Source:Foreign Affairs– Yes, the Tea Party loves Sarah Palin. Also in the news: it snows in the winter, in Wisconsin.

“As proudly patriotic as it is, the Tea Party is not exceptional — or at least not in the ways it likes to think. The angry conservative group, which accuses U.S. President Barack Obama of betraying the constitution and driving the United States toward “European-style” socialism, epitomizes a libertarian strain of thought and action with deep roots in its country’s past. The same alarm — that the United States needs protecting from a leviathan state supposedly alien to the cherished values handed down by the Founding Fathers — has been raised by the Liberty League in the 1930s,”

From Foreign Affairs

I guess my response to Michael Kazin would be: which Tea Party is he talking about?

I agree that in the last year or so, even 3 years, the Tea Party is now mostly the Christian-Right from the 1990s, with an economic message, that at times sounds Libertarian. But they can also sound populist, if not nationalist, on trade issues and organized labor, sort of like 1930s and 1940s blue-collar Democrats. And if you just look at the health care reform debate from 2009-10, they would say they don’t want socialized medicine, but hands off their damn Medicare.  So which Tea Party is Michael Kazin referring too.