June 23, 2022 37porters as “little old ladies in tennis
shoes.” The Birchers, however, had
many elite connections. Welch had
attended Harvard Law School, and
two of the founding members in In-
dianapolis had served as presidents
of the National Association of Manu-
facturers, of which Welch was a board
member. Although the Birch Society
was known for its clout in the Sunbelt
states, Welch ran it for decades from an
office in Belmont, Massachusetts, and
lived for a time in Cambridge, where he
had founded the company that eventu-
ally became known as Welch’s Candy,
the maker of popular treats like Sugar
Daddies and Sugar Babies.
The society was funded by member-
ship dues and magazine sales. At one
point in the 1970s Welch had to send
out a letter to friends saying the orga-
nization’s financial situation was “des-
perate,” but the Birchers could usually
depend on wealthy businessmen to bail
them out—in particular, the Texas oil
magnate Nelson Bunker Hunt, the or-
ganization’s biggest benefactor, whose
intermittent contributions helped keep
the Birch Society afloat for many years.
The business leaders who supported
the Birchers were unified by their con-
tinuing opposition to Franklin Roo-
sevelt’s New Deal reforms. (Years later,
when President Richard Nixon signed
into law the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, Welch, with
his standard hyperbole, called it “the
worst piece of tyranny ever imposed
on any people by any government.”) In
this sense, the Birch Society’s base was
different from the Trump movement
today. The domestic manufacturers of
the 1950s, often based locally and run
by a single family, have in many cases
evolved into large corporations with
overseas operations; worried about
exports and their corporate images,
they generally avoid taking political
positions that could provoke backlash.
The Trump movement includes some
important individual donors from the
business community, but it has been
more hostile to corporations than the
Birchers were.
Still, when it came to grassroots sup-
port, the Birchers drew on many of the
same sorts of sentiments we now see
among the Trumpers. The businessmen
seeking lower taxes and deregulation
were able to enlist, through conspiracy
theories, the support of those who felt
that the America they had grown up in
was being undermined or destroyed—
and that some malign organization
or force must be behind these social
changes.
Once the John Birch Society began
to spread through the country, conser-
vative leaders had to decide how to deal
with it and what to say about it: Should
they renounce the Birchers, and if so,
how bluntly? This is, of course, roughly
the same issue that confronts promi-
nent Republicans, from Liz Cheney to
Mitch McConnell, in grappling with
the Trump movement today. Wil-
liam F. Buckley Jr.—who in 1955 had
founded National Review to serve
as the main organ of conservative
thought—initially praised some of
Welch’s early writings, observing that
he was “the author of two of the fin-
est pamphlets this country has read in
a decade.” (They shared a publisher:
Regnery had published Buckley’s God
and Man at Yale before putting out
Welch’s The Life of John Birch, one of
the pamphlets Buckley was referringto.) Yet Buckley grew increasingly
uncomfortable with Welch’s conspira-
torial theorizing, and he began to crit-
icize Welch in his magazine.
The turning point for Buckley seems
to have been Welch’s allegation that
Eisenhower was a Communist. Welch
first made this claim in 1954 in a letter
he sent out to hundreds if not thou-
sands of conservatives, saying that it
was his firm belief “that Dwight Ei-
senhower is a dedicated, conscious
agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
This was several degrees more outra-
geous than the other red- baiting of the
1950s; even McCarthy hadn’t gone that
far. It also clashed with what the pub-
lic had come to know of Eisenhower.
“Eisenhower isn’t a Communist. He is
a golfer,” observed another prominent
conservative, Russell Kirk. Buckley’s
National Review mocked Welch’s con-
spiracy theories. One essay from 1959,
for example, said that Welch and the
Birchers “concede to the Communist
world a monolithic perfection, a super
human cleverness, which does not
and could not exist outside a fiction
1984 .”Buckley also took his opposition to
the John Birch Society beyond these
published comments: in early 1962,
during a meeting with Senator Barry
Goldwater in which Buckley and other
conservatives were encouraging Gold-
water to run for president, Buckley
urged him to denounce the society in
public.
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 repudia-
tion. For Goldwater, the Birchers were
an important constituency in states like
California. Instead of a direct repudia-
tion, 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 peo-
ple 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 Char-
lottesville, 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 move-
ment) for censure, thus deflecting crit-
icism away from the membership and
the organization itself. In the 1960s Re-
publican politicians took to denounc-
ing Welch personally for going too far
in his conspiracy theories, while avoid-
ing comment on the many Birchers
who believed them. Goldwater, for ex-
ample, 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 Re-
publicans to “repudiate once and for all
Robert Welch and those who accept his
leadership and viewpoints.” Nixon won
the California primary over a Birch So-
ciety member, but then lost the general
election because the Birchers refused
to vote for him.
Most Republicans today are similarly
unwilling to directly criticize Trumpfor fear of offending his supporters and
losing Republican primaries. For just a
few days after the January 6 insurrec-
tion, it appeared that some Republican
politicians (Lindsey Graham, for exam-
ple) 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 suc-
cessful Republican political campaign
since Trump’s departure, Virginia gov-
ernor Glenn Youngkin took pains to
keep him at a distance while courting
his supporters.)
