Walter Russell Mead of Bard College has a nice essay up at Foreign Affairs, which unfortunately requires paid access. You won’t be disappointed to pop for the pdf, though. It’s this kind of analytical and exploratory discussion of the Tea Party that helps out quite a bit in translating what the differences are between this group and standard-issue Pat Buchanan types:

The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy

The comments are interesting, too, particularly the one up front, from a guy named Robert R: If indeed total war and unconditional surrender are Jacksonian principles, they served the United States well in World War II.

The dangers of history, right?–where we think we know what happened, and we take constructed images of the past and indulge in drawing conclusions from a past that never was what we now conclude it was. (ie, the US didn’t fight WWII alone; there were devastating, long-term consequences of working with the Soviets, etc. No lessons from history strike me as particularly simple.)