Barbara Tuchman’s book, “The Guns of August,” describes the outbreak of World War I. Yet, it also seems an apt characterization of the voter anger that has erupted at Town Hall meetings last month.

Democratic politicians who had not read the health care bill (following a custom whereby only some read these bills and then direct the votes of others), were armed with “cue cards” to supply answers to anyone with the temerity to ask a difficult question. Meanwhile, concerned citizens took the initiative to inform themselves, and so it was that, with complete surprise which quickly devolved into victim hood, these politicians found themselves faced with people who knew more about the bill than they did.

Liberals had an uprising on their hands. In response, they resorted to the juvenile tactic of name-calling. Concerned people, both Republicans and Democrats, who exercised their duties as citizens of a democracy, were labeled Brown shirts, carriers of Nazi symbols, an unruly mob and political terrorists.

This defensive tactic by liberal politicians hearkens back to this spring when liberal commentators derided Tea Party participants as malcontents, Republican losers, and people upset that a black man occupies the White House. Moreover, liberals scoffed that the original Tea Party was driven by colonists protesting a tax—and pointed out that the Bush tax cuts were still in effect.

But today’s Tea Party patriots are not motivated by the issue of taxes—and in some ways, neither were the original Tea Party colonists. Their dissatisfaction was not solely about taxes. The tax on tea was small, but it represented yet another encroachment on the autonomy the colonies had enjoyed.

The tea tax was the perfect issue to galvanize public outrage. Manipulation of the tea trade highlighted the already-rankling controls England asserted, and alerted colonists that King George III meant to subject them to the rule of an absolute monarch over his subjects. The colonists saw that they would no longer benefit from the system of Benign Neglect which had worked well for generations during the evolution of liberty under a limited monarch. The reaction by the protesters of heaving tea overboard was symbolic, cathartic and decisive.

King George understandably resented the fact that royal sovereignty had been diluted by the role of parliament. It was unthinkable that he could change this relationship. Nevertheless, he intended to reassert in the colonies the “proper” order of a sovereign over his subjects. Actions to assert more direct control over peoples’ lives discarded the protections that either Parliament or the colonial legislatures afforded as buffers between the king and his subjects.

This ratcheting-up of government control in people’s lives constituted an undeclared revolution, which was recognized by perceptive members of Parliament. Edmund Burke warned of the folly of this course of action. Despite the rallying cry of “no taxation without representation,” the colonists had been satisfied as unrepresented British subjects. They realized that the few members seated to represent them in Parliament would be difficult to communicate with and easily out-voted. Burke understood that a major shift in the balance between liberty and royal power could not be acceptable to the colonists.

The Boston Tea Party was the opening shot of what became the American Revolution or, more accurately, the War of Independence. It was a conservative struggle to maintain the colonists’ God-given liberties, which had evolved—and that a revolutionary George III sought to overturn. As Burke asserted, it was “a revolution not made but prevented.”

People may not understand that today’s resistance and anger echoes the feelings that led to the American Revolution. Still, just as the “guns of August” signaled the onset of World War I which led to earth-changing events, it may be that the protests at town hall meetings and Tea Parties signal the awakening of an underlying American spirit that will once again resist statist revolution.