The third technique Republican pol-
iticians used to avoid condemning the
John Birch Society was the “endorse-
ment,” a term that Ronald Reagan
employed to perfection when he was
running for governor of California in- Reagan first worked out with his
advisers the general idea: “Any mem-
ber of the society who supports me
will be buying my philosophy. I won’t
be buying theirs.” He then distilled
this into his stock campaign line: “I
didn’t endorse them—they endorsed
me.” (During his 1980 presidential
campaign, Reagan flipped his formula
around while courting the support of
evangelicals: he told a convention of
fundamentalist pastors, “I know this is
nonpartisan, so you can’t endorse me,
but I want you to know that I endorse
you.”)
On the whole, as Miller’s book makes
clear, Republican politicians of the
early 1960s were more eager to court
the John Birch Society than to distance
themselves from it. Indeed, Goldwa-
ter’s famous line from his acceptance
speech at the 1964 Republican Na-
tional Convention—“Extremism in
the defense of liberty is no vice”—can
be read as an apologia for the Birch
Society.
Miller captures the crucial difference
between the John Birch Society’s be-
liefs and William Buckley’s brand of
conservatism. “Unlike Welch, Buckley
never believed that domestic Commu-
nists, as opposed to foreign ones, were
a greater threat to America’s survival,”
he writes. For Welch and the Birchers,
the main targets were liberalism and
the elites.
Miller’s book, however, is curiously
dismissive of Buckley’s efforts to cur-
tail the Birch Society’s influence. It is
hard to see how much more Buckley
could have done (Miller doesn’t offer
any suggestions): after having appealed
to Goldwater to denounce the Birch-
ers, in 1965 Buckley published a spe-
cial fourteen- page section of National
Review condemning the organization.
The Birch Society magazine American
Opinion had just argued that the major
branches of the US government were
under Communist domination, sug-
gesting that the real Communist enemy
was at home, not abroad. In a column
for National Review’s special section,
Buckley called that “drivel” and said the
Birch Society was “a grave liability to
the conservative and anti- Communist
cause.” Readers responded to the issue
with more than 1,500 angry letters and
roughly as many subscription cancella-
tions. Yet despite Buckley’s denuncia-
tions, the conspiratorial thinking of the
Birchers took root on the right wing
of the Republican Party and remainsthere today. As Miller writes, “Robert
Welch was never excommunicated by
William F. Buckley.”
Welch, who had maintained tight
personal control over the John Birch
Society for more than a quarter-
century, suffered a stroke in 1983 and
died two years later. The organization
still exists, but without the prominence,
power, and influence it once had. Nev-
ertheless, the spirit of the Birchers lives
on in the web of fictions we see in pub-
lic life today—not merely in cults like
QAnon, conspiracists like Alex Jones,
and fringe politicians like Marjorie
Taylor Greene, but also in many of the
leaders of the Republican Party, who
dispute the results of the 2020 election
with one fable after another. Indeed,
the penchant for conspiracy theories
seems stronger today than it was during
the Birchers’ heyday in the 1960s.
Right- wing conspiracy thinking sur-
vived the collapse of communism in the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe be-
cause it became an instrument not just
of anticommunism but of expressing
resentment of educated elites—which
not only continues but has arguably
increased—and also because social
media can spread conspiratorial ideas
instantaneously to a mass audience.
The persistence of this evidence-
free theorizing raises the question
of whether conspiracy theories have
become necessary to the Republican
Party’s existence. Conspiracies are, in
short, a way for the party to keep feed-
ing its populist base while more quietly
pursuing economic interests (cutting
taxes, opposing government regula-
tion) that the party’s powerful, well-
heeled members and donors find vital.
A Conspiratorial Life sometimes
makes its case for the relevance of the
John Birch Society in recent years in
a heavy- handed, breathless fashion.
“America had become Welchland,”
Miller writes, a classic example of a bi-
ographer overstating the importance of
his subject. “Now the ideas of the John
Birch Society are everywhere—even
in the White House. Even in your own
house.” Such passages seem almost the
mirror image of the Birch Society find-
ing Communists under every bed.
It is clear that, just as the style of
the Birchers outlasted Welch’s death
and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
so too the spirit of Trumpism will en-
dure well beyond Trump’s lifetime.
Outlandish statements, rivaling the
claim that President Eisenhower was
a Communist, have now become com-
mon. Not long ago, on Fox News, Lara
Logan, once a prominent CBS foreign
correspondent, compared Anthony
Fauci to Josef Mengele, the Nazi doc-
tor who did experiments on prisoners
at Auschwitz.
On January 20, 2021, those who
were watching President Biden’s inau-
guration on television could see that
an unidentified man of Asian descent
stood either behind Biden or at his side
throughout the ceremonies. He was
David Cho, a Korean American Secret
Service agent who had been placed in
charge of Biden’s presidential security
detail (after having earlier protected
Trump). Yet American social media
soon lit up with speculation that this
man was a Chinese agent, assigned by
Beijing to control the new president. “I
just asked why has [Biden] got a Chi-
nese handler,” read one typical tweet.
Robert Welch could not have said it
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