‘Birchers,’ the history of a group that helped pave the road to Trump

They called themselves the John Birch Society, in honor of an evangelical missionary and U.S. intelligence agent killed by Chinese Communists in 1945. And over the next two decades, historian Matthew Dallek writes, Welch and his trustees “mobilized a loyal army of activists and forged ideas that ultimately upended American politics.” Indeed, by the early 1960s, the Birchers had become the most visible — and most controversial — anti-communist organization in America, inspiring President John F. Kennedy to warn against their “counsels of fear and suspicion.”

With “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right,” Dallek joins a chorus of historians who have insisted, since Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, that the contemporary Republican Party, with its nationalist, isolationist, nativist and conspiratorial inclinations, can be understood only by looking back to far-right mobilizations of earlier eras: to groups such as the Birchers, who were long considered too marginal and too extreme to have played a decisive role in shaping American conservatism, much less all of American politics. “More than any other far-right group, and more than the most hardline Goldwater, Nixon or Reagan Republicans,” Dallek writes, “the Birch Society staked out a vigorous challenge to conservative orthodoxy and bequeathed to subsequent generations an extreme antigovernment zeal and rhetorically violent appeal.”

In his analysis, however, Dallek dissents, if only faintly, from the emerging consensus embodied by such historians of the right as Rick Perlstein, John S. Huntington, David Austin Walsh and Edward Miller‚ author of “A Conspiratorial Life” (2022), a richly detailed, definitive biography of Welch. These writers tend to collapse the long-held distinction between extreme and mainstream right, between the more vulgar, racist, nationalist elements of the right and their sophisticated, suited-up counterparts. At the very least, they emphasize the mingling, cooperation and synergy of these sides over their conflict and competition.

While Dallek agrees with his contemporaries that historians — those who credulously accepted William F. Buckley’s own self-image as the arbiter of respectable conservatism — had overstated Buckley’s role in providing “guardrails” against the right’s unsavory elements, he still insists upon distinguishing “mainstream” and “far right” conservatism. The Birchers were not, Dallek stipulates, an indispensable “base” or ideological “vanguard” of the conservative movement. They were the “fringe,” and they might have remained so if the GOP establishment had not “court[ed]” the far right, kept them “in the coalition” and allowed them to “gain a foothold and eventually cannibalize the entire party.”

This may seem like hair-splitting, but it is not without import. By blaming the establishment and insisting on contingency — Dallek writes that “treating the fringe as allies rather than banishing it was a choice”; that “the leaders of the GOP did not have to placate them” — he places Republican elites back in the driver’s seat of conservative history. By implication, Dallek suggests, the Trump era might have been avoided had different choices been made at opportune moments.

Dallek has a talent for articulating these fine distinctions, but when it comes to proving his theses with evidence, things get a little fuzzy.

By the 1980s, as Dallek notes, the Birchers had receded from view, displaced by activist organizations of the New Right — Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. And while Dallek ably identifies certain overlaps in the characters involved with the John Birch Society and those in these “successor” groups, he also asserts more than he shows, relying on flimsy words like “Birchite,” “Birchy,” “Birchian” and “Birch-toned” to make his case that the Birchers were the genealogical starting point for every dogma, habit of mind, strategy and tactic adopted by right-wing activists in the late 20th century.

Likewise, Dallek’s dearth of sociological data — of the sort one finds, for example, in “Suburban Warriors,” Lisa McGirr’s groundbreaking study of Birchers in Orange County, Calif. — makes it difficult to evaluate his insistence that the GOP didn’t need to placate the Bircher base. He writes: “Republican leaders figured that they could do just enough to keep the culture warriors, conspiracy theorists, extreme free marketeers and anti-civil rights radicals in their camp while also maintaining support from mainstream conservatives, especially suburban women.” But as we know from McGirr’s study, and as Dallek admits elsewhere, Bircher groups, especially in the sunbelt, were concentrated in the suburbs. They thrived among, as Dallek writes, “activist homeowners, housewives, and middle-class professionals.”

How to square this contradiction? Why did the suburbs cease to be a base for GOP radicalism? What happened to all those “little old ladies in white tennis shoes,” as California attorney general Stanley Mosk memorably described some Birchers in 1961? Dallek notes that “economic and demographic shifts intensified the far right’s sense of alienation and disempowerment,” that “deindustrialization” severed “white working-class voters” from unions and made the American Dream seem “increasingly unattainable.” But this familiar litany doesn’t explain how the archetypal conservative radical turned from a professional, suburban warrior to unschooled, rural Trumpist — nor does it justify Dallek’s implication that they are essentially the same person, motivated by similar grievance and animus.

A little back-of-the-envelope class analysis might help us move toward clarity: If, in the 1960s, militant anti-communism flourished among affluent suburbanites with jobs tied to the Cold War defense industry — as McGirr once suggested — we might suppose that the increasingly isolationist, rural and working-class character of the contemporary right has something to do with declining stability in the same sector. But evaluating such a hypothesis would require sociological study of a sort neglected by many recent histories of the right.

There can be little doubt that the tone and tactics of Trumpism are ”Birchite.” And Dallek’s account — of the “halting” and clumsy effort by conservatives to simultaneously exploit and contain Bircher energies — is both well-told and depressingly familiar. But like others in the booming cottage industry of “explaining the right to terrified liberals,” his analysis risks over-promising; readers hunger for the cleanest possible story about “how we got here,” but historians should resist the impulse to elide important distinctions to sate their appetite. As Leo Ribuffo, great historian of the Old Christian Right, once wrote: “What historians are supposed to do is to sort out continuity and change, similarity and difference.” It’s easier said than done.

Sam Adler-Bell is a writer and co-host of Know Your Enemy, a podcast about American conservatism.

How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right