We can’t easily understand those accusations, contemporary conservative thought or the influence of the Tea Party without appreciating the enduring impact of the Hiss case.
I think that David Halberstam’s analysis of the conflict within the Republican Party between the urban establishment and small-town populists better captures the origins of the Tea Party. In his highly perceptive 1993 volume, The Fifties, Halberstam writes (p.4-5),
On one side were the lawyers and bankers of Wall Street and State Street, their colleagues through the great Eastern industrial cities, and those in the powerful national media, based in New York. They were internationalist by tradition and by instinct: They had fought against the New Deal in states where the power of labor was considerable but had eventually come to accept certain premises of the New Deal. By contrast, the Republicans of the heartland…were anxious to go back to the simple, comfortable world of the twenties…They had always controlled their political and economic destinies locally…Now they looked at Washington and saw the enemy…they seemed to have lost control of their own party…they were at war with the Eastern Republicans, who in their eyes, were traitors, tainted by cooperation with the New Deal.
The Tea Party of the 1950s spurned Nelson Rockefeller and nominated Barry Goldwater, with disastrous electoral results.
I would reiterate that midcentury politics revolves around socialism, Communism, and anti-Communism. Both sides have history that they would rather forget. The left would rather forget that many of its leading intellectuals saw Communism as equivalent to, or even superior to, capitalism. The right would rather forget its hostility to Civil Rights (the urban Republicans were crucial to passing Civil Rights legislation, overcoming Southern Democrats and heartland Republicans.)