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At the height of the John Birch Society’s activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society’s extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life. Conservative leaders recognized that these affluent voters were needed to win elections, and for decades the GOP courted Birchers and their extremist successors. The far right steadily gained power, finally toppling the Republican establishment and electing Donald Trump.
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Axis Mundy Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today here with an amazing interview, somebody I've wanted to talk to since their new book came out, Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.
And just really, really excited to share this with you.
The author of the book is Professor Matt Dalek, who is a political historian at George Washington University.
Professor Dalek has written a number of great books, including Defenseless Under the Night, The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security, which won the Henry Adams Prize for the Society for History in the Federal Government.
He also wrote The Right Moment, Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics, and Inside Campaigns, Elections Through the Eyes of Political Professionals.
He's been a commentator on politics and history all over the place, including NPR, CNN.
He's also been part of political campaigns.
So all of that to say, just a fantastic scholar and somebody who's written a book that I think is really, really helpful for understanding things about our current moment.
Some of you out there are familiar with the John Birch Society.
Some of you are not.
You might have a vague idea about the John Birch Society as a kind of conspiratorial organization, a violent organization, a right-wing organization from the 1960s or 70s, before you were born, before you were really paying attention to American politics.
And I want to just encourage you not to tune out today or think that today's kind of a history lesson in something that's not important.
The John Birch Society started in the, basically the early 1960s.
It was started by a man named Robert Welch, who was just somebody who indulged in conspiracy theories whenever he could.
But he was also very wealthy.
And as I talked about last week, he has, and you can hear my baby Kasia here, she's very excited about today's episode as well.
Robert Welch has parallels to somebody I talked about last week, who is Charles Haywood, the leader or founder of Society for American Civil Renewal.
Both men are wealthy industrial types, people who are not part of what we would think of as the working class, people who are not blue collar.
Welch retired early from his Life and business and started the John Birch Society.
He gathered about a dozen or so very wealthy elite men in Indiana in the late 1950s in order to really launch the idea of the John Birch Society.
The point I want to make here, and you're going to hear this in the interview, is that the John Birch Society was a conspiratorial organization on the fringes of the right wing.
Yeah, these were not folks who were in a basement somewhere in Appalachia or Eastern Oregon.
These were not people who were on the fringes of society itself.
In fact, they were in many ways leaders of business.
There were people who were part of the Eisenhower administration.
This speaks to something that we've tried to talk about often on this show, and that is that in order to feel as if you're a victim, to feel resentment, to feel as if you've been pushed around to the side of society, you don't actually have to be someone who is not economically privileged or somebody who doesn't have a lot of power.
You can have a narrative or a myth of, Of being pushed to the margins, even though from all angles it seems as if you're in power and you're elite.
We see this today in the United States.
We see folks who, by all accounts, have a lot of power and privilege.
Many white Christians, many elite white Christians, people with financial means, people with connections.
Talking about how they've been left behind, how they are part of a society that no longer recognizes them and in fact is persecuting them.
So I want you to listen for that in the interview.
I also really, one thing I really appreciate about this book about the John Birch Society is this.
What Dalek does is make the case that the John Birch Society was at the rightward fringe of the Republican Party.
It was full of conspiracy theories.
I mean, some of the most zany things you've ever heard.
But it was also, and this is the part that I think is so pertinent to our current context, hyper-local.
They mobilized on the ground.
And what did they talk about?
What did they fight about?
What did they get into?
What did they want everybody to culture war about?
School boards?
What was allowed in the school library?
What was taught in the school curricula?
The fact that sex ed was beginning to be taught in American schools?
Mayor races?
They were involved in the very tendons and ligaments of American society.
When you see today Moms for Liberty and the Proud Boys, when you see today folks who are standing up at school board meetings yelling about grooming, yelling about pedophiles, those are the heirs of the John Birch Society.
And what I want you to see is two things.
One, and Matt Dalek says this in the interview, conspiracy theories give permission for anger.
They're a way to mobilize.
They're a way to say that you've been victimized.
There are people coming with very bad intentions and you better act now.
Conspiracy theories from the 60s to the 70s till now have been used to mobilize people in order to get their votes, but also to get their anger.
