Can Progressives and Tea Partiers Find Love Across the Aisle?

With the first shock waves of Tuesday's election reverberating across Washington and the country, armchair pundits are taking it as gospel that the results will inevitably mean gridlock as progressives and newly elected Tea Partiers lock horns in mortal combat. This may be true on a number of issues, but there might also be several surprising areas of convergence, including on some aspects of foreign policy. For many people, the Tea Party's foreign policy agenda has been largely a cipher. As Kate Zernike noted, "Tea Partiers say they want to focus on economic conservatism, meaning that they don't spend a lot of time talking about other topics—foreign policy, or social issues like gay marriage and abortion." But it is not so difficult to predict where the Tea Party impulse lies on a number of issues.

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This article was originally published in Foreign Policy.