Back in 2009 or 2010, I often found myself ranting about the things the Left would say about the Tea Party. No, the Tea Partiers aren’t some Astroturf mirage, I would grumble. Nor are they a mob of downtrodden sans-culottes, a band of fascists, or a generic herd of populists. The Tea Party is just a new name for the ageless, timeless conservative Republican base, an enduring American social-political formation that vomited up a Reagan in 1976, a Goldwater in 1964, a John Bricker in 1946. From generation unto generation, they have been white, affluent, Protestant, and deeply right wing. They’re not new.

So I was gratified to see that a comprehensive and scholarly examination of the Tea Party has finally arrived. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson’s The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism is based on an encompassing analysis of polls, news reporting, and scholarship, but also on the authors’ first-hand observations and interviews with local Tea Party groups in several different cities. It’s a first-rate piece of real-time scholarship that I commend to everyone. Best of all, the book largely confirms me in everything I grumbled.

The Tea Partiers, write the authors, “are overwhelmingly older white citizens, relatively well educated and economically comfortable . . . Almost all are Republicans or conservatives.” Many are “currently or formerly in professional occupations such as medicine and engineering. Yet the plurality seemed to be small business owners, often in fields like construction, remodeling, or repair.” (“With very few exceptions, the grassroots Tea Partiers we have met fit the same broad social profile.”) Especially delicious for me was this nugget: “A surprising number of the people we met dated their first political experience to the Goldwater campaign in 1964. Virginian Mandy Hewes told the story of her mother writing a song called ‘Let’s Go Back to the Constitution’ in 1963.” (It’s fifty years later and they’re still trying to go back to it!)