And once you convince them that they've been victimized and there's bad people coming, then you give permission for them to act according to their extreme emotion, their anger, their resentment, their hatred, their othering.
All of that can come out in the name of standing up For the children, standing up for those who are vulnerable, so on and so forth.
The last point I want to make, and I really appreciated this about Matt Dellek's book, is this.
He points out that there was a rightward fringe in the Republican Party in the 60s and 70s, and the John Birch Society really represented that.
And he points out that people like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, they really courted folks who were on this fringe in order to get their votes.
Now I think there's two things to say about that.
I think one, we've seen the slippery slope that happens when you try to court extremists in order to get votes, especially on the right wing.
Goldwater did it, Reagan did it, and now we see with Trump, it's full blown.
And he encourages the extremism, he encourages the conspiracy theories in order to maintain his place at the top of MAGA Nation.
So that's there.
I think what Dalek also points out is that yes, there was a mainstream GOP that was trying to keep these forces at bay, even as it used them.
But I don't want to get it twisted just because there was a mainstream GOP and a rightward fringe of the GOP in the 1960s, 70s, 80s.
Does not mean that the mainstream GOP was not rife with policies and attitudes that were xenophobic and racist.
I mean, we've talked about on the show before that Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in a historic site where in the South, in Mississippi, civil rights activists were killed.
And, you know, I talked about Barry Goldwater and the way he's winked at Racists and white segregationists who didn't want civil rights to move forward in the 1960s.
So even though we're talking about a mainstream GOP, it doesn't mean that the mainstream GOP wasn't rife with all the issues we talk about on the show often.
It just means that there was folks, even to the right word of them, Pushing for policies, pushing conspiracy theories, pushing a worldview that was even more hardcore isolationist in terms of foreign policy, openly racist, Christian nationalist, conspiratorial, and so on and so forth.
Now, the final thing I'll say about this is that one of the last questions I asked Alec is, what's different now than it was then?
And the answer, I think, in short is that the guardrails really aren't there anymore, such that if in the 60s and 70s the John Birch Society was the fringe, those who are the heirs of the John Birch Society are no longer fringe.
Instead, they are the heart of the Republican Party, as Dan and I have tried to explain over and over and over again on this show.
It's of course exemplified by the figure of Donald Trump, who, as we talk about in the interview, Matt Dalek and I, came to notoriety as a conspiracy theorist, somebody who was the birther-in-chief.
It's also emblematized by those who are front and center in the Republican House caucus, someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is threatening to call for the ouster of Speaker Mike Johnson based on a spending bill that includes aid.
And Johnson's stance is on helping Ukraine against Russia.
Those are the echoes.
Those are the direct inheritances of the John Birch Society, the anti-interventionism, the isolationism, the America first and the conspiracy theories that that Marjorie Taylor Greene espouses all the time.
We also just have people who are elite, people who have money and power and influence, claiming that they are marginalized, claiming that they're pushed to the side.
People who come from rich families, like Matt Gaetz.
People who are inheritors of great wealth in the American right, saying that they have no more place in America.
That's all the inheritance of the John Birch Society.
What I'm trying to tell you is that for me, studying the John Birch Society is instructive because if in the 60s and 70s it was pushing at the rightward fringe of American politics, it is now front and center.
And so we are living through what it looks like if the John Birch Society is successful.
The xenophobia, the racism, the Christian nationalism, and the conspiracy theories all wrapped into one.
When I hear about QAnon, I think about the John Birch Society.
When I hear about the big lie, I think about the John Birch Society.
Every time I hear Joe Biden or anyone else called a communist or a socialist, I think about the John Birch Society.
When I hear people use the rhetoric of grooming at school board meetings, John Birch Society.
Ban books.
On and on and on and on and on.
I hope you enjoyed the interview because for me, there's a lot to learn here.
If you're a subscriber, we got 15 extra minutes for you with Matt Dalek.
If you're not a subscriber, subscribe now so you can get the entire interview and all of our great content.
For now, I'll say thanks for listening.
I hope you really enjoy my conversation with Matt Dalek.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Venetiu, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Here today with someone I've... If I'm honest, friends, I love doing this show for a lot of reasons.
