At the height of the John Birch Society's activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society's extremism remade American conservatism.
Dallek dissents, if only faintly, from the emerging consensus ... Dallek has a talent for articulating these fine distinctions, but when it comes to proving his theses with evidence, things get a little fuzzy ... Dallek’s dearth of sociological data...makes it difficult to evaluate his insistence that the GOP didn’t need to placate the Bircher base ... Dallek’s account...is both well-told and depressingly familiar.
Dallek argues convincingly that despite the end of the cold war, amid which the Birchers were born, its antipathies and suspicions continue to animate and inflame.
