In this regard (and most others), the average citizen is entirely at odds with the policy elites who run the country, and who wish to tamp down the burgeoning TEA Party movement, in part because they themselves recognize that it is about much more than just taxes.
Just how far we have gone down the road toward socialism and how much freedom we have lost will soon become evident, I think. And when it does, there will be some event or incident that serves as a rallying point for the opposition. It's just a matter of time.
To borrow your theme ... while the "tea party" movement does have legs of a sort, I think has more to do with a general sense of dissatisfaction, than with any specific agenda.
It's all good fun to show up in crowds and wave teabags around, but for the moment it's not much more than a publicity stunt; and as such, easily forgotten in a world in which publicity stunts are a dime a dozen.
Before such a movement can become truly effective it needs an intellectual basis: identify what, precisely is wrong, and determine what precisely needs to be done about it. And of course we need leaders -- real, grown-up ones -- to embody those principles.
Unfortunately, this is long-term work, and conservatives have shown an unfortunate tendency to be impatient and to rely on gimmicks when they should have been behaving like responsible adults.
I'm actually pretty pessimistic about our short-term chances to just convince people of the rightness of our position; it will take a crisis to shake them out of their torpor. I don't think it will be possible for that intellectual foundation to be build before things get quite ugly on any number of fronts -- economic, geopolitical, and so on. I think the best we can hope for is for something good to spring from the rubble of a collapse that's been 50 years in the making.