Sam Tanenhaus: G.O.P. History vs. the Tea Party

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.

FOR more than two years, conservatives have been riding a wave of Tea Party insurgency that has formed the most dynamic force in American politics, a protest movement that promised to slash taxes, close the federal deficit and remake Washington. And yet to judge from the results of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, some of the most engaged Republican voters are inching closer to nominating Mitt Romney, the candidate they like least, a Harvard-educated technocrat who is in many ways a mirror image of the president the insurgents want to dislodge....

This is all the more puzzling because the Tea Party movement did not lack for useful precedents or operating models. On the contrary, it is “the latest in a cycle of insurgencies on the Republican right,” as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice writes in his new book, “Rule and Ruin,” a chronicle of half a century of internecine Republican warfare. “Even the name of the movement was a throwback to the ‘T Parties’ of the early ’60s, part of the right-wing, anti-tax crusade of that era.”...

It is hard to imagine a similar conflict happening during previous conservative insurgent cycles, mainly because they were centralized operations, often guided by insiders, in many cases Ivy League intellectuals who helped groom political figures for the national stage.

THE first successful insurgency, Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, was the brainchild of seasoned insiders in Washington and New York. Its strategic headquarters were on the East Coast — in fact a suite on Lexington Avenue, near Grand Central Terminal. Its organizational genius, F. Clifton White, a political scientist who had taught at Cornell, teamed up with William Rusher, the publisher of National Review. Together they sewed up slates of delegates even as Goldwater fared poorly in a series of contested primaries against moderates like Henry Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton. Some of the ground troops for the Goldwater campaign were members of the Young Americans for Freedom, an organization created on the family estate of National Review’s editor, William F. Buckley Jr., in Sharon, Conn....