Goldwater balked. He did write Buckley a letter saying he would like to see the John Birch Society disband, yet he would not issue a public repudiation. For Goldwater, the Birchers were an important constituency in states like California. Instead of a direct repudiation, Goldwater and other conservative leaders began to resort to some of the phrases, evasions, and rationalizations that eventually became standard fare to maintain the support of a repugnant movement.
The first of these can be called the “good people” evasion. Goldwater called the Birchers “the finest people in my community” and said they were “the kind [of people] we need in politics.” (After the 2017 riots by neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump told a press conference that there were “very fine people on both sides.”) A second type of evasion is to single out the leader (or some other individual within the movement) for censure, thus deflecting criticism away from the membership and the organization itself. In the 1960s Republican politicians took to denouncing Welch personally for going too far in his conspiracy theories, while avoiding comment on the many Birchers who believed them. Goldwater, for example, asserted at one point that Welch should resign. Buckley, too, at first chose to blame Welch rather than the Birch Society as a whole. Nixon crossed this line: while running for governor of California in 1962, he called upon Republicans to “repudiate once and for all Robert Welch and those who accept his leadership and viewpoints.” Nixon won the California primary over a Birch Society member, but then lost the general election because the Birchers refused to vote for him.
Most Republicans today are similarly unwilling to directly criticize Trump for fear of offending his supporters and losing Republican primaries. For just a few days after the January 6 insurrection, it appeared that some Republican politicians (Lindsey Graham, for example) were willing to condemn him while seeking to maintain the support of his base. These efforts collapsed, and the Republicans returned to Trump. For the moment, at least, Trump not only maintains hold on his movement but is its raison d’être. (Yet in the most successful Republican political campaign since Trump’s departure, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin took pains to keep him at a distance while courting his supporters.)