Carl Bernstein of Woodward-Bernstein fame thinks he's caught a whiff of radicalism in Mitt Romney and the Tea Party, here at The Daily Beast, imagining all sort of vain things about both of them.
By the end of the hysterical tirade he calms down a little and realizes his own progressivism qualifies as radicalism, too, but he'd much rather call his beloved progressivism a "transformational movement". In other words, "progressivism good, radicalism bad", sort of like how liberalism got a bad name and had to be replaced at all costs if liberalism were to continue to retain influence.
The reality is the Tea Party is a reactionary movement trying to forestall the radicalism of Barack Obama. Reactionary movements often are mistaken for radical movements because in order to succeed in their objective they have to get to the root being yanked out of the ground by others, by the revolutionaries, and replant it. As such reactionaries, the Tea Partiers are counter-revolutionaries: "Put It Back!"
This is not to say that reactionary movements cannot be hijacked by ideologues any less than true revolutionary movements are inspired by them. The American revolutionaries are a case in point. They never embraced the idealisms which turned into a class war against aristocrats in France. It is unthinkable that the history of the early American independence movement would have turned out as it did had it otherwise been a movement about liberty, equality and fraternity. Former loyalists were welcomed back. While enthusiasm for the idealism of natural rights among Tea Party activists is reminiscent of this, especially among the libertarian elements, the genesis of the movement was in reaction to Obama's proposed mortgage bailouts of deadbeat homeowners, many of whom were becoming infamous for "walking away". Like a good reactionary, Rick Santelli gave voice to his indignation at these people on national television in February but characteristically planned a Tea Party protest on the beach of Lake Michigan for months later, during his summer vacation. In the interim, he had to go to work.
The people, however, had other ideas about waiting. But unlike real radicals such as the Occupy Wall Street types, their protests were peaceful, orderly, clean, and came to an end, and then transformed themselves into the constructive activity of political action, retaking the US House in 2010 for the Republicans in order to stop Obama. As a political movement, it should be understood in those practical prophylactic terms despite the efforts of Republicans to co-opt the movement. The Tea Party is a movement of Americans who are radical only in the sense that they have rediscovered their roots in the constitution and the world which gave it birth.
The true radicals in the bad sense are those who would extirpate them.
