By JOEL B. POLLAK

‘What’s an Orthodox Jew doing with the tea party?” It’s a question I often confront, though I’ve never been asked it by fellow Republicans, or anyone involved in the tea party itself.

The questions typically come from folks who have bought the line that the tea party is an extremist cult—a Ku Klux Klan rally “without robes and hoods,” in the words of Rep. Steve Cohen (D., Tenn.).

Here’s my story. When I learned that my representative in Congress, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D., Ill.), had called the tea parties “shameful” and “despicable” merely for protesting the stimulus bill, I suspected that the lady doth protest too much.

At around the same time that Ms. Schakowsky made these comments, I had a confrontation with Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) at Harvard University. “How much responsibility, if any, do you have for the financial crisis?” I asked him at an event, prompting an angry response.

The confrontation became a YouTube hit, and people back home encouraged me to challenge Ms. Schakowsky. I decided to do so after attending her health-care town hall last August, where organizers paid by a group called Health Care for America Now were brought in to suppress questions.

From the start of my campaign, I’ve encountered many tea party activists. Two of the first people I met ran into me at a café in Washington, D.C. Walter and Joanne Jones are from Illinois; they had come to town for the big tea party rally on September 12. Mr. Jones had just retired from his job as manager at an electronics factory and had become politically active for the first time.

I caught up with Mr. Jones again last month. “When we decided to go to Washington,” he recalled, “it was about the spending. After we went to Washington, it’s also about the control that the Democrats are trying to put on the American people right now.” He added that he was angry that Congress had ended a successful school voucher program in Washington, D.C. “Those are the kinds of things that drive me nuts,” he said.

Mr. Jones is like many of the tea party people I have met since then—not opposed to the government as such, but against a political establishment that is determined to expand its control and limit the choices of ordinary people.

In the past several months, I’ve met other tea party activists in Illinois, people like Denise Cattoni, a mortgage broker who started paying attention to politics when the markets crashed in September 2008. “I spent October through February trying to keep people in their homes,” she recalls. “They came up with the TARP funds and it didn’t help anyone. The banks never helped homeowners, and they still haven’t to this day.”

Ms. Cattoni organized local opposition to the Obama administration’s attempt to transfer terror detainees from Guantánamo to Thomson, Ill. A majority of Illinois residents oppose the transfer, but there has been no formal attempt to stop it other than these kinds of grass-roots efforts.

Then there is Caitlin Huxley, a member of the Log Cabin Republicans who found a new outlet in the tea party movement. “As a fully ‘out’ lesbian, I was a little worried about whether I’d be accepted,” she told me. “But everywhere I went, I was nothing but welcome,” she said.

I’ve been endorsed by the tea party, and I’ve seen nothing to substantiate the allegations of racism or homophobia—quite the opposite. It brings people together who feel their votes have been silenced by their elected representatives. The tea party has been met, on occasion, with violence, and it faces the condescension of the political class. Yet it continues to grow and win the support of Americans from all walks of life.

Those wishing to understand the tea party should revisit Alexis de Tocqueville. He observed of citizens in a democracy: “They love change, but they dread revolutions.”

The American people voted for change in 2008, and they will do so again in 2010. The first tea party started a revolution; the second tea party is determined to end one.

Mr. Pollak is the GOP congressional nominee in the 9th district of Illinois.