When the internationalist-minded Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) decided it was time to take a hard look at the growing influence of the Tea Party movement in America, it selected “one of the country’s leading students of American foreign policy,” Walter Russell Mead, to do the study. Appearing as the headline article in Foreign Affairs for March/April 2011, his article is entitled “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy.”

Mead’s credentials for representing one of the leading lights of the Anglo-American Establishment are impeccable: an honors graduate from the Groton School and Yale University, he was the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the CFR. He is now a professor of foreign affairs at Bard College and is editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine.

He got the first part right: “The rise of the Tea Party movement has been the most controversial and dramatic development in U.S. politics for many years. Supporters have hailed it as a return to core American values; opponents have seen it as a racist, reactionary, and ultimately futile protest against the emerging reality of a multicultural, multiracial United States and a new era of government activism.”

He then complains that this battle of ideologies is going to be impossible to resolve, especially since the Tea Party has no leadership, calling it “an amorphous collection of individuals” which include “affluent suburban libertarians, rural fundamentalists, ambitious pundits, unreconstructed racists, and fiscally conservative housewives. ” He was distressed to learn that about 115 million of them exist (or at least sympathize with the movement) according to a recent poll. Consequently, the Tea Party’s “message” is mixed.

He noted that Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the father of the movement, and, to a lesser extent, his son, now Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), are trying to “resurrect isolationism” in their call for greatly reduced military spending and military involvement in foreign undeclared wars. Sarah Palin is much more to his liking; he calls her a “full-throated supporter of the ‘war on terror,’” and notes that, when she was Alaska’s Governor, she kept an Israeli flag in her office.

But how could such a (in Mead’s view)  rag-tag, disorganized, incoherent, and unsophisticated gaggle of misfits, miscreants, and malcontents have such a huge impact on the future political direction of the country?  He noted that the GOP victory in the House of Representatives in 2010 was the largest gain by either political party since 1938 — despite that fact that as many as four Senate seats were lost by the GOP through political blunders and naïveté. How could this happen? Mead wrirtes: (more…)