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.
While written in the typical uninflected voice of contemporary histories, the book effectively demonstrates how one can 'see, in COVID denialism, vaccine disinformation, America First nationalism, school board wars, QAnon plots, and allegations of electoral cheating, a movement from the 1960s... casting its shadow across the United States' ... A timely, critically important contribution to the history of our present political and constitutional crisis.
