The enemy within.
Enchiridion Militis blog
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 in America, Social, Conservatism by Josh Trevino
There was once a movement, born of desperation and a sense of embattlement at being on the losing side of historical forces. This movement saw itself as the inheritor and the guarantor of true American tradition and identity, and it sought to restore those things to their rightful primacy in national life. But because the movement did feel embattled, and because it did view itself as the victim of powerful forces, it chose to not merely fight its foes, but emulate them. It saw the prime virtue of its enemies as their ability to win, and if they could just crack the code — if it could grasp the very methodology of victory — then they would turn the tables, and victory would be theirs.
The history of the John Birch Society is a colorful one, and it is easily-forgotten today what a powerful force it once seemed. In the era of its genesis, conservatism was on the ropes — an incoherent public ideology, discredited, if conceived at all, by its popular (and incorrect) association with the Great Depression, and its somewhat more deserved opprobrium for prewar isolationism. The march of history seemed to be on the side of the statists, and the great questions of the day revolved about how, rather than whether, the state would manage the lives of the people. Against this, the conservative was ill-equipped; and so he often enough took his refuge in anger, in symbolism, and in isolation from the public square. Not for nothing did Lionel Trilling issue his famous epigram on the conservative eclipse:
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Into the void stepped the Birchers.
Their formal foundation was in 1958, long after it was clear that the New Deal reorganization of the American polity was not going to be reversed by the Republican governance of that decade. Its leader was one Robert Welch, Jr., an erstwhile Massachusetts manufacturer who looked at the past quarter-century of statism's march, and saw relentless conspiracy. He was not alone in his analysis: surely this sea change, counterintuitive and counter-American as it was, could never have succeeded simply by the will of the people. Surely it was not a function of the mere zeitgeist. Surely it was not coincidental. No: forces were at work. The Birchers meant to identify them.
And identify them they did. In the classic manner of the conspiracy-minded and the cultist, having arrived at the effect — which is to say, their own relentless marginalization by hidden forces — they set out to identify causes and agents. One obvious agent was international Communism. Fair enough: it had an objectively-verifiable existence, acknowledged by its own participants. Less obvious were the American agents of that agent: the secret Communists advancing the cause within our very nation. And here the Birchers went astray.
To paraphrase William F. Buckley on Welch himself, if an act advances the agenda of X, it does not follow that the actor is a conscious agent of X. The rejection of this common-sense premise underpinned the entire worldview of the Bircher movement. Welch himself betrayed the ridiculous conflation demanded by this mindset when he proclaimed that there were four types of persons in America: "Communists, Communist dupes or sympathizers (emphasis added), the uninformed who have yet to be awakened to the communist danger, and the ignorant." Reasonable people understand that a dupe and a sympathizer are not the same in any meaningful sense. But the Birchers were not reasonable people. They saw the enemy everywhere outside of themselves — and as they did so, they parroted their perception of that enemy, to the point of organizing themselves in Communist-style localized cell-structures. This, they reasoned, would give the John Birch Society the same enduring resilience that their enemies surely had. And in the coming conflagration — often expected, never well-defined — it would provide the winning edge.
The ludicrous fallacy of this approach seems obvious enough. Methods have moral content. An end may have multiple means. An end for one actor may not be the same as an end for another. Et cetera.
In retrospect, it seems incredible that the Birchers would ever achieve prominence in any movement attracting the American mainstream. But remember that they, like the Bolsheviks before them (and in this, they were successful at emulating their enemies) had the advantage of organization in an otherwise disorganized movement. Trilling's purveyors of "irritable mental gestures" were still coalescing, and the Birchers had true first-mover advantage. This meant they enjoyed an outsized prominence within that movement — and it meant that for a crucial period, they had no meaningful check on their excesses from within it. In the absence of any self-discipline, the John Birch Society went off the rails.
In 1963, Robert Welch released his magnum opus, The Politician. The book is still available, and the extant John Birch Society praises it as the work of "a respected business leader and conservative political activist [who fearlessly revealed] the facts about a powerful minion of the Establishment," and "a monument to Robert Welch's love of truth." A sincere love of truth demands that one acknowledge that The Politician is, in fact, a stupefyingly insane and nonsensical indictment of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a key agent of the Communist conspiracy in the United States. The "evidence," such as it was, consisted of Eisenhower's perceived failure to adequately combat Communism at all stages, and especially of his active hostility to certain self-proclaimed anti-Communists — in particular, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Welch embellished his fantasy with details — for example, the President's brother Milton was purportedly Dwight's superior in their particular Communist cell — that only added to its realism in the sense that Tolkien's compilation of Elvish syntax added to the realism of his works.
The Politician was the beginning of the end for the John Birch Society's place in American mainstream discourse — but the beginning of the end for its place in American conservatism came the preceding year. Nearly concurrent with its founding was the founding of the National Review, and in the beginning, there was much overlap between the personnel of each entity. Under William F. Buckley's aegis, the National Review did what the Birchers did not: specifically, it eschewed the foe rather than mimicking it; and it inculcated within itself and its fellow-travelers a basic optimism about the American people that the Birchers, with their dark Weltanschauung of dupes and proxies, found utterly alien. Buckley in particular wrestled with the problem of Welch's unhinged theories, until publicly concluding in the seminal February 1962 NR essay, "The Question of Robert Welch," that the Birchers' leader was simply a paranoiac who had to be ejected from the still-nascent conservative movement.
The gravity of Buckley's action cannot be overstated. Conservatism was still on the ropes. Its declared adherents were few, and it would shortly suffer a crushing rejection from the American electorate in the 1964 election. In this circumstance, many argued that to turn away any ally was a fool's act, bringing division in dire straits where unity was paramount. Mercifully, the National Review rejected this in favor of doing what was right rather than what was seemingly pragmatic. Considering the probable resulting alternatives in the modern day — a conservative movement twisted by a dark vision of paranoia and loathing, or no conservative movement at all — we owe a debt of gratitude for this simple essay in winter 1962.
The Birchers staggered on, reaching their seeming apogee in 1964, when they became a bete noir of the national media — as vocal backers of the Barry Goldwater campaign — but their demise thereafter was swift. The following year brought twin blows which ended the organization's place in mainstream conservatism: National Review published a followup essay anathemizing the entire organization (the 1962 piece had only focused upon its leader); and Goldwater himself — who was never comfortable with the raving conspiratorial-mindedness of his most shrill supporters — called upon all members to resign.
At this point we must ask: why recall the John Birch Society? Why recount its history? What lessons do we draw from it? For the right, the answer is that it's a cautionary tale — and it reminds us to be proud of our antecedents in the movement.
For the left, it has everything to do with current events.
The American left today is not quite in the position of the American right circa 1960. But it is suffering nonetheless, having been in slow decline for the past quarter-century. Even when it wins the Presidency, it loses the Congress: and even when the President is the inept, uncommunicative George W. Bush, it still cannot make a dent in the ascendancy of its enemies. The end result of this is a group of Americans, identifying as members of the left, that is strikingly similar to the conservative movement of a generation past: inchoate, angry, and prone to "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
Consider the average member of this group. He (or she) remembers the era of leftist dominance of American politics — and he remembers the beginning of its end, on election day 1980. He is around 50 years old. He is professional living in a coastal enclave, mostly on the Pacific coast or the northeast. His political consciousness was formed by the McGovern and Carter campaigns — and of course the American retreat from Vietnam. He may have grown up in Iowa, or Texas, or Missouri, or Utah — but he went to college elsewhere, and fell in love with the people in California, or New York, or Boston, who were so much more progressive and intellectual than the hayseeds back home. His initial concept of conservatives, which he's never really abandoned, was formed by Nixonian malfeasance: they're all crooks and corrupt, in his mind. The ascent of Reagan in 1980, and later the 1994 revolution, came as a profound shock — how could America forget so soon? He is well-off: and the bulk of his working career — and hence the font of his personal prosperity — was spent in the boom markets of the 1980s and 1990s, under Republican national governance in one form or another. He doesn't think about the implications of that much.
But for all his generally good circumstances, he's been on the political and cultural losing side all his adult life. He's tired of it. And he's found a website which, at last, makes him feel empowered. He is, in short, the typical member of the so-called netroots: the left-wing movement, organized around blogs, that seeks to "take back" this country from its usurpers. The netroots is a movement born of desperation and a sense of embattlement at being on the losing side of historical forces. It sees itself as the inheritor and the guarantor of true American tradition and identity, and it seeks to restore those things to their rightful primacy in national life. Critically, it choose to not merely fight its foes, but emulate them. It sees the prime virtue of its enemies as their ability to win, and if they can just crack the code — if it can grasp the very methodology of victory — then they will turn the tables, and victory will be theirs.
Sound familiar? It is — to us. To the left, it's all very exciting, and all very new. And so we see the self-proclaimed netroots go through a trajectory very much like what the Birchers went through, albeit in highly compressed time. The elements are all there: the resentment, the conspiracy-mindedness, and especially the leaders with stupefyingly poor judgment married to Napoleon complexes. I've noted before that they are "frank proponents of outright mimicry of the mechanisms of GOP ascendacy." Add to this the horrifying, alienating statements ranging from the mockery of dead Americans at war to the derision of political opponents' personal sorrows. Add to this the demonization of the very people who should, in a sane world, be their friends — The New Republic chief among them — and the formula is complete. Messianism and paranoia marry to make this.
There's already some evidence of pushback. The journalistic establishment won't take the abuse forever. The purported agents of the Communist — sorry, the vast right-wing conspiracy won't endure the smears indefinitely. And the left's political establishment won't kowtow endlessly — and certainly not so long as the netroots keep losing. For the sake of American civic life, one hopes this is true.
But for the sake of the enemy — we conservatives of all stripes — we need merely note that whereas they have a pint-sized Welch, they have no Buckley.
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