Even at the peak of its influence in the early 1960s, the John Birch Society was regarded as something of a joke by liberals and conservatives alike. The Birchers were so extreme that many of them thought Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon were too soft. One California Bircher opined that if Nixon won the Republican gubernatorial primary, “we might as well teach our children how to count in rubles.” Robert Welch, the ex-candymaker and Harvard Law dropout who founded the John Birch Society, became infamous for describing Dwight Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.”
The Birchers were almost a parody of anti-communist paranoiacs. Their in-house magazine once ran an article calling peace signs “symbols of the anti-Christ.” They believed the first Earth Day was a communist plot intentionally scheduled to coincide with Lenin’s 100th birthday. Polls consistently showed they had little support among the public at large, and even respectable conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. kept a cautious distance from them in public.
Today, the John Birch Society attracts little public notice, though it’s still out there promising to “save children from our public schools” and “stop the globalists’ trade agenda.” But the Birchers’ politics have become standard, not fringe, on the American right; their rhetoric is repeated almost word for word by Donald Trump. On the Birch Society website, they promise “to prevent the Deep State, with its Marxist and globalist ideology, from poisoning and ultimately destroying America.” Trump kicked off his first rally for the 2024 campaign with a similar vow: “Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state.” The Trumpian right doesn’t need the John Birch Society per se, because it’s adopted the Birchers’ extremist paranoia wholesale.
In Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, Matthew Dallek examines how this came to be. As kooky and isolated as it was, the John Birch Society, he argues, “slipped into the culture and politics of the country in underappreciated ways.” By launching their society, this “island of far-right misfits” helped create “a host of canny successors that put extremist themes, ideas, and techniques into general circulation.”