It’s also in keeping with this ideology that Paul wants the federal government to stop shoveling taxpayers’ money into wars. He was against the war in Iraq and finds the justification for our commitment in Afghanistan “murky.” He believes that America’s national security is “not threatened by Iran having one nuclear weapon.”

No wonder he didn’t get Cheney’s endorsement; Paul also opposes the enhanced government surveillance mandated by the Patriot Act. The Tea Party is a rolling rebuke to the neocons’ quarter-century dominance of the G.O.P. Only three months ago, Ron Paul, who shares his son’s un-Cheney national security views, won the straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, ending Mitt Romney’s three-year winning streak.

With Rand Paul, we also get further evidence of race’s role in a movement whose growth precisely parallels the ascent of America’s first African-American president. The usual Tea Party apologists are saying that it was merely a gaffe — and a liberal media trap — when Paul on Wednesday refused to tell Rachel Maddow of MSNBC that he could fully support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But Paul has expressed similar sentiments repeatedly, at least as far back as 2002.

Image Frank Rich Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

His legal argument that the federal government cannot force private businesses to desegregate is the same used by Barry Goldwater, a frequently cited hero of Paul’s, when the conservative standard-bearer voted against the Civil Rights Act at its inception. It’s all about the Constitution, not race, you see. Under fire, Paul ultimately retreated from this stand — much as the new Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, finally withdrew his April proclamation saluting Confederate History Month. But not before both men’s messages reached their intended demographic.

Still, it’s Paul’s brand of populism, not his views on Jim Crow or Iran, that are most germane to the Tea Party’s birth and its future — both within the G.O.P. and as a force that will buffet Obama and the Democrats. Paul most abundantly embodies the movement’s animus when he plays on classic American-style class resentment. His campaign loved to deploy the full name of his opponent, Charles Merwin Grayson III, a Harvard-educated banker’s son. In his victory speech Tuesday night, Paul said the voters’ message was to “get rid of the power people, the people who run the show, the people who think they’re above everybody else” — or, as he put it on an earlier occasion, the establishment who “from their high-rise penthouse” look down on and laugh at the “American rabble.”

That Paul gave his victory speech in a “members only” country club is no contradiction to white Tea Partiers. Their anger is directed at a loftier club that excludes them as well: the big-government and big-money elites partying together in that high-rise penthouse. At the Utah state G.O.P. convention this month, the mob shouted “TARP! TARP! TARP!” as it terminated the re-election bid of the conservative Senator Robert Bennett. It was Bennett’s capital crime to vote for a bailout of Wall Street’s high-flying bankers.