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Discovering A Far-Right Political Tradition: Revisiting Scholarship on the John Birch Society


By Yanic Dollhopf

Since 2016, Donald Trump has been the dominant force in American politics. His style of politics and ideology enabled American far-right ideas to gain more influence in the political mainstream. As many people in the media and the public struggled to understand the origins of what is now often termed Trumpism, scholars, too, began to search for its intellectual and historical roots.

Approaching this question from a historical perspective requires an examination of the American far-right. Scholars have often used one organization as a window into far-right politics in the United States, the John Birch Society (JBS). The JBS was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch and other businessmen in Indianapolis and quickly became a dominating force on the American far-right. Its rhetoric included conspiracism, anti-communism, rejection of pluralism, and ridged individualism. Different generations of scholars have tried to make sense of the Society’s role in American politics. In this essay I will categorize three different waves of scholarship on the JBS in the United States since the Cold War and try to focus on ways to expand on the third wave.

Since the 1960s, the heyday of the John Birch Society, the far-right has attracted considerable scholarly interest. The first wave of interest started in the late 1960s and lasted into the 1970s. The most prominent authors of this period were scholars associated with the so-called Liberal Consensus – the Cold War sentiment that New Deal liberalism represented the only intellectually relevant tradition in the United States. Forces outside this consensus were thought to be anomalies. Richard Hofstadter’s article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” is one of the most impactful far-right works of this time. At its core, it represents a psychologization of far-right people and organizations, foremost the John Birch Society, claiming that they lack a coherent ideology and are instead driven by psychologically induced conspiracy belief as the central trait of their so-called paranoid style. Others, like Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, also not shying away from psychological statements, write that “[e]xtremist politics is the politics of despair” (Lipset and Raab 1978: 3). Neither the JBS nor other organizations taking part in the ‘paranoid style’ were seen as having anything worth analyzing in terms of political thought. There was therefore also no serious analysis of what Birchers believed in. This leaves us with a picture of an organization that is in effect an amalgam of ‘crazy people’ with no consistent worldview or ideology, who share only their personal psychological tendency to be paranoid. And as much as liberals might want to take this finding and put it onto Trumpism today, it holds no real explanatory power for the ideas represented by Trump and how they got where they are now.

When a second generation of scholars became interested in the history of the far-right, they used the JBS as part of a larger narrative. Around the 2000s and 2010s they criticized severely the first-wave scholars of the Liberal Consensus for dismissing the impact of the far-right on American politics. The second wave characterized the Cold War far-right first and foremost as anti-communist conspiracy theorists. But the two main arguments made at this time, developed by Lisa McGirr in her book Suburban Warriors and Jonathan Schoenwald in A Time For Choosing, were not actually interested in the far-right as a phenomenon in and of itself. Rather, the goal of second-wave scholars was to chart the impact of the far-right on the history of American conservatism. McGirr did so by showing the profound impact far-right grassroots activists, many of whom were organized in the JBS, had in the ascendence of ‘moderate’ conservatives, especially president-to-be Ronald Reagan, in California. Schoenwald, on the other hand showed that self-branded ‘moderate’ or ‘respectable’ conservatives used the far-right as a mechanism of legitimization. By pointing at the ‘lunatic fringe’ as it was represented by the Birch Society self-identified moderate conservatives redirected liberal attacks away from themselves. In doing so, they were able to establish themselves and their ideas as viable and legitimate parts of the American political system. So, while the first wave does not recognize the far-right as a serious political force at all, the second wave does. However, it is more interested in its impact on modern conservatism than in the far-right itself. Not surprisingly, then, the analysis of far-right ideology falls short when scholarship mostly stops at the conclusion that they were anti-communist and conspiracy-driven.

The most recent scholarship which has been published since 2020 has picked up on the idea of the far-right as its own political force. Developing on the second wave, the far-right is no longer seen by the third wave as a footnote in the history of American conservatism but as its own political tradition, which deserves its own place beside conservatism and liberalism. In his biography of JBS-founder and ideological icon Robert Welch, called A Conspiratorial Life, Edward Miller asserts that it was the ghost of the Birch Society which lead the far-right from the fringe of American politics to center stage and made it possible for it to capture the Republican Party. He comes to the conclusion, that “[t]oday all of us are strapped into the roller coaster in the fantastical theme park of Welch’s imagination. And we can’t get off” (Miller 2021: 4). This position is also mirrored in George Washington University historian Matthew Dallek’s book Birchers, in which he traces an organizational history of the far-right from the JBS to Trump. Dallek suggests to designate the time from 1958 to today “the Bircher Years” (Dallek 2023: 286), arguing that it is the long rise of the far-right that started with the founding of the John Birch Society in 1958 and found its preliminary zenith in 2016 that is the most important development in American politics of the last almost 50 years. Although clustering together the presidencies from Eisenhower to Trump in one periodization might be a little overeager, Dallek’s idea challenges the reader to engage with the longue durée of the American right. Donald Trump, that is the main takeaway for the reader, is not a new phenomenon. The contrary is true. 

“If you look, then, you will see in COVID denialism, vaccine disinformation, America First nationalism, school board wars, QAnon plots, and allegations of electoral cheating, a movement from the 1960s, long thought dead, casting its shadow across the United States” (Dallek 2023: 16).

The newest addition to the third wave has been David Austin’s Taking America Back (2024). More than Miller and Dallek, he focuses on the intertwining of the far-right and modern conservatism and picks up many of the themes of the second-wave scholarship. Still, in contrast to the second wave, he does not use the far-right to write the history of conservatism, but gives it a prominent and equal place in his narrative. He argues that it is in this interwinedness of ‘respectable’ conservatism and the far-right that the explanation of the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA can be found.

It is no large leap from the third wave’s recognition of the far-right as its own political tradition with its own organizational history to asking about its ideological history, its history of ideas, as well. If Trumpism really stands in the tradition of this Birch Society far-right, one can hypothesize that its ideas would do so, too. But as attentive readers will, without a doubt, have noticed by now, none of the waves actually provide us with a deep understanding of the worldview of the JBS or a potential ideological tater that leads from the Birchers of the 1960s to the Trump administration. This might not have been a problem in the framing of the first wave (the far-right as ‘crazy people’) and second wave (the far-right as foot soldiers for conservatism). But if it is a separate tradition – as the third wave has claimed – