You Say You Want a Revolution American politicians love to evoke our Revolution against British rule, and will certainly do so again this week, adding their own verbal fireworks as the nation celebrates its independence. Last January in his second inaugural address, President Obama made his own distinctive use of this hallowed reference when he analyzed our history as a continuing effort to carry out the ideals of the revolution and presented his administration as the most recent step in this gradual process. The rhetoric of the Tea Party - the far right of the Republican Party - asserts a quite different view: that Obama's mode of governing represents a betrayal of our revolutionary ideals and calls for a "mission . . . to restore America's founding principles." Although few Tea Party members advocate armed opposition, many, like the original Tea Party, are committed to much more than the conventional elective and legislative efforts to thwart the goals of "liberal" government. Ever since Obama's initial election, they have been willing to employ almost any "acts of disruption" short of civil disobedience or insurrection. They routinely use filibuster to oppose legislation, obstruct the implementation of laws (especially the Affordable Care Act) already enacted, and put on indefinite hold appointments to key administrative and judicial positions. In this sense, they are indeed a revolutionary party. On the other side of the political spectrum, recent developments - particularly Edward Snowden's leaks about government surveillance programs - have evoked similar revolutionary sentiments from the far left. Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who published Snowden's information, maintains that it shows a "government [that] continues on its orgies of whistleblower prosecutions, trying to criminalize journalism, and building a massive surveillance apparatus that destroys privacy." Snowden himself sees such actions as "an existential threat to democracy." Similarly, Noam Chomsky says the surveillance program is an example of how "governments combat their primary enemy - which is their own population." We may well think that a proper response to a government so opposed to the fundamental rights of its citizens would be "disruptive action" to negate its power - which is precisely what Snowden undertook. We might further think that at this moment, at least, both the far right and the far left are revolutionary parties: both insist that disruption is necessary because the current government, like that of our 18th-century British rulers, is violating our fundamental rights as citizens and so has lost legitimacy. The principles of our original revolution, it would seem, once again require revolutionary action. In this context it is instructive to return to Obama's own reading of the Revolution in his second inaugural address. Citing our Declaration's "all men are created equal," he defines the revolutionary ideal as equal rights for all. He goes on to offer an interpretation of our history as a gradual, non-revolutionary process of our learning what this principle means and finding ways of putting it into practice. Obama acknowledges that the initial understanding of the ideal of equality - arising from the overthrow of an oppressive government - emphasized the rights of individuals in opposition to the government, and that this has rightly remained a major strand in our thinking: "We have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society's ills can be cured through government alone." But he also thinks our history shows that this can't be the whole story. From our efforts to "protect . . . people from life's worst hazards and misfortunes," we have learned that "preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action." Part of what we have learned, moreover, is that, in many cases, the power of the federal government is an essential instrument of collective action. It required government power to, for example, abolish slavery, build the country's railroads and highways, impose anti-trust restrictions and set up our Social Security system. The Tea Party's case against Obama stalls in the face of his historical analysis. Specifically, the analysis poses a dilemma to which they have no good response. If, on the one hand, they reject Obama's claim of the indispensable role of government intervention, then they must also reject many of the defining achievements of our revolutionary heritage, which clearly required such action. If, on the other hand, they accept Obama's reading of our revolutionary history, then they must agree that the government has a major role to play, and that the only remaining questions are about the nature and extent of that role in specific cases. Such acceptance, however, means giving up the central Tea Party tactic of objecting to every deployment of government power (for instance, any increase in taxes or regulations, any major reform projects) as in itself a betrayal of core American principles. Rather they must argue, for each particular case, that Obama's particular proposal involves an unjustified use of government power. This brings them into Obama's preferred, distinctly nonrevolutionary, political world: back-and-forth debates over the details of proposals to solve specific problems, with lots of room for fruitful compromise and a willingness to let unresolved disagreements be settled by majority vote. A similar dilemma undermines the revolutionary tendencies of the far left. They must either deny the obvious fact that protecting Americans from terrorist attacks requires a substantial government surveillance system or they must agree that the only debate should be about how this surveillance system should work, not whether it should exist. Taking the second approach means accepting the fundamental legitimacy of Obama's anti-terrorism program and merely challenging specific aspects of this program. Similar arguments could be developed against far-left attacks on the legitimacy of Obama's use of military force, support for Israel and acceptance of market capitalism. Unless they want to renounce the use of military force, abandon Israel and eliminate the market economy, they must disagree within Obama's preferred political framework. There is, in fact, no good case for a revolutionary challenge to our government. Both the far right and the far left should give up the romantic fantasy of revolution and take up, with the president, the challenge of actually governing this country. Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, "Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960," and writes regularly for The Stone. He was recently interviewed in 3am magazine.