The tea parties were in large part a gut reaction to very radical government action. The founders counted on this self-correcting mechanism of democracy as inherent in all free people and relied on elected politicians to faithfully ensure that implied freedoms, like the freedom of speech, were constitutionally protected. Thus, the movement is not and never was a revolution but a counterrevolution. The tea parties oppose the radical policies of bailouts, handouts, wealth redistribution, and intrusion into the lives of Americans that can only be described as radically revolutionary. The tea party backlash is about protecting individual liberty and the documents and institutions that have made it possible. The tea party protestors represent the flip side to the revolutionary ideas that sparked the tea party counterrevolution. They believe that age-old philosophical principles of individual liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and basic property rights, as enshrined in law through the United States Constitution, are the fundamental building blocks of the civil society. The tea parties embrace government as a necessary evil in constant need of being trimmed back like weeds in the spring. They want their highways, cops, firefighters, and military well-funded so they can go about their lives in a free society with basic guidelines within which they can live their lives as they see fit.