One of them, though, is I have an excuse to email people I probably would never have an excuse to email and say, hey, please talk to me.
And the person who's with us today is in that category, and that's Dr. Matt Dalek from George Washington University.
So, Dr. Matt Dalek, thanks for being here.
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
My pleasure.
You've written a bunch of great stuff.
I just told people about it, but we're here today to talk about Bircher's, your new book, how the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.
And I just have to tell everybody, I think folks who listen to the show regularly know I'm from Orange County, California.
That was one of the epicenters of the John Birch Society back in the 60s and a place that was in full on anti-communism mode and libertarian mode, the place that raised Richard Nixon and the church that I used to go to, that gave us the candidacy and politician that became Ronald Reagan, that was the home, the spiritual home of
Of many other conservatives, a place where Barry Goldwater was beloved and John Wayne.
We named our airport after him after all.
So all that to say, any chance to talk about the Birchers for me is welcome, much less with this amazing book you've written.
Let me start here.
In 1958, Robert Welch clandestinely assembles a group of men, a group of men that are God's angry men to what would be the first meeting of the John Birch Society.
These, as we're going to talk about in more depth in a second, are upper crust men.
They are men of means and influence, but they are angry.
What are they so angry about?
What did they want?
And what drew their resentment towards the rest of the nation?
They were really colossal, bestriding the world's most dynamic economy.
They were almost uniformly very wealthy, white, Christian, and on the surface, as your question suggests, they had no reason to be angry because they were on top of the world.
But they were.
And they were angry because they thought that the United States, as they knew it, Constitution, as they defined it, was slipping away.
The country, for just a couple years, but actually for decades, at least since the New Deal, more likely since the Progressive Era, the country had become a kind of bastardized version of what it meant to be American and what it meant to have freedom, as they defined it.
In particular, they saw the relentless expansion of the welfare state As a basically slow-rolling communist bulldozer that, again, for decades, right, since the 1930s, have been depriving individuals of their, you know, liberties in the economy.
They were deeply anti-union.
So, one of the founders, Bill Grady, from Wisconsin.
He had done battles because he was a founder and basically CEO of industrial firms.
And he had done kind of hand-to-hand combat with the unions in his own firms.
Many of these men, they were all men, came from the National Association of Manufacturers, a kind of hardline of this very prominent industrial lobby group.
So they hated unions and power.
So that was one kind of tranche.
Another, though, was a sense that in foreign policy, The United States has deliberately allowed the global communist conspiracy to basically dominate the world, or come close to dominating the world.
And in fact, as they viewed it, foreign policy of the United States from the recognition of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, To the so-called loss of China, to Mao Zedong and the communists in the early 50s, to the stalemate in the Korean War, right?
There was a whole string of seemingly defeats and grave errors.
These men attributed to An internal, at least some of them did.
The founder, Robert Welch, the candy manufacturer, he did in particular.
Some of the others did as well.
But they attribute it really to the work, the dirty work of the communists within American government, within American institutions.
And so, at least on these two areas, they were really rebelling against, they viewed themselves as dissidents going against the dominant grain of American life.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet.
In the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Profit by Jeff Fulmer.
That word dissident really stands out to me because as you say, here we are, we have a group of very wealthy, very influential men in a room in the Midwest.
This is an era where Dwight Eisenhower has been president and Dwight Eisenhower, a kind of middle of the road conservative.
So it's not like we just finished with FDR.
I guess I'm wondering how the role of dissident Opened the gates for conspiracy for a group of men who were in all other parts of life, rational, efficient, very good at making decisions based on business data, based on the markets.
How do men like that end up creating the organization that for many people listening, We'll have very little detail in their mind about until now, but we'll just think, oh yeah, those guys, the conspiracy people from the 1960s.
How do we go from one to the other?
Yeah, that's another great question.
So the conspiracy theories are of course central to the birth society and central to the Well, far right.
First of all, I don't think that every founder or every member of the Birch Society subscribed wholeheartedly to the conspiracy theories.
Certainly some did, absolutely.
Probably a majority.
But Robert Welch, the founder, part of the reason the Birchers are known for their conspiracy theories is that Welch was a dedicated conspiracy theorist.
First of all, these conspiracy theories, they're sort of the famous and then the less famous, right?
So, they range from, as Welch infamously put it, Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of D-Day, was a dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy.
And their view, at least Welch's view, was that Eisenhower had failed to roll the New Deal, that he had accommodated the mainstream, the establishment of both Democrats and Republicans, and that he was, you know, therefore part of this worldwide conspiracy.
The other piece, though, is that you ask this question, well, they are very rational and they're very successful.
But I think that many of them recognize that conspiracy theories are pretty effective weapons at mobilizing people to be active in the struggle for power.
And that they're not always literal.
They're also sometimes figurative.
They send a message that Well, in today's parlance, the deep state, what was then called communist pinkahosa running America's institutions, that these people had really hijacked, for example, the Constitution and made a series of decisions and put from positions of power, the Earl Warren Court,
That trampled on states' rights, the individual's right to basically live a free life and with uninhibited, unencumbered by the state, certainly by the centralized federal state.
And so the conspiracy theories were stories that, again, I'm not saying that The founders didn't, some of them at least, didn't believe in that.
I think that they did to some extent.
But they were, you know, also, I think, very useful because they mobilized, they activated people.
And again, the problem, though, with the conspiracy theories is not only that they're not based on femme, but they create a kind of permission structure for all sorts of White supremacists, anti-Semites, other big-headed people to step in and point the finger at.
Because usually conspiracy theories, they're not benign.
They usually scapegoat someone, some group.
And suggest that this group is at least part of this really un-American.
And the last thing I'll say is that why are they gravitating toward them?
I think they also saw the growth of, again, what they saw as secularism, an increasingly multiracial country, that it was diluting Kind of their understanding of what the United States was.
And there was, at times, explicit racism.
I think within there was a desire to go back to a more anti-interventionist or isolationist stance in keeping with the U.S.
foreign policy in some of the 19th century.
And so the conspiracy theories, I think, were also a way to say that Issues like the schools, morality, the sex education, and all these, you know, the culture wars, what we think of today as the culture wars, that these issues were also part of this vast kind of leftist movement to destroy values.
Again, the Christian values as they define them.
That really defined also what it meant to be American.
I think the idea that conspiracy theories are useful and that they are a permission structure is a great segue into my next question, because one of the things that I think stands out about the John Birch Society, as opposed to perhaps other groups that have been on the fringes of American political parties, is its hyper-local organizational and mobilization structure.
This was not a group that was just throwing missives out into the ether by way of pamphlets.
This was a group that organized people into chapters, 15 people, 20 people, and they were really akin to communist cells in ways that are very interesting.
The communists that they so despised, well, they really copied their organizational tactics by saying, if you have a local group and it reaches 20 people, you have to split and start another group.
You just talked about culture wars.
The John Birch Society fought school curricula, it fought sex ed curricula, it fought about what books were in the library, all things we're discussing now.
How did the hyper-local structure enable them to adapt nimbly to fight those issues on the ground everywhere from Northern California to rural Georgia and everywhere in between?
So, one member said that the John Birch Society was, quote, the answer to every anti-communist prayer.
And I think for a lot of members, as they rode into headquarters, what they liked about the society is that it was not an organization that was just about talking.
It was about doing.
And so what a lot of them said is that after many years of being part of groups where I just felt like I was talking about the dangers of communism, now I'm able to attack it directly.
Now I'm able to take action and not just to take action globally, but in my community where the communists, their handmaidens or their allies have established a beachhead.
And that was another very effective way of framing, pitching, and selling the organization.
And it's important why I think people felt invested in it.
It's not that they just had to pay dues, which they did, $12 for women, $24 for men per year, but that the group allowed them to take agency and ownership of the communist issue at the local level.
And they could see what was happening in their community.
A PTA meeting.
Sex education in the schools, as you mentioned.
The kinds of textbooks that their students in the public schools were being assigned.
And they could do something about it.
The movie that was playing in a local theater, the books that were lining the public libraries.
So these almost mundane, you know, what previously I thought of as just kind of civic, non-partisan, non-ideological Elements, really foundational elements on which American democracy stands.
The Birchers could up and say, no, these are left wing ideas infiltrating my neighborhood, my schools, and really indoctrinating my kids and the other kids.
So that was one element.
I think the other element, and this is probably why Robert Welch, one of these hyper-local, this kind of 20-person chapters, is that it allowed the Berkshires to, well, first of all, admire the communists and that they thought the communists were quite effective.
So, they very explicitly wanted to eat their tactics and their strategies.
But it also, the 20-person chapter model In theory, and to some extent in practice, enabled secrecy.
Because the founders were very worried that if the communists, again, as they define them, if the communists discovered that the Berkshires existed and who the members were, that the communists could destroy the Berkshires that the communists could destroy the Berkshires before it became a massive force.
So the Berkshires wanted to build themselves into a major force.
Because Welch's sort of grandiosity was such that he, and again, many other Berkshires saw themselves as part of the most effective anti-communist movement in the United States, and therefore potentially even in the world.
Fuck.
Dang.
And to do that, though, to be effective, they had to have a level of secrecy.
And they were worried.
And look, it wasn't just paranoia, or was it primarily paranoia?
They were worried they were going to be infiltrated, that the government was going to hound them, try to take them down somehow, that they would be maybe jailed somehow or rounded up and hounded.
The 20-person Really kind of anonymous chapters, and they were given the chapters were given names or code names, essentially, like numbers, random numbers, or seemingly random letters.
I mean, if there was a pattern to the letters, I couldn't decipher it.
CBQM.
And so, again, it was both, I think, a key to why it became A big, relatively big thing in the 1960s and beyond.
It gained about 60,000 to 100,000 members at its peak.
But it also had some drawbacks to having these sort of 20-person chapters.
It had some, created some real problems for the, that model did for the organization.
But, but yeah, it was, it was highly appealing and in many ways quite effective.
I'm thinking about my home region of Orange County where, as I mentioned, the John Birch Society really did take off.
And that's a place where you have a lot of housewives in the early 1960s dropping kids off at school and coming home and then maybe joining a coffee group who are women of their local John Birch Society chapter.
Well, I'm thinking about the man who comes home from his job at five o'clock.
And the idea that you would be in a local chapter of a secret society with a code name is pretty damn exciting compared to the, at the time, bucolic, budding suburban life you were living.
I mean, I can just imagine, I guess on the ground, the thrill of thinking that you were part of this group that was the vanguard of fighting communism that had to act at times in secret because you were so important and so It was absolutely empowering.
by what would be today called the deep state.
I think of folks like Moms for Liberty or others today that have a similar mindset that, hey, we're so important and such a threat to the dominant global world order that we have to kind of have this cloak and dagger kind of comportment about us.
Yeah.
It was absolutely empowering.
And in a way that I think many young people, many people on the 60s left as part of a really felt like they were in the vanguard of really profound social change, a struggle, various struggles for equality that unfolded various struggles for equality that unfolded in the 1960s.
I think, again, in its own way, you can only take the comparison so far, but it's in its own way, many Birchers did feel in power.
And it was extremely exciting.
You also put your Well, in your question, you also mentioned something really important, which is, and I have a whole chapter on this, which is women and the role of women in the movement.
So, the leadership of the Birch Society, it was based in Belmont, Massachusetts, the headquarters of Times 60, 70 employees, many of them paid.
But one thing I argue in the book is that it was the women at the grassroots level who often powered the movement.
Who breathed life to the ideas that were coming out of the male-dominated headquarters.
The women had the time, as one Southern California birch woman said, they had the time, they had the desire, the energy, and I think that they also tapped into, even though they would become deeply opposed to the feminist second wave of feminism,
In the 1960s and women's liberation, they did tap into, I think, this idea of women in the public sphere, that women should take, you know, ownership over kind of public debates would be very, and we're also very, especially areas of the schools, morality, culture.
So, women who, at the time, they were Birch women, were derided as, quote, little old ladies in tennis shoes.
That was one of the famous quotes.
But it was very, not only was it condescending and I think kind of ageist and sexist, but it really misled people, people who bought into that trope.
It misled them into thinking that these are just kind of crazy and bumbling Almost ineffective.
No, you know, it was not reflective, I think, of who the Birch Women were and how much agency and control and power they had in the movement.
It's a little bit like trying to paint Phyllis Schlafly as someone who's ineffective and of no import.
I mean, it's just a grand mistake and makes no sense.
I want to move to the lasting legacy of the Birchers.
I think one of the arguments you make throughout the book is that the Birchers did hang around the fringes of the GOP.
They were there for a long time and still are, to be honest.
Agitating, pushing, trying to gain traction among political candidates, as I've written in my book, and many others, of course, have.
The most famous example of this is the 1964 election with Barry Goldwater, who becomes the unlikely GOP candidate for president and faces off against Lyndon Johnson.
So we have the Birchers As part of the political spectrum in this country, their conspiracy theories, their radicalism, their willingness to claim anybody's a communist if you don't sort of stand with us.
I think some folks would be like, well, that's a fun story, just like a lot of groups.
They fizzled out and then they went away.
So, you know, second Ku Klux Klan in the late 1920s, they kind of went away and that group over there, they fizzled out after a decade.
Reading your book makes it very clear that's not how we should probably understand the history of the John Birch Society and its influence on American politics.
If I zoom in on the George W. Bush years, what might I find in terms of the John Birch Society and its influence on the American political landscape?
Yeah, you're right.
The argument in the book.
is at least in part that the Birchers, as the most prominent far-right group in the 1960s, that they helped to forge alternative political tradition on the far-right.
And that there was actually a dividing line between these far-right activists and more mainstream conservatives.
Which included a variety of conservatives, Chamber of Commerce conservatives, Wall Street conservatives, fundamentalist Christians, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, a wide variety of kind of more mainstream folks.
And that the ideas of the Birchers, even though the movement, really the organization, fades By the early to mid-1970s, it's kind of a shadow of its old self.
But its ideas live on.
Its ideas primarily were, as we've been discussing, conspiracy theories, explicit racism, anti-interventionism versus the dominating nationalism, a more apocalyptic, violent mode of politics, And a hardline culture wars, although there were other, obviously, groups, individuals who took up that last piece.
Anyway, the argument is that the successors to the birth society, a variety of successors, picked up the pieces, pick up on the ideas, sometimes copy their tactics, and that they keep these ideas alive through the decades.
To think about the George W. Bush years, in many respects George W. Bush falls very much into this mainstream conservative camp.
The Republican candidates, you know, major party candidates, they did forge, especially in campaigns, a coalition that included Birx types and Birx successors, especially, you know, as part of their electoral coalition, but then often governed in ways that felt very frustrating to them.
Because on an issue like immigration reform, right, George W. Bush made it a primary issue of his, the pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Well, there was a wing of conservatism that was much more anti-reform, anti-immigrant and immigration, so that was an element.
The Terry Schiavo case where the federal government essentially intervened in this case to keep alive a woman who I believe was brain dead.
It had been for many years and there was a family dispute and infused a religious test or vision of The role of government is imposing a kind of Christian, almost fundamentalist vision on things like health policy.
So, I think that was another element of that.
People like Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul, who in the 1990s and 2000s were very much opposed to U.S.
foreign interventions, opposed to going to war in Iraq, for example.
I believe that the United States government should be a much smaller presence, and that these foreign misadventures, as they saw then, were fundamental violations of, again, what it meant to be American, and also that the wealth had to be kept at home, not going overseas.
So I think that, and then I would suggest that in the second Bush's second term, which I think was a really critical moment in the sort of last 60-year history of the conservative movement.
It did kind of mainstream conservatism.
It didn't collapse entirely.
But it took a series of heavy blows that allowed this kind of far right, what became the Tea Party and has morphed into MAGA and the Trump movement.
It allowed the far right to become the dominant force within conservatism and within the Republican Party, in part because of the failure of the war in Iraq, the Great Recession, Bush's immigration, a failure of immigration reform, Hurricane Katrina.
There was a series of really debacles in the second term that created this opening for those on the far right, kind of Bush's critics to say, Bush did not really govern in the way that conservatives ought to govern. - Yeah.
And I think much of what we see today in the Republican Party is It's in a sense a reaction to still that second term.
And that we're seeing the fruits of some of the failures of that second term.
Really the backlash on the far right in the current 2024 presidential campaign and many other places.
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