Birchers by Matthew Dallek: Compelling history of the American far-right group

The present changes what we see in the past. For decades, the far-right John Birch Society seemed a relic of the Cold War era. It was best known for some of its most outlandish beliefs, such as that President Eisenhower was a secret communist agent, or that the fluoridation of water was a communist plot. Memory of its existence survived in some of the great satires of the Cold War era.

In Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant film, Dr Strangelove, a deranged general initiates World War III because of his belief that fluoridation has deprived him of “precious bodily fluids”. One of Bob Dylan’s funnier songs, Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues, recounts a Bircher’s dismay at his inability to find any communists: “I was lookin’ everywhere for them gol’-darned Reds/ I got up in the mornin’ and looked under my bed/ Looked behind the kitchen, behind the door/ Looked in the glove compartment of my car/ Couldn’t find any.”

Yet from the perspective of the Trump era, the Birch Society seems more contemporary, more mainstream, and worth taking more seriously. Tens of millions of Americans today believe key elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory that the country is run by a secret cabal of blood-drinking Satanic child sex traffickers. Not just the Birch Society’s conspiracism, but also its suspicion of globalism, demonisation of liberal elites, white supremacism, and Christian extremism all characterise today’s Republican Party. Matthew Dallek’s excellent new history, Birchers, argues convincingly that this “movement from the 1960s, long thought dead, is casting its shadow across the United States”. Dallek offers not just a definitive history of the John Birch Society but also an insight into how we got to where we are today.

The John Birch society was formed in 1958 by Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who had invented the Sugar Daddy lollipop. He named the society after the man he styled as the Cold War’s first victim: a Christian evangelist and American army officer killed by Chinese communists. Within a few years, the Birch Society had become the major mass organisation of the American right. It claimed as many as 100,000 members in local chapters across the country that were organised in secretive cells of no more than 20 each (ironically, in imitation of communists).

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Based in Boston, it spread to the US southern states, where it attracted segregationists who portrayed the civil rights movement as a communist conspiracy, and to southern California, where conservative women derisively called “little old women in tennis shoes” by a Democratic state official gained significant clout in local politics.

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Birchers sought to pull the Republican Party to the right. Their attacks on moderate Republicans could be as vitriolic as those against liberals. Barry Goldwater, the libertarian and fervent anti-communist, captured the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 partly due to Bircher support. But the Birch Society became a major issue in the campaign, helping President Lyndon Johnson paint Goldwater as an extremist and defeat him in a landslide victory. Goldwater and other Republicans faced a conundrum: how to draw on the Birchers’ grassroots energy without alienating moderate voters. Ronald Reagan succeeded in this regard, helping propel him to the California governorship in 1966.

History is inevitably shaped by contemporary concerns and should speak to them, but it is a mistake to draw too straight a line from the past to the present

Though it still exists today, the society’s influence petered out, starting in the late 1960s. Yet, as Dallek shows, the “Bircher inheritance” remained a feature on the American right. Dan Quayle, vice-president under George HW Bush, was the son of a man who pronounced himself “unashamed” to have been a member. Tim LaHaye, the right-wing minister and bestselling author of the Left Behind novels about the end times, was very close to the society. Conservative commentators Glenn Beck and Alex Jones and politician Ron Paul were directly influenced by the society. One of the society’s founding fathers, Fred Koch, was the father of Charles and David Koch, major donors and fundraisers on the Republican right.

Overstretches

Dallek makes a compelling case for the Birch Society’s significance, but he claims too much for it. He overstretches when he suggests we call the period from 1958 to the present the “Bircher era”, or refers to the “Bircher/MAGA movement”. The Birch Society is but one of many forerunners to the contemporary American right and not its most immediate predecessor.

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By positing the Trump presidency as the telos of his story, Dallek misses elements particular to the Birch Society. In particular, its fervent anti-communism prevented the society from being too critical of interventionist foreign policy. After the Cold War ended, the American right faced no such problem. The isolationism that has characterised its stance since is closer to the American First movement of the late 1930s than to the Birch Society. History is inevitably shaped by contemporary concerns and should speak to them, but it is a mistake to draw too straight a line from the past to the present.

If there is one contemporary lesson that can be taken from Dallek’s book, it is that the far right can be defeated with democratic means. Republicans today rely on the energies of the extremist right. They cannot be allowed to have their cake and eat it too. If they will not renounce the radical right, then Democrats must win over moderates by painting Republicans as extremists. Democrats have had some success with this strategy in 2018, 2020, and 2022 and they should retain it in 2024 with a looming possible rematch against Trump.