It is amazing how few people understand the tea party movement. The movement is portrayed asfringe right wingers, radicals, conspiracy nuts, and so forth. Yet extremism has nothing to do with what the movement is all about.
What is really going on is that conservatives are throwing out the neoconservatives. Neocons aren’t really conservatives, yet they managed to hi-jack the Republican party after the 2000 election. The Bush administration betrayed the conservative movement by going neocon, and the leaders of the tea party movement are fighting to retake control of that movement.
To understand this, take a look at the world’s smallest political quiz. As Wikipedia notes, this quiz was developed in 1969 to show that the traditional left-right political spectrum was too simplistic. The quiz defines political views on two axes: fiscal and social. Social liberals believe in gay marriage while fiscal liberals believe in single-payer health care. The point is that you can be a social liberal and a fiscal conservative — a libertarian — or a social conservative and a fiscal liberal — which the quiz calls a “statist.”
The election of Ronald Reagan resulted from a coalition of the traditional conservatives and libertarians. Reagan was fiscally conservative but his record on social issues was mixed, reflecting this conflicting coalition. But the 1980s also saw the rise of the neoconservatives, who demonstrated that there was a third axes in the political spectrum.
One former neoconservative recorded recorded that neoconservatism “originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats.” In other words, they were socially and fiscally liberal, but considered themselves “conservative” on foreign policy issues. This is ironic, as during the 1910s through 1930s, the conservative view of foreign policy wasisolationist, that is, that America should engage in free trade but take military actions only in self-defense. It was the liberals — progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt — who had a more expansive or interventionistview of American military might. It was only when the Vietnam conflict became controversial that hawkishness became a conservative characteristic.
