Conservative leaders rising up from tea party movement

The tea party movement has grown nationwide with thousands of events that eventually led to the 9/12 March on Washington three weeks ago when over 1 million conservatives converged on Washington, DC, to send a message to their elected representatives.

That movement may be a bit unorganized at the moment but, as RedState's Erick Erickson opined in the Washington Examiner, leaders are rising from the ranks of the tea party organizations:

We should not look at the tea party movement and the voices surrounding it as shrieking voices of populist sentiment devoid of substance. They give voice to the instinctual level, or gut, of the conservative conscience.

What we see across the country are more and more people standing up realizing the direction we are headed is wrong. They are unorganized. They are unfocused. But they do not lack a “connection to a concrete ideology,” they just are not skilled or trained in the ideology.

There is no greater conservative sentiment than “stop.” Bernard Bailyn’s influential The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution laid out how conservative the American Revolution was.

The popular messages of “freedom” and “liberty” were not slogans of propaganda put forward by the 18th century equivalent of a 501(c)(4), but were very real and meaningful to the colonists on the street and in the fields.

While no one should expect a revolution against government from the tea parties, we should expect and hope for a revolution in conservative thought and an upheaval of at least the Republican Party as the tea party activists start putting down their protest signs and picking up campaign signs. Then, perhaps, they will move on to taking over their local political party.

Out of the conservative movement are rising leaders of the future.