Few recent domestic newsworthy events have so clearly manifested the nature of the political divide in America as the televised discussion over health care between Republicans and Democrats last week. Freedom and equality went head to head, and only civility seems to have won, but just barely.

Summarizing the freedom position afterward, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., noted that Republicans want less government involvement in everything -- health care and the economy, to be sure, but also labor conditions, energy policy, the environment, education, virtually everything. Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., on the other hand, commented that Democrats believe that government still can provide the solution to many of the nation's problems, and that without government support, many people will be left to the mercy of rapacious and uncaring corporations. These are clear statements of fundamental principles that have been in opposition in our culture for over a century, since the Progressive Era.

Before the full industrialization of America, when there still existed a frontier in the contiguous states, the memory of the freedom from tyranny fought for in the Revolution continued to resonate meaningfully. But with the urbanization, consumerism and dependence generated by industrialism, many Americans lost the freedom to be self-reliant. They became captives of a host of forces beyond their control, forces that benefited an ownership class from which most ordinary citizens were barred and which the owners sometimes manipulated to the disadvantage of workers and an emerging class of service providers.

American freedom ceased to facilitate and enrich the lives of countless Americans, and became the province of a few, most of whom enjoyed unprecedented and unparalleled wealth. For those left behind, the loss of freedom and status felt humiliating.

To restore freedom for the many, to counter loss of face and put some equity back into the culture, reformers persuaded a majority of citizens to support an expansion of government power to restrain the freedom of the few in order to guarantee more equality for the many. Antitrust and industrial safety legislation, pure food and drug laws, banking regulation, the direct election of U.S. senators, and government protection of the public lands are a few of the salient reform changes. Through the 20th century, government gradually increased the range of its restraint in order to increase the range of citizen equity. The civil rights revolution particularly amplified the government's power to guarantee equality for those citizens who had been denied it.

But beginning with the property tax protests in California in the mid-1970s, Reagan conservatives used the language of freedom to rally the middle class against the liberal movement, and often, against equality itself. Conservatives have continued to use that language, as manifested in Sen. McConnell's comments.

Today, mostly because of congressional deregulation, income distribution again approaches the inequality of the Gilded Age. The loss of freedom incumbent in lost or reduced jobs, mortgage foreclosures and inadequate health coverage feels again like humiliation. It's exacerbated by the various congressional bailouts, unavailable to ordinary citizens, who are made to feel like fools when Wall Street investment firms pay their failed brokers bonuses larger than the mortgages their victims cannot pay.

But the conservative leadership has lost control of today's protest. It has not lost it back to the old advocates of equality but instead to the nascent Tea Party movement. That movement's language is ostensibly about freedom, not equality. Most Tea Party members are white and lower-middle class. They aim the anger of their humiliation at both the liberal and conservative elite. And they have actually been shunned by the most powerful elements of the conservative elite, who still use the language of freedom and the cry of anti-government, but who continue to expand and use government.

But while Tea Partiers use the language of freedom, what they most resent is the inequality of income distribution and the loss of opportunity and the degradation it has spawned. They also feel displaced by the gains of the civil rights movement and by immigration amnesty, both of which represent a quest for equality.

The effectiveness of the Tea Party movement is in doubt. But its blurring of the languages of freedom and equality is new and fascinating.