Since the Obama Administration's advent just over a year ago, American political debate has seen the emergence of a new populist movement known as the Tea Party Movement.  Such movements are common to U.S. political history and the political history of many other countries.  One of the first movements of this nature in our political history was the Shays Rebellion against high taxes which occurred in western Massachusetts during the early years of our republic.  The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of the leftist oriented populist movement which sought to protest what it regarded as the monopolist practices of railroad companies, agricultural distress, and various purported real and purported evils of Wall Street, high finance, and governmental policy.

Today's Tea Party movement protests against the Obama Administration's attempts to increase spending and national debt and enhance governmental authority over our complicated health care system.  The vast majority of Tea Party protestors are, undoubtedly, sincere individuals who are concerned about our country's direction.  However, it is not enough to be opposed to governmental policies you don't like.  You must pose credible alternatives to those policies and, unfortunately, Tea Party members have not appeared willing to present us with specific alternatives to control our budget deficit, national debt, governmental spending, or resolve health care issues.  A recent article in Canada's conservative National Post newspaper elaborates on this by mentioning that the recent Tea Party conference in Nashville, TN saw delegates present no specific suggestions for reducing entitlement program spendings.  Since they held their meeting in the Volunteer State, I wonder if any Tea Party delegates would have come out in favor of privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority which has provided electric and hydroelectric power for significant portions of the south since the New Deal.

For the Tea Party to be a true force for good, it will have to work with existing Republican Party political leaders and the vast network of conservative think-tanks to pose credible public policy alternatives to the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress.  It's not enough to say you're against Obama Administration policies, you need to know the nuts and bolts of government administration i.e. what's the difference between the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Minerals Management Service and what roles these agencies play in national energy policy.

Grassroots populist movements, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, tend to take two courses.  They fall apart for personality conflict reasons or factional disagreements about goals, or they and their concerns get absorbed or coopted into the policy platforms of the political parties they are closest to.  A good example of this latter situation occurred in Canada in the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of this century.  The Reform Party, a populist Conservative movement from western Canada which became disenchanted with the ideological incoherence of the country's misnamed Progressive Conservative Party, split from this Party and was able to win a number of seats in the House of Commons.

However, Reform never gained enough seats outside of western Canada to threaten the then ruling Liberal Party's hold on power.
Reform Party leaders realized this as did the more realistic members of the Progressive Conservative Party from eastern Canada.  The two factions worked diligently to find common ground and reemerged in 2003 as the Conservative Party of Canada.  Stephen Harper of Alberta, a key leader in the Reform movement which had become the dominant faction in Canadian conservatism, became the leader of this reunited party and in 2006 became Canada's Prime Minister by leading this party to victory.   Harper's Conservatives remain in power today and are doing a far better job of helping Canada cope with the global economic down than we are due to their practice of more intelligent fiscal and regulatory policy.

 A key lesson to learn from this is that protest movements who are willing to learn the substance of governmental policymaking and be serious about providing high quality governmental service, instead of whining about the unjustness of current governmental policies, have a serious chance of being able to obtain real political power to improve the material lives of their countries citizens.  Protest movements that learn how to "play the game" and advocate an ethos of praising public service, have a chance of reaching beyond their political base and offering credible public policies that can benefit citizens who share or don't share their political or ideological objectives.  Tea Party members should resist the temptation to create a third party and seek to enhance their practical knowledge of governmental policymaking and offer the GOP substantive, specific, constructive, and well-crafted public policy alternatives to Obama Administration policies instead of babbling about socialized medicine or dangerously high national debt.