The Tea Party was born of a wit's-end frustration at the intransigence of the Washington Republican Establishment, and grew up fast on the mean streets of President Obama's city of broken dreams. For all the movement's early and extraordinary successes—most remarkably the complete rehabilitation of the Republican Party itself from a shiftless loser on the brink of generational decline to the ascendant force in Washington and in the public imagination—the sheer urgency of action within that movement militated against any serious foundational exegesis.
