When the Tea Party movement began almost five years ago, before it gained national influence and provoked a civil war in the Republican Party, its raison de etre was public debt: its self-proclaimed role as the virtuous watchdog protesting government’s investments in failing corporations. In the speech which became the movement’s rallying cry, CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli railed that “the government is promoting bad behavior” and promised that “we’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July…we’re going to be dumping in some derivative securities.” This kind of backlash was not particularly surprising in the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and it was certainly attuned to the mood of large sections of the country at the time.

The Tea Party’s seemingly mainstream origins are difficult to remember now, in 2013, because its members have revealed themselves to be outside the mainstream on everything from same-sex marriage to preserving Social Security for the next generation. Public debt serves the movement primarily as a rhetorical scrim, useful for striking a pose of concern for the common good to cover a radical social and economic agenda benefiting a segment of the population that’s older than 45, white, higher income, and mostly male. You cannot oppose Medicare and Medicaid cuts while calling for smaller government and expect to be taken in good faith.

Nonetheless, the politics of public debt remain key to understanding the Tea Party movement, though not in the ways the Tea Partiers think. They’re members of a generational cohort that gained unprecedented personal wealth and political influence thanks largely to government accruing debt over the last 70 years. Now they’re revolting against the kind of society that debt created. This is an ugly spectacle, but it’s not an unprecedented one. It’s a pattern that’s held steady throughout the 300-year history of public debt in Western society. Looking at how that history began, with a movement in England whose complaints were similar to the Tea Partiers and which ended up similarly marginalized, provides an instructive model to understand the Tea Party’s trajectory: How an effort which initially appeared like a populist cry in the wilderness amounted to an interest group desperately trying to keep its taxes low and its government benefits intact. It’s a story about the winners of a new political and economic order who don’t realize why they won, and their unwillingness to face the costs of their success.

Public debt first became a political issue in late seventeenth century Britain, when policymakers started borrowing money on a massive scale to fund expensive trading wars with France. For the first time, owners of capital became major players in the economy and in government. To help pay the debt back reliably, Parliament created a national bank and extended the tax system, which in turn created a class of bureaucrat administrators. This was a major shift for a society where political power had rested with prosperous merchants, farmers, and artisans, and where tax collection had been managed from the provinces by the landed nobility. These groups’ response was, predictably, inflamed. Rallied by the polemicist Henry St John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke, they became vociferous critics of the new arrangements, identifying themselves as the “Country Party,” in opposition to what they called the “Court Party” of London financiers and politicians, which seemed corrupt, unrepresentative, and in thrall to financial interests. The Country Party identified itself as nonpartisan, separate from the formal political organizations of the Tories and the Whigs, but tended to support the more conservative Tories.

Bolingbroke, the Country Party’s informal leader and major spokesperson, was a curious figure. An ardent monarchist who tried to overthrow Parliament and ended up in exile, he eventually returned to Britain and made a lasting political mark by relying on a different rhetorical strategy. His enemy was the same—Parliament—but now he railed against corrupt, unrepresentative political institutions on behalf of small farmers, merchants, and landholders. Bolingbroke was not necessarily dissimulating when he championed the virtues of Britain’s middling classes, but his loyalties remained with his fellow rural elites whose power was being sapped by London.