That isn't to say that no one is fighting back. On the right, Ron and Rand Paul, the latter a Tea Party candidate, come to mind. But neither are champions of the average Tea Party participant.

Says Levin, in his conclusion, "In this time of grave challenges, conservatives must work to protect the fundamentally constitutionalist character of the Tea Party, and of the conservative movement -- avoiding the excesses of both populism and technocracy as we work to undo the damage done by both, and to recover the American project." That is sound advice for conservatives, and liberals would do well to avoid the excesses of populism and technocracy too. But the American project wasn't in fact launched in reaction to populism or technocracy, however wisely and deliberately it guarded against them. What the Founders feared more than anything was that government would be captured by a tyrant with the mindset of a King George.

As a minority within the Tea Party and others sympathetic to it understand, the War on Terrorism is both a fight to preserve our safety and a threat to liberty and limited government, especially when partisans of one president or another undermine our system of checks and balances in its name. You'd think, given the Tea Party's priorities, that liberty is most often lost after a nation passes an individual mandate for health care or increases tax rates on the rich. But it is historical fact that war profoundly empowers and expands the state more than anything else.

That is true even of just wars. The Civil War, World War II and the Cold War were all rife with excesses. Guardians of liberty and the constitution should be most attune to war's corrosive effect.

It is conducive to the most extreme abuses of civil liberties.

Elsewhere in the world, many a tyrant has some to power by taking advantage of wartime powers willingly conceded.

Better to be governed by a "constitutional conservative" than a populist or technocrat, or so I'd argue. But more dangerous than a president sympathetic to populism or technocracy is one who would seize all the war powers that John Yoo would give him. Aside from Ron Paul, every Tea Party affiliated Election 2012 candidate for president seems to think such radical powers are the president's due. Aside from the power to torture, President Obama himself substantially agrees.

It would be helpful if those at National Review, the Heritage Foundation, and elsewhere would stand up to this bipartisan move toward a kingly executive who reigns over an endless War on Terrorism, unchecked in his powers, as if that is what's needed to keep America safe. Instead, establishment conservatives and Tea Partiers alike are more likely than not to defend Dick Cheney, David Addington, the Patriot Act, the indefinite detention of American citizens, stripping the judiciary of its power, presidential assassinations of American citizens, and all the rest.