How to Spot a Real Republican Insurgent

In case you hadn't noticed, Republican "insurgents" are back. In the previous presidential cycle, the label was stuck on every candidate who wasn’t Mitt Romney. This time, so-called insurgents appear to include everyone not named Jeb Bush -- a group that includes Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and, of course, Ted Cruz, the first Republican to declare his candidacy for the party's 2016 presidential nomination.

But what exactly does it mean to be an insurgent running in 2016? The term itself denotes a revolt (or rebellion) against authority -- an accurate description of the first modern insurgent campaign, Barry Goldwater’s run for president in 1964. Goldwater’s Sunbelt libertarianism really did challenge the orthodoxies of consensus liberalism. He was fiercely attacked not only by Democrats but by a series of Republican opponents, each a Northeastern patrician: Henry Cabot Lodge (Massachusetts), Nelson Rockefeller (New York) and William Scranton (Pennsylvania).