There are some really ticked off people out there and they want to change Washington.
They call themselves members of the Tea Party, but the name is misleading. A party suggests organization, a well-oiled political machine complete with candidates and a platform.
 

The Tea Partiers are better characterized as an insurgency. They’re a coalition of angry groups and grassroots organizers. They don’t get along all that well, and the issues they care about range from guns to immigration to monetary policy. But they’re united by their hatred of big government.
 

Barack Obama serves as the most useful symbol of everything they despise, but the Tea Partiers heap just as much disdain on congressional leaders, governors, and anyone else in the political mainstream. Although a lot of media attention has associated the movement with Republicans, the two groups couldn’t be less similar. Just about everything George W. Bush ever did is anathema to the movement.
 

Unlike most of the punditocracy, I don’t think the Tea Partiers are all stupid and crazy. They have more—much more—than their fair share of wackos and demagogues, but that’s not the whole story. The Tea Party has tapped into a populist current that’s been brimming beneath the surface for years as both major parties embraced mammoth government expansion.
 

Americans have long distrusted government. Our revolution was sparked by frustration with taxes. Our founding fathers wrote a constitution intended to severely restrict the power of the federal government. They’d just fought a war against centralized authority and they weren’t keen on replacing one oppressive bureaucracy with another. The government they agreed upon was small, decentralized, and limited.
 

This model worked for a long time. But eventually problems came about that our leaders felt demanded an expanded role for the national government. The 20th century saw a huge increase in the powers of the federal behemoth, especially those concentrated in the hands of the president. The income tax, the welfare state, the regulatory regime; things we now take for granted were hotly contested in the last century.
 

Not everyone trusted this explosion of power. Many brilliant philosophers and politicians warned of the adverse effects the new programs would have on the economic and social institutions that had served the country well for centuries. They considered their worst fears confirmed in the imperial presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.
 

It’s in this tradition that the best parts of the Tea Party movement were born. Although both major parties would like to write the movement off as a bunch of blathering fools, some of its ideas aren’t that bad.
 

The Tea Partiers want their civil liberties back, a reasonable request given the warrantless wiretapping and secret prisons of the Bush years. They want their taxes significantly lowered, which is understandable when you look at all the wasteful pork doled out each year. They want the reach of Washington pared, a dream many share, although the way they want to do it is, to say the least, unorthodox.
 

Even some of the crazier Tea Party proposals aren’t totally illegitimate. While abolishing the Federal Reserve might be a tad extreme, that body’s long history of setting disastrous monetary policy makes reforming its operation a sound proposition. The Tea Party should moderate some of its rhetoric if it wants to be taken seriously, but its problems are more a matter of degree than of complete hysteria.
 

More than that, though, the Tea Party needs to get serious about itself. Right now, its members see it as a way to vent frustration against the establishment. None of them seem to realize that they could actually form a mainstream party and help reform Washington.
 

There’s a long way to go if that’s to happen. First of all, the movement needs to find some real leaders capable of forcefully articulating its philosophy. Sarah Palin is a poor substitute. She has shown time and again that she hasn’t the intellect, the stability, or the drive to be a convincing proponent for anything, let alone a powerful movement of reform. Somewhere amongst the Tea Partiers there must be someone better able to make the case for small government.
 

Secondly, the Tea Party needs to clean up its message. Right now, it allows xenophobes and conspiracy theorists like Glenn Beck to dominate its media coverage. Say what you want about Obama’s policies, but he loves this country and its institutions, and to say that he wants to turn it into a dictatorship is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst. For the Tea Party to become a respectable movement, it must shed such ignorant propaganda and focus instead on its message of constitutionalism and limited government.
 

Finally, the Tea Party should recognize that change is best made in increments. As a fringe coalition, it can call for the immediate dismantlement of large institutions. If it wants to become a responsible party, it needs to focus on a step-by-step reduction of Washington’s power rather than wholesale iconoclasm.
 

The Tea Party can be a real force for good in American politics. Right now, both major parties stand for massive government intrusion in almost every part of our lives. No one has yet to step up and offer a viable alternative to deficit spending, corporate bailouts, and the ever-growing supply of pork. The Tea Party, if it rallied around a coherent, reasonable platform of moderate reform and reduced government, could become that third way.
 

As it stands now, this seems unlikely. Most of the Tea Partiers seem to prefer the easy rhetoric of demagoguery to the difficult honesty of real leadership. But Americans dissatisfied with their government deserve better.
 

Even if the Tea Party followed all this advice and entered the mainstream debate over this country’s future, many Americans, myself included, probably would not vote for its candidates. But that would be a reasoned rejection of its policies after careful consideration. That sure beats the out-of-hand dismissal the movement currently enjoys.

Nathaniel French is a junior theater major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].