So where were you during the great Civil War of 2009?

What, you don't remember it?

Six months ago, you may dimly recall, the nation's elite guardians of political discourse were sounding the alarm about what New York Times bloviator Frank Rich described as “;the simmering undertone of violence in our politics”; that “;keeps getting darker.”; The Southern Poverty Law Center warned that “;the sounds of violence are growing louder.”; The source of the threat was clear: “;brownshirt”;-style “;street thugs”; protesting President Barack Obama's health care policies, according to historian Rick Perlstein.

Angry voters shouting questions at congressional town hall meetings, the emerging consensus agreed last August, were speaking less out of genuine self-interest than from what Paul Krugman described as “;the same cultural and racial anxiety that's behind the 'birther' movement.”; Evidence for this cutting-edge sociological explanation was furnished by liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, who died four decades ago. Still, Hofstadter's early-1960s warning of the “;paranoid style”; and rampant anti-intellectualism of right-wing politics was being used by a club by pundits to describe the people who disagreed with them. The Tea Party movement was an atavistic last gasp from the same marginalized white crazies who brought us everything from the John Birch Society to Timothy McVeigh.

What a difference a few elections make. Now that Republican Scott Brown has single-handedly punctured the Democrats' supermajority and likely scuppered the party's health care bill by winning Teddy Kennedy's old Senate seat in a 3-to-1 Democratic state, coverage of the Tea Party movement has dropped the panicky warnings of imminent violence and morphed into something approaching a genuine, if belated and condescending, curiosity. Unless your name is Keith Olbermann, it's hard to sustain the narrative of racist white nutjobs in a state that elected Barack Hussein Obama by 26 percentage points. No matter how crazy-sounding would-be Tea Party spokesmen can sound — and there was ample Obama-birth-certificate goofiness at this past weekend's self-styled Tea Party convention in Nashville — the disaffection that has fueled its rise is verging on the mainstream.

As two journalists who covered the huge Sept. 12 Tea Party march on Washington, and as two champions of limited government who have long studied the gap between Americans' fiscal conservatism and their governments' fiscal recklessness, we'd like to assist our newly curious colleagues in the legacy media in understanding this strange and uncomfortable apparition.

The first thing to note is that the Scott Brown election was, if anything, a lagging indicator. Beginning at least last May, when California voters overwhelmingly rejected a series of budget-juryrigging ballot measures supported by the Golden State's entire political class, American voters during this long and unhappy season of fatcat bailouts and seven-figure job losses have taken every available opportunity to give their elected leaders the collective finger. Last summer's town hall meetings, which despite all the media hyperventilation weren't statistically violent in the least, were more than anything else predictable: If the federal government goes on an unprecedented spending binge after the new president campaigned on a “;net spending cut,”; and then starts talking about overhauling health care and jacking up the costs of energy consumption, yeah, those constituency discussions might get a little heated.

Underlying this intense and growing alienation is a fact that no demonization of individual Tea Party protesters can sweep aside: Ever since then-President George W. Bush went on live national TV in September 2008 to declare that “;under normal circumstances”; he was “;a strong believer in free enterprise,”; the economic policies favored by Official Washington have been tremendously unpopular.

By a count of 56 percent to 30 percent, Americans think the bank bailouts were a bad idea, according to a January survey by Rasmussen Reports. Even more — 73 percent — dislike the auto bailouts, a number that is the exact inverse of what Rasmussen describes as the “;political class,”; who were 73 percent in favor. That disconnect is not an outlier.

According to a January ABC News/Washington Post poll, 58 percent of Americans prefer “;smaller government with fewer services,”; compared to 38 percent who favor “;larger government with more services.”; A Gallup poll from last September has 57 percent of Americans believing that the government is doing too much with the economy.

This makes sense if you think about it for more than two seconds. Fiscal conservatism was last spotted in Washington during the 1990s, which also happened to coincide with a fondly remembered boom. Then George W. Bush jacked up spending at rates not seen since his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson bestrode the economy like a deficit-generating Colossus, and Barack Obama decided to see his predecessor's irresponsibility and raise it up a notch. Voters who prefer government to live within its means, and who favor the type of American capitalism that allows deserving companies to fail rather than become wards of the state, have had nowhere to turn for more than a decade.

This goes a long way to explain why the Tea Party is showing up in some polls as more popular than the Republican Party. Though the grassroots movement is definitely a right-of-center phenomenon, many of the protestors we spoke with back at the Sept. 12 march in Washington were disgusted with the GOP, somewhat embarrassed that they didn't give Bush a harder time, and very eager to thwart any attempt to convert this powerful new tendency into just another get-out-the-vote operation for the Republican Party.

Even within the self-described Tea Party movement there have been all kinds of factionalization, contests for power, and mutual recriminations over obscure sleights. To the consternation of many interpreters, the Tea Party is not behaving like a top-down political organization at all, but rather a series of loosely connected local groups ready to fall in — or fall out — at a moment's notice. This weekend's pricey proceedings in Nashville were condemned by many Tea Party loyalists long before Sarah Palin gave her odd and hugely publicized speech.

But it would be a mistake to confuse organizational incoherence — not to mention a hysterical, off-putting tendency to portray the president as some kind of totalitarian jackal — with political impotence. Not only are Tea Party activists materially affecting things as big as Scott Brown's election and as little as a Virginia state vote to outlaw health insurance mandates, but their broad and relentless critique of runaway government is, if anything, more popular than the movement itself.

Judging by President Obama's State of the Union address, this is a message that just isn't getting through to the White House. In a season where Republican governors have won in Virginia and New Jersey, where a third-party conservative came incredibly close to winning a hotly contested House district in upstate New York, the president faced the electorate and promised a 6 percent education hike and bullet-train projects to nowhere. His gargantuan $3.8 trillion proposed budget, despite coming wrapped in rhetoric about how it would be “;a terrible mistake to borrow against our children's future to pay our way today,”; makes precisely that mistake, racking up a mind-blowing $1.56 trillion in debt.

As long as there are politicians in both parties who preach “;fiscal responsibility”; while delivering the opposite, who “;punish”; bad banks by saying mean things about them while handing over billions, and who treat capitalism as a process that begins with government benevolence, there will be both a Tea Party movement and broader political tendency underneath it. Americans have ridden these two worn-out husks of political parties since the 19th century; it's no wonder that voters are defecting in droves.

Independent voters are the one part of the electorate that is growing like the stock market used to way back a decade ago. A recent poll of Arizona voters found that both the Democrats and the Republicans were shedding voters like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Nearly one-third of Grand Canyon State voters were considering a switch to independent status, which is pretty much what's happening in every state in the country. The politicians — and parties — that recognize that Americans are sick of the fiscal doubletalk and really do want a government that reflects their limited government sensibilities will do just fine. The others will be looking for work in a country where jobs are hard to find thanks to promiscuous government intervention in every part of our lives.

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