Matthew Dallek, son of the prestigious biographer Robert Dallek – of Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Johnson, among other presidents – has recently published a book with a thesis that is as provocative as it is disturbing.
In Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, Dallek exhaustively investigates the weight of this American far-right think tank in its heyday – the late 1950s and early 1960s – and how it was considered a alien to the country's political tradition and practically forgotten in the following years and how, to the surprise of locals and strangers, it has been recovered in the presidential campaigns – three to date – of former president Donald Trump.
Historically, there is a crucial moment in this attempt to give respectability to what, then as now, moderate public opinion calls lunatic fringe, an untranslatable expression but which has traditionally referred to far-right extremists. And the phrase that one of the icons of American conservatism, Senator Barry Goldwater, uttered at the 1964 Republican Party convention today, almost 60 years later, still gives food for thought: “Extremism in defense of Liberty is not a vice, moderation in defense of justice is not a virtue.
The following fall, Americans resoundingly consigned Goldwater's message to the dustbin of history, limiting his electoral victories in that year's presidential election to his home state of Arizona and five states of the former Confederacy and handing the president a landslide victory. Johnson, but those elections marked the beginning of Republican hegemony in the southeast of the country, a movement that has not ceased since then.
The truth is that objectively it is difficult to find a politician, even a Republican, likely to please the heirs of the John Birch society, who in their day considered President Eisenhower, hero of the Second World War, as a dangerous communist. Not even Ronald Reagan was free from suspicion, because, despite his deep social conservatism, he did not abdicate traditional American internationalism nor did he hesitate to meet and sign agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev, after all Soviet.
The Bushes, father and son, were always viewed suspiciously by the extreme right, the father for declaring himself a supporter of a new world order, ergo internationalist, and the son for being supposedly soft on illegal immigration. At the same time, the presidencies of Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama galvanized nativist, xenophobic, homophobic and anti-feminist movements until they largely became the watchword of a Republican Party that abjures moderation and internationalism.
The most curious thing is that the leader of the movement is a figure as atypical and unclassifiable as that of Donald Tump, a product of equal parts of show business and real estate speculation, surprisingly converted, and despite his eventful love life, into an idol of the most barbaric religious extreme right.
In short, as Matthew Dallek argues, what were marginal tendencies and the subject of a certain joke 60 years ago, today form an integral part of the ideology of the Republican Party. Of course, ideas, free by their very nature, are one thing, and conspiring to carry out a coup d'état is quite another, as that and no other was the intention of the assailants of the Washington Capitol on January 6, 2021, to whom that justice is giving a complete response. That is what the rule of law is for.
