The Other Side Of Big Government, Ctd

Larison rebuffs Beinart:

[T]he constant search for a “Tea Party foreign policy” seems to be a waste of time. If there is a movement of activists and voters focused almost exclusively on one set of domestic issues, most pundits wouldn’t ask what the foreign policy views of movement members are. The question would never come up, because the movement consciously defined its priorities as having nothing to do with foreign policy. For that matter, there isn’t much interest in the domestic political preferences of explicitly antiwar movements, except by way of trying to discredit or defame them as part of the “fringe.” Yes, if Tea Partiers wanted to be thoroughgoing Jeffersonians and strict constructionists, they would favor dramatic reductions in the warfare state as Beinart says, but what gives Beinart the impression that there are suddenly legions of Jeffersonians among the Republican rank-and-file?

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan