How the Birchers Staged a Quiet Coup on the GOP

While I thought I was blending into the crowd pretty well, the second I tried talking to rally attendees they saw right through my pressed pants and collared shirt. The Proud Boys had been holding one of an elongated sequence of events in Portland, Oregon, this time at Delta Park, which crests the northernmost edge of the city limits. It is the site of the historic Vanport housing development, which housed Black dock workers who migrated to town to work on the ports during World War II before establishing vibrant Black neighborhoods in the Albina, Mississippi, and Alberta districts. Those are now almost monolithically white neighborhoods, branded with campy bars, craft salt stores, and condos that cost fifteen times more than the average annual salary of Portland residents.

The Proud Boys and their comrades were there with a complicated mission: to root out the subversive elites destroying the American working-class and their antifa conspirators, two hands shaking the other. I was early in the process of writing my book on antisemitism so I wanted to find out exactly who they were there to expose and what kind of nefariousness they were up to. “[George Soros] would be a very prime candidate to be the next Hitler,” said one woman in a Confederate flag shirt refusing to be identified. “He is using Black people and BLM to do his work because we are the last of the free nations and he does not want any free nations in his way.” 

As speakers headed to the stage, they painted a picture of two Americas: the God fearing American public who sees their wages shrinking and their voice dwindling, and those who are orchestrating the collapse for their own ends. This is a sentiment I’m sure the antifascists holding their own counter-rally down the road would agree with, but the devil’s in the details. It wasn’t corporate elites or capitalists controlling world markets that were the problem, according to these far-right propagandists, but a powerful legion of cabals, Satanic pedophiles, communists and black-clad antifa running amok. The world had been captured, and now it was time to take the country back. It had always been time.

The language was somewhat new, but deja vu quickly set in: this story had been told before. In fact, this had become a centerpiece of the new far-giht, both in and outside of the Republican Party, who’s entire identity is about taking very real fears about economic and social dislocation and retelling it through a nativist populism that blames their ideological enemies for the behavior of the ruling class. This is the only method the right has to reclaim the (white) working class, by acknowledging their grievance and retelling the story in a way that confuses cause an effect. The only way to make someone believe tax breaks for the rich are somehow good for working people is by inverting reality, spinning a conspiracy theory that is just as emotionally relevant as it is factually erroneous.

The new book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right by scholar and historian Matthew Dallek recounts how one particularly fringe organization helped to establish the framework that would evolve to become the whole of the right’s identity. In doing so, Dallek paints a vivid picture of the group and its cartoonish leadership, all why balancing it with some of the deepest research ever done on the subject. While the book makes a convincing case for the John Birch Society’s outsized influence, the Birchers may be just one character in the story of the right’s descent into paranoid conspiracism rather than the prime agent of this shift.

Dallek’s book can be easily summarized by the title of its introduction: Fringe to Center. Birchers describes how a right-wing activist Robert Welch and leaders pulled from the anti-union National Association of Manufacturers created the John Birch Society to root out what they believed was a vast communist conspiracy that infiltrated the highest levels of American government and society. Without evidence, they created a rabid network of vocal activists, claiming people like President Dwight D. Eisenhower were, in fact, captured communist agents, and conspiracy theories became the vessel for, as Dallek describes, “the metaphor…[for the] long arc of American decline” that adapts to really any issue. They went to war with the U.N, the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movement, and grew rapidly, bringing in large sums of money and spreading conspiratorial pamphlets around the country. 

They were considered nuts by much of the establishment right from the beginning, and National Review founder William F. Buckley famously made his name by kicking them out of polite company. But they also had their effect, and many of who became celebrity right-wing movement leaders, like anti-Equal Rights Amendment campaigner Phyllis Schlafly, were Birchers. As John S. Huntington described in his recent book Far-Right Vanguard, there never really was a strong barrier between the beltway and the far-right, they were, ultimately, ideological bedfellows. While the far-right may have said the “quiet part out loud,” the rest of the right still said the quiet part quietly. So the barrier between the Birchers and the rest of the right was always flimsy, at best. 

The book’s strength is in its detailed analysis of the Society’s heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as outlining its decline. One area where the book could have been strengthened is in discussing the Society’s more recent history: it continues to this day and has seen some resurgence from activists within the Tea Party, the MAGA movement, Save the Children obsessives, and similar currents. Instead, the book focuses the final third on how the Birchers influenced the right, particularly figures like Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, and, ultimately, Donald Trump. The connections are numerous and Dallek goes to great length to parse out the nuance on how the Birchers crafting the model that became standard for the emerging populists of the right. One criticism that could be leveled against this recounting, however, is that the influence of the Birchers may be overstated by this framing. The Bircher style has become commonplace, that is true, but it's questionable whether or not it was simply the Bircher ideology being exported to the right or a larger trend that the Birchers are simply one piece of. The Birch model of communist conspiracy has informed the way that the right talks about political correctness, “cancel culture,” and certainly the antifa panic, but there were other far-right organizations and movements that likely also played a role in normalizing this. The Birchers were influential, but they were far from the only player. Dallek certainly does, however, find stories from the Bircher files that are eerily similar to behavior we see the right performing now, such as recording teachers to prove that coercive left-wing influence is damaging kids in the classroom. 

These are small quibbles with a book that is engaging, readable, and incredibly insightful, and one that joins a number of great recent volumes on the development of modern conservatism such as The Partisans by Nicole Hemmer, Conservatism in a Divide America by George Hawley, and Preparing for War by Bradley Onishi. What is especially useful about Dallek’s history is what options it gives us for creating a movement against these shifts in American discourse and as a reminder that there was a time when the Birchers’ delusions were seen for what they were: dangerous.