurant. The second, King Mob, emerged from his populism.
The Tea Party phenomenon "is something that goes back to the anti-federalists in the 18th century who believed that the only real guarantors of individual freedom were the states and that a strong central government was despotism in the making," explains Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
The election of Barack Obama coincided with an unprecedented peacetime upsurge in central government spending and activism. That was only partly of the new President's making, as the bailouts of Wall Street and stimulus spending that will drive this year's budget deficit to a mind-boggling $1.6-trillion would have likely befallen anyone occupying the White House.
But Mr. Obama's year-one obsession to reform the American health-care system, and to a lesser extent his thus far equally unsuccessful bid to get cap-and-trade legislation through Congress, became to modern-day Tea Partiers what duties on British East India Company tea were to the pre-revolutionary colonists who revolted in Boston Harbour 237 years ago.
The nearly $1-trillion proposal to extend subsidies to most of the 47 million Americans without health insurance to enable them to buy coverage would have meant new taxes for most of 83 per cent of Americans who already have it. "Cap-and-tax," as the Tea Partiers call the Democrats' proposed climate-change initiative, is thought of as little more than a socialist plot to send jobs to China. For the Tea Partiers, both legislative attempts were acts of provocation every bit as egregious as King George's tax on tea.
"If you look at the history of attempts to create a national health-care system going all the way back to Harry Truman, every time there has been a powerful backlash," remarks Brendan McConville, a history professor at Boston University. "It just strikes a nerve of big government and socialism, and in America, that is a third-rail kind of thing."
To many Americans, big government is just plain unconstitutional. And Americans, perhaps more than any people on Earth, know their Constitution - or at least purport to. Indeed, pocket-sized copies of the document are all over the Nashville Tea Party convention.
"The American Constitution begins with the words, 'We the People,' and since the beginning of this country, the people of the United States have felt peculiarly attached to the idea that the Constitution is theirs," says Dale Carpenter, a constitutional expert at the University of Minnesota. "Americans have almost a romance with the text of their Constitution."
Tea Party leaders regularly invoke the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of expression and the Second, the right to bear arms. But more often they derive their inspiration from the Tenth. It says: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The Tenth Amendment is a rampart against an over-dominating central government, and the Tea Partiers' reverence for the Tenth shows up in their insistence that regulating health care be left to the states and that Washington is overstepping its bounds by arguing otherwise.
To the Tea Partiers' chagrin, the U.S government has seen its tentacles grow exponentially relative to those of the 50 states. Indeed, individual state governments are increasingly small players in Americans' lives, at least when compared to the extent to which Canadian provinces dominate those of their citizens.
The Tea Partiers' desire to see more decisions left to the states - especially in the most conservative jurisdictions - is "an outgrowth of this distrust and suspicion of all concentrations of power" that has informed every wave of U.S. populism since the 19th century, Prof. Carpenter explains.
"There is no question that the federal government has taken on more power and responsibilities than anyone at the time of the founding could have imagined," he adds. After the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s - both of which saw rapid growth in the federal government under Democratic presidents - the past year "looks, to its critics, like a third wave of federal power sweeping over us."
That is certainly how it feels to the Tea Partiers here, even if they might not always articulate it that way.
"The majority of Americans don't want government-run health care," insists Ms. O'Bryan, an even-tempered brunette in a fuchsia "Key West" hoodie. "So, they better not do it. That just wouldn't be right."
They, of course, are the Democrats, who still hold a majority of seats in Congress. Despite Mr. Brown's swearing in as the 41st Republican senator this week, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are still looking for ways to pass a health bill that would circumvent a GOP filibuster.
Though Mr. Brown is a superhero to the Tea Partiers - for defeating a staunchly liberal Democrat to take the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat and vowing to kill the health-care bill - the rest of the GOP caucus is on notice.
"There needs to be a whole cleanup," Ms. O'Bryan says.
For the modern Tea Partiers here, sweeping out the current ruling class won't involve dumping crates of tea into the harbour or taking up arms. More than the rowdy rallies for which they are best known, their weapon of choice is the Internet. It may just make them even more powerful than their forebears.