What exactly is "Bircherism?" What do we mean when we call it "far right?"

The problem of definitions when writing about the American right

As promised, here are some additional thoughts upon finishing Matthew Dallek’s excellent new book, Birchers (building upon my initial post about the book).

The first 2/3 of this 288 page book focuses on the John Birch Society before the mid-60s, and those sections provide the most detailed and insightful analysis of the JBS that has been written to date. Chapter 6 especially stands out for its detailed account of the extensive efforts of the Anti-Defamation League and other “Birch Watchers” to keep tabs on (and even infiltrate and spy on) the JBS. This archival evidence has never been discussed extensively in print (as far as I know) and Dallek’s account of it is fascinating and especially resonant in an era when keeping tabs on the far right has become a hobby for the many American citizens who are concerned about the future of our democracy. [An aside: there are aspects of that chapter’s argument I disagree with, but in the interest of time I’m not going to talk about that in this post.]

Any reader who’s been following the news for the past eight years will encounter many a moment in Dallek’s book where the JBS’s activities and statements from the early 1960s will appear eerily contemporary.

Dallek thankfully resists hitting the reader over the head with the contemporary resonance of his early 1960s material, allowing the connections to emerge implicitly. I am fully convinced by the book’s central argument that the John Birch Society of the early 1960s—especially in regard to its “explicit racism, anti-interventionism, conspiracism, apocalyptic mindset, and [obsession with] culture wars”—provides an essential historical touchstone for anyone who wants to understand the nature of the contemporary, MAGA-dominated GOP. The questions and criticisms I offer below should be taken in the context of my generally very positive assessment of the book.

Dallek focuses on the period from the late 1950s up to the present, but it’s only the last 80 pages of his 288 page book that discuss the period after the mid-1960s. It’s an understandable choice given that Dallek didn’t want to write a 500-page book. But the imbalance between the first 210 pages that closely examine the years 1955-1965, and the last 80 pages that move quickly through the remaining 55+ years of US political history is definitely a weakness, especially given that one of the book’s central claims is about the Birchers’ enduring influence on American politics.

While Dallek argues that the John Birch Society (and “Birchism” more generally) laid the foundations for the far right that has today risen to dominance in the Republican Party, he also claims that it’s an overstatement to reduce the entire American conservative tradition to just Bircherism. This is how he puts it at the end of the introduction: “the Birch Society did not equal the conservative movement as a whole; the fringe was not, for the most part, the biggest driver of the GOP—until very recently. And it’s not bound to remain so indefinitely.” (p. 16) In contrast to those who claim that the tradition of “reasonable, moderate conservatism” was a lie all along—always saturated with racism, prone to violent rhetoric and action, and obsessed with empirically-groundless anti-government conspiracy theories—Dallek argues that “the process of radicalization of the Republican Party was in fact contingent, halting, and gradual, not foreordained and inevitable.” (p. 11) Many historians such as Nicole Hemmer, John Huntington, and Rick Perlstein have offered differing interpretations of the historical relationship between the fringe and the mainstream of the GOP. Dallek cites them but doesn’t extensively elaborate upon his points of disagreement.

As I read it, one of Dallek’s key takeaways seems to be that your grandfather’s GOP (as well as his variety of “conservatism”) really were a different sort of beast than today’s “conservative” GOP, and the lessons of history tell us that the influence of these “far right fringe” elements ebbs and flows. Perhaps, Dallek implies, we are just in one of those moments of fringy far right flow and this too shall ebb. I’ll leave the prognostication for others and stick to the history.

Here’s the question I was left with after reading this book: “what is the connective tissue that links the actual Birchers of the pre-1965 era (when the society was at its most robust and relevant) to modern day, far right ‘Birchite’ Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz, neither of whom (I’d bet) could even pick Robert Welch out of a lineup or name one thing Barry Goldwater did?” In Chapter 8 (Fringe) Dallek offers a compelling account of how the JBS became dominated by ever more unsavory extremists after the mid-1960s and came to occupy an increasingly fringe place on the edge of the US political spectrum. By 1970 it was taken seriously by only a tiny handful of people. [For real, if you’re over 30, take a minute to think back on how frequently, in the pre-Trump era, you thought about the John Freaking Birch Society as a politically relevant organization. My guess is that, unless you were a real history or politics nerd or a Bircher yourself, you most likely had no idea the JBS even still existed.] The almost complete irrelevance of the JBS as an organization in American political life from the late 1960s into the 2010s poses a major challenge for Dallek’s thesis about the Birchers’ enduring significance and contemporary explanatory power.

Dallek mostly confronts this challenge with the liberal use of adjectives like “Birchite” and a kind of “six degrees of Birchite Bacon” approach. Don’t get me wrong, the last 80 pages of the book offer an engaging and insightful account of the far right from the 1970s up to the present, featuring all of the key players from George Wallace to John Schmitz to Pat Robertson to Pat Buchanan to Rush Limbaugh to Ron Paul to Sarah Palin to Glenn Beck to Michele Bachmann, et. al. Whenever any of these figures had ties to the John Birch Society or said something nice about the JBS, Dallek is sure to point those connections out, but for the most part we are shown people saying and doing things that have a generally “Birchite” feel to them, though few people at the time would have seen the connection to the largely irrelevant Birch Society. That’s what I mean when I say the last 1/3 of the book often feels like an argument by adjectives. How exactly Ron Paul or Sarah Palin achieved the popularity they did by saying “Birchite” things is left unexplored in any detail. “Birchism” (like fluoride?) appears to be a kind of nebulously poisonous substance infecting the nation’s political water supply from the late 1960s up to the present.

What do we mean when we identify “Birchism” as “far right?”

“Birchism” is Dallek’s catch-all term for the American “far right” political culture ca. 1958-2023 that is his subject. But what if we considered other terminology that might be more analytically useful? We might start by interrogating one of Dallek’s more frequently used terms, “far right.” Describing “Birchism” as on the “far right” implies that the difference between those Birchers and the conservatives just a few clicks to their left was a matter of degree and not kind. There’s a case to be made, however, that this doesn’t quite work.

Let’s take immigration as an example. “Normal” conservatives in the early 2000s might say they wanted to limit immigration in X, Y, or Z particular ways, but they’d still speak of America in general as “a nation of immigrants.” The far right “conservatives” of that era would have agreed about restricting immigration, but they wanted to shut down immigration from the places Muslims and non-white people came from because they believed America was a nation that belonged to white Christian people. So yes, the “right” and the “far right” could agree on the narrow policy issue of limiting immigration, but their visions of the end goals of such policies differed radically. One was basically congruent with the ideal of America as a multi-racial, multiethnic democracy, the other was hostile to it. Is this a difference of degree (right and far right?), or is this a difference in kind (pluralistic vs. anti-pluralistic)?

Another example would be taxation. Normal conservatives would say tax rates are too high and we should reduce them, especially for the “job creators” in the top bracket. The far right would say, “yes, taxes are too high and also the IRS and the federal reserve are unconstitutional and should be eliminated, and also, did you know that the person who came up with the idea of the graduated income tax was Karl Marx? [mic drop]” While the “conservative” position on taxation would still keep in place the entirety of the federal government and modestly shrink its budget (or just expand deficits, as every GOP President in recent memory has done), the “far right” position sought to completely obliterate most of the non-military parts of the federal government. So yes “the right” and “the far right” can find common cause on the idea that taxes suck and should be reduced, but the end goal for the far right is the fundamental destruction of 90% of the federal government as it has existed for the past 90 years or so. An analogy: someone who’s trying to cut down on dairy might order the oat milk at a coffee shop and get a look of solidarity from the vegan behind them in line, but that doesn’t mean the vegan’s approach to consuming food should be described as a slightly more extreme version of the periodical dairy avoider’s world view.

So if the right/left spectrum, with the Birchers being placed on the “far right” end of the spectrum, has its limitations, what are the other alternatives?

Middle American Radicals (MAR)

One alternative would be to identify the “Birchism” of the post-1960s era as a manifestation of a political formation that sociologist Donald Warren has called “Middle American Radicals.” In October of 2015, John Judis wrote a compelling analysis of then-long-shot GOP candidate Donald Trump that put him in the context of that “Middle American Radical” tradition. It’s worth a read. Below are some key passages from Warren’s 1976 introduction where he explains how the Middle American Radicals of that era didn’t fit neatly into either “left” or “right,” or “Democrat” or “Republican.”

One advantage of this MAR concept is that it enables us to explain Trump’s appeal to alienated, previously apolitical white people from the middle and working classes. These are the sorts of “conservatives” who were not enthused about Romney, Paul Ryan, or McCain (though they liked the cut of Palin’s jib). And while they may have voted for George W. Bush on cultural issues, they never bought into the Bush family mystique. These are the folks who drove in the George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot-curious, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump lane of American politics. [FWIW, every former associate of Walter Huss I know of who was alive in 2016 enthusiastically supported Donald Trump, and most of them had been profoundly alienated from electoral politics for the previous decade or more, though they loved Pat Buchanan.]

This MAR concept also helps account for the demographic shift from the heyday of the Birch Society when its membership was largely made up of wealthy and upper-middle class white people, to the “Birchite” Buchanan-brigades of the 1990s which were overwhelmingly comprised of working class white people and some church-going middle class culture warriors. The modal Bircher of 1960 was a prosperous dentist or an anti-union factory owner; while the modal “Bircherite” Buchanan fan in 1996 was a 50 year old white factory worker who was worried about his job disappearing, “the gay agenda,” “gang violence,” “illegal immigrants flooding the country,” and probably some nebulous, “globalist” connection between all four. To lump the 1960s dentist and the 1990s Buchanan fan into the category of “Bircherite far right” seems to overlook too many important differences between the politics of these two movements and the social locations of the people that comprised them.

“Birchers” as Hofstadter’s “Pseudo-Conservatives”

Another analytical language we might substitute for Dallek’s term “Birchers” was coined by Richard Hofstadter back in the late 1950s and 1960s. He referred to groups like the JBS as “pseudo-conservatives” who lived off the map of normal American politics. Pseudo-conservatives, “although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways." Pseudo-conservatives were more of the “I love America so much and that’s why I have to kill it” variety. What most struck Hofstadter about these pseudo-conservatives was how bizarrely disconnected their political concerns were from empirical reality or even rational economic self-interest. This is Hofstadter in 1962 reflecting back on his original 1955 essay where he’d coined the term “pseudo-conservative.”

Had he been around in 2016, Hofstadter would have had little patience for the “economic anxiety” mode of analyzing the Trump phenomenon. As a good Cold War liberal attached to the idea of a “vital center,” Hofstadter lamented that these John Birch kooks had managed to steer the national political conversation onto such utterly bizarre territory. "Why on earth are we talking about whether Ike is a commie or not!?!?"

The above passage reminded me of something Matt Sitman said in this excellent podcast discussion about Whitaker Chambers: “For the American right, nothing is ever just what it is.” What he meant by that is that something like the Alger Hiss case was never just about one individual who did bad things, it was always merely the tip of an enormous pinko iceberg on the verge of destroying American civilization. Just like today a drag show at a Colorado coffee shop or a teacher in Florida saying something you don’t like about slavery and the founding fathers is a sign that “the woke mind virus” has transformed “the Democrat Party” into a bunch of zombified tyrants hopped up on CRT, Cultural Marxism, and “radical gender ideology” who want to put anyone suspected of wrongthink into a gulag. It’s all just so silly and hyperbolic and detached from the reality of how society functions, and also is an alarmingly common way in which self-described “American conservatives” tend to understand and engage with their fellow citizens.

We don’t have to diagnose “pseudo-conservatism” as a pathological mental health condition the way Hofstadter did to see the continued usefulness of the term. While there are several claims in Hofstadter's 1955 essay that have not stood the test of time, its last sentence strikes me as tremendously insightful and prescient, and worth unpacking slowly.

Translation: a weakness of our anti-elitist culture is that it’s hard for gatekeepers to prevent shameless elites (think Robert Welch or Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson) from capitalizing upon a generalized sense of “populist” mistrust to build popular outrage about "the wildest" things...like stolen elections, or anti-vaxx, or "groomers" or "CRT" or [fill in the blank]. This "highly organized, vocal, active and well-financed minority" (in the form of the MAGA movement and its elaborate media ecosystem) has, I would argue, created "a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety [has] become impossible." Not that US politics was ever a fully rational conversation about "our well-being" but there have been times when the political system has been able to a) identify a problem and b) come up with a decent response to it. Such a world seems impossible at this point.

We can't address our problems through politics because one party has decided that many of our most pressing problems--gun violence, climate change, economic inequality, access to health care, etc.--are not even problems we can or should address through politics. They have succeeded in making these issues (to use Sitman’s formulation) something other than what they just are—black helicopters are surveilling your house so they can grab your grandpa’s muzzle loader, climate change is a globalist hoax designed to imprison hamburger eaters and car owners, people will stop being poor if we just cut taxes for the rich, DEATH PANELS!!!! Our democracy is ailing not because the GOP has moved too far to the right, it’s ailing because the pseudo-conservative tradition, that never bought into the idea of “democracy” in the first place, has succeeded in taking over one of our nation’s two major parties.

Putting the policy preferences of someone like Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump on a left/right spectrum is perhaps less useful than putting them on a reality-based/democracy-corroding-propagandistic-bullshit spectrum. So perhaps the connective tissue that ties the actual Birchers of the 1950s and 60s to the “Bircheresque” figures of today is a shared commitment to a fabulistic pseudo-conservatism that advances an anti-government agenda of plutocratic populism focused not on generating reality-based arguments about policy but rather on “flooding the zone with shit” as Steve Bannon would put it.

From this perspective, the media comes into view as a key player that provided the “connective tissue” for this pseudo-conservative political tradition. Where the Bircher and Bircher-adjacent “far right” from the 1950s into the early 2000s utilized newsletters and AM radio programs that largely flew under the mainstream media’s radar to reproduce and amplify their political world view, the explosion of social media in the Obama era radically transformed the game and created new opportunities that far right outlets like Breitbart, the Daily Wire, Gateway Pundit, etc. capitalized on to great effect.

If this is indeed the story of how we got from the Birchers to MAGA, then we need to know a lot more about figures and outlets who barely earn a mention in “Birchers”—Richard Viguerie, Willis Carto, The Spotlight, Human Events, etc. etc.

“Participatory anti-democracy” and the F-word

The dreaded “F-word” (fascism) does not appear much in Dallek’s book, though he does note that several observers of the John Birch Society in the late 50s and early 60s caught more than a whiff of WWII era fascism from the group. Interestingly, one of those people who expressed concern about the potentially fascistic nature of the JBS was Herbert Philbrick, a fervid anti-communist who was beloved by many on the far right (including Walter Huss).

I’m not going to wade into the choppy waters surrounding the question of whether we should use the F-word to describe the contemporary MAGA right, but I will say that the “Bircherite” tradition that Dallek depicts in his book fits into a category of fascistic right wing politics that historian Joseph Fronczak has usefully described as “participatory anti-democracy.” It's a brilliant phrase that captures how far right politics fires up ordinary people to engage in movements that seek to deny the rights and humanity of others. We might think of it as the difference between a person who thinks “meh, this trans stuff seems weird to me but it’s no skin off my nose” and someone who thinks “I’m going to make a sign about ‘groomers’ and go protest at a school board meeting about gender neutral bathrooms and when I see a Proud Boy with his AR-15 and brass knuckles there I’m going to hand him a granola bar in solidarity.”

This relates to Adam Serwer’s key insight that for the MAGA movement “the cruelty is the point.” Much of the pleasure that people experience at a Trump rally or when they see a MAGA candidate win is that they know the libs will be crying and “the radical left enemies of the people” who “hate America” will have been thwarted in their efforts to “totally destroy the nation you know and love.” This is a politics that carries with it echoes of massive resistance to school integration and organizations like the KKK and the White Citizens Councils that got ordinary white Americans fired up to participate in movements to “save the country” from the supposed “horrors” of multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism.

To be continued…like every other historiographical conversation in the history of history.

I’ve gone on long enough at this point, and I’m sure you get the idea. I think there are good reasons to interpret the political tradition Dallek calls “Bircherism” as a serious threat to the always-contested and never-fully-realized American political tradition of multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism. That anti-democratic tradition has very deep roots in our nation’s history and I’m not optimistic it’s going to ebb away any time soon leaving behind a totally normal Republican Party. That “far right”—call it Middle American Radicals, pseudo-conservatives, or lovers of participatory anti-democracy—has, for the first time in over a hundred years, almost entirely captured one of the nation’s two major political parties. This is, to use a technical term, a bad thing. I’ve long given up hope that “reasonable” political elites like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, or Lisa Murkowski can claw the GOP back from the abyss any time soon. And as someone who listens to local AM radio with some regularity, I defy you to find “reasonable” voices out there in the “conservative” media arena.

The “Birchers” long ago, and for very good reason, became a laughing stock in American public life, and in many ways still are one. But there is nothing funny about what happened on January 6, or the GOP’s refusal to honestly reckon with it or move beyond the authoritarian figure (and presumptive GOP POTUS nominee) who instigated it. “Bircherism” as a placeholder is a good enough term to identify the historical forces that threaten American democracy, but I think there’s value in exploring other terminology that might help us discern the contours and content of that threat with greater precision.