1 gen 1930 anni - 1950s culture wars: right-wing group The John Birch Society promoted "alt facts" and conspiracies

Descrizione:

[The John Birch Society] was known for its opposition to the civil rights movement, its antisemitism, its willingness to harass and intimidate its political enemies and for spreading conspiracy theories... Communist plots were alleged to be behind many things the Birchers opposed, from the U.N., to teaching sex education in schools and putting fluoride in the water supply. The group was founded in secret in 1958 by the wealthy, retired candy manufacturer Robert Welch, whose candies included Sugar Babies, Junior Mints and Pom Poms. The people Welch first invited to join the society were also wealthy, white businessmen, including the Koch brothers' father Fred Koch.

DALLEK: Yeah. Well, one of the points of the book is that, time and again, the activism, the money, the energy can be much greater, politically and culturally - much more powerful than the votes of millions of people because they could push issues onto the agenda that other people were not talking about. They could dominate news cycles. They could get people to respond to them and their ideas. They could be a kind of force - as I said before, a shock force - and people would have to take notice...

GROSS: My understanding from reading your book is that the John Birch Society combined right-wing politics with culture wars.

DALLEK: Yes. So I argue that the Birchers helped forge an alternative political tradition on the far right and that the core ideas were an anti-establishment, apocalyptic, more violent mode of politics, conspiracy theories, anti-interventionism and a more explicit racism and that - and then on top of that, as well, they were some of the first people on the right to take up questions of public morality, of Christian evangelical politics - banning sex education in schools, trying to insert what they called patriotic texts into libraries and into the classroom. And so they were quite early to - even the issue of abortion. They were quite early to a set of issues that would become known as the culture wars. And that women - at the chapter level, because they had chapters of 20 - roughly 20 people. Women, at the chapter level, were especially effective teachers, so to speak, teaching - trying to teach the public about the threats from a liberalizing culture.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/17/1176662608/a-historian-details-how-a-secretive-extremist-group-radicalized-the-american-rig

....Founded in 1958 by the businessman Robert Welch, the society was the most robust political fringe group of its day, intent upon thwarting any U.S.-Soviet coöperation, withdrawing America from the United Nations, exposing Communists in the federal government, and impeaching Chief Justice Earl Warren. Rick Perlstein, in his 2001 book, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,” summarizes the trimming strategy: “Goldwater would take the line that Robert Welch was a crazy extremist but that the Society itself was full of fine, upstanding citizens working hard and well for the cause of Americanism.” Throughout the 1964 race, Goldwater availed himself of Bircher money and manpower at the risk of being soldered, by his opponents, to the Birchers’ more addled views, the most notorious of these being Welch’s suggestion that Dwight Eisenhower had consciously acted as an agent of the international Communist conspiracy.

The association of Goldwater and the society helped to take both of them down. By 1968, Richard Nixon, a needle-threader extraordinaire, had captured the Presidency and cemented an identification with conservatism despite being loathed by the Birch leadership for a lack of true belief. Nixon had famously withheld his applause when Goldwater declared, at the 1964 Convention, that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”; two years before that, he had been badly bruised by the society during his failed run for the governorship of California.D. J. Mulloy sees the Birchers as having “played a crucial role in conservatism’s revival” because of these internecine smackdowns: the society helped “by providing something for more ‘respectable’ conservatives to define themselves against and differentiate themselves from.”
...These are deeply depressing times for moderate conservatives who are donating their time and money and shredded nerves to fending off the takeover of the Republican Party by far-right elements and non-ideological egomania. As they do so, they nonetheless find themselves routinely equated with the very forces to which they are intramurally opposed.

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