Being told what to do by epidemiologists and officials wielding SCIENCE as their authority has been enough to bring Tea Party–era liberty back in vogue.

It’s 2009 again, or feels like it.

That was when spontaneous, grassroots protests against overweening government sprang up and were widely derided in the media as dangerous and wrong-headed.

The protesters then were inveighing against Obamacare; the protesters now are striking out against the coronavirus lockdowns.

The anti-lockdown agitation shows that, despite the revolution in Republican politics wrought by President Donald Trump, opposition to government impositions is deeply embedded in the DNA of the Right and likely will reemerge even more starkly if former vice president Joe Biden is elected president.

The Tea Party that was so powerful in the Obama years, roiling Republican Party politics and making stars out of the likes of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, sputtered out and was subsumed by the Trump movement in 2016.

The emphasis on constitutionalism, opposition to deficit spending, and American exceptionalism gave way to an emphasis on American strength, opposition to immigration, and nationalism.

The differences shouldn’t be exaggerated — the Tea Party was opposed to amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and Trump has faithfully nominated constitutionalist judges. The Tea Party, like Trump, hated the mainstream media with a passion. But the shift from an overwhelming focus on fiscal issues to Trumpian cultural politics was very real.