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 as provocative as it is disturbing.
In Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, Dallek comprehensively investigates the weight of this ultra-right think tank in the United States in its heyday – the late 1950s and early 1960s – how it being considered alien to the country's political tradition and practically forgotten in the following years and how, to the surprise of some, it has been recovered in the presidential campaigns – three so far – of former president Donald Trump.
Historically, there is a crucial moment in this attempt to give respectability to what, both then and now, moderate public opinion qualifies as the lunatic fringe, an untranslatable expression that has traditionally been used to refer to far-right extremists . The phrase that one of the icons of American conservatism, Senator Barry Goldwater, uttered at the Republican Party convention in 1964 is still thought provoking today, almost 60 years later: “Extremism in defense of freedom is not a vice, moderation in defense of justice is not a virtue".
The following fall, Americans forcefully consigned Goldwater's message to the dustbin of history. They limited their electoral victories in that year's presidential elections to their home state of Arizona and five states of the old Confederacy, and awarded President Johnson a landslide victory. But those elections marked the beginning of republican hegemony in the south-east of the country, a movement that has not stopped 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 once considered President Eisenhower, hero of the Second World War, as a dangerous communist. Even Ronald Reagan was not free from suspicion, for despite his pure 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 with suspicion by the ultra-right, the father for having declared himself a supporter of a new world order, ergo internationalist, and the son for allegedly being soft on illegal immigration. At the same time, the presidencies of the Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama galvanize nativist, xenophobic, homophobic and anti-feminist movements to become largely the holy grail 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 in equal parts of show business and real estate speculation, surprisingly turned, and despite his turbulent love life, into an idol of the fiercest religious ultra-right.
In short, as Matthew Dallek argues, what were marginal tendencies and the object of a certain facetiousness 60 years ago, today form an integral part of the ideology of the Republican Party. It is clear that ideas are one thing, free by their very nature, and another quite different thing is to conspire to stage a coup d'état, that this and not another was the intention of the attackers of the Washington Capitol on January 6 2021, to whom justice is giving the relevant answer. This is what the Rule of Law is for.
