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 H. 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 the two sides over their conflict and competition.
While Dallek agrees with his contemporaries that historians — those who credulously accepted William F. Buckley Jr.’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 had the GOP establishment 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 hairsplitting, 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” and 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, he 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.