For these conservatives, the prospect of a Goldwater presidency offered more than protest against Democrats and liberals. It was an opportunity “to crystallize the conservative position in national affairs,” as Mr. Buckley explained after Goldwater’s devastating defeat in the general election. Crystallizing the position meant giving it more coherence and also making a case that skeptics and adversaries would have to take seriously. Goldwater intellectuals, including Mr. Wills and the novelist John Dos Passos, then joined a new organization, the American Conservative Union, which still is a powerful Beltway institution.

INTELLECTUALS were instrumental as well in the next great conservative insurgency, Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald R. Ford in 1976. The campaign drew on arguments in books like Mr. Rusher’s “The Making of a New Majority Party,” Kevin Phillips’s “Mediacracy” and Patrick J. Buchanan’s “Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories.” Each posited that the blue-collar Democratic constituency rooted in the New Deal had grown increasingly conservative, alienated from “big government.” Parallel arguments could be found in The Public Interest, the policy quarterly that specialized in rigorous critiques of federal antipoverty initiatives and pension fund “socialism.”

Such debate had the effect of uniting intellectuals with politicians, and of bridging differences that might otherwise have separated “top-down” strategists from “bottom up” activists.

Of course, the Tea Party faithful also claim that theirs is a movement of ideas, in many cases the same ideas that Goldwater and Reagan espoused. But they tend to emphasize quixotic crusades — the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which established the election of United States senators by popular vote, or Representative Ron Paul’s mission to abolish the Federal Reserve. Beyond this, “candidates who claimed the mantle of fiscal conservatism had no real plans for reducing government expenditures beyond the conservative pursuit of politics-as-warfare,” Mr. Kabaservice writes. They favor “cutting programs that benefited Democratic constituencies while preserving programs that benefited Republican constituencies and avoiding any serious reform of defense spending or middle-class entitlement programs.”

Tea Party adherents are often “strategically ambiguous” on fundamental economic issues, the Harvard scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson note in their new book, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” They describe a conference last April, in which Jenny Beth Martin, one of the founders of Tea Party Patriots Inc., was asked about specific tax and health care measures. In the authors’ account, Ms. Martin said there was “no need to discuss the actual content of legislation because good proposals are always to be found at think tanks such as the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation.” In “Tea Party Patriots,” Ms. Martin’s own new book, written with Mark Meckler, the organization’s co-founder, there is some policy discussion along with familiar denunciations of government overreach. The book also proposes a “Forty-Year Plan for America’s Future.” It is weak on specifics. “What will the final plan look like?” Ms. Martin and Mr. Meckler ask. “One thing we can tell you from experience is that it will be far better, and wiser, than anything that any of us can imagine right now. When the creativity, ingenuity, and genius of the American people are unleashed, wonderful things happen.”

Perhaps, but it’s not a plan. It’s a preachment, aimed at the like-minded. The same is true of the Tea Party movement itself. Dick Armey, himself a Beltway insider before he became the chairman of FreedomWorks, one of the most powerful Tea Party organizations, acknowledged as much when he reportedly told the freshman Republicans shortly after the 2010 election: “You don’t owe your office to the majority. You owe your office to the people who put you there.” Those people, however, compose only a fraction of the electorate. And that fraction is divided. For now the beneficiary is Mitt Romney, who has emerged, paradoxically, as a kind of Goldwater in reverse, the lone moderate in a field of insurgents. Like Goldwater in 1964, he has swatted away each new rival, though in this instance they have been Tea Party favorites like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Ron Paul. Another target, Newt Gingrich, may be the most credentialed insurgent in the field, the mastermind of the 1994 Republican revolution, which gave the party its first majority in the House of Representatives since the 1952 election.

After National Review denounced Mr. Gingrich, when he briefly rose to challenge Mr. Romney in Iowa, an article in The American Spectator, a conservative magazine that has been sympathetic to the insurgents, suggested that “William Buckley’s defiantly against-the-wind conservative masterpiece has gone G.O.P. establishment.” A more accurate term might be conservative establishment. But then, as Sarah Palin, whose own rise to celebrity was partly the doing of editors at National Review and The Weekly Standard, knows all too well, that particular establishment prefers to direct its revolutions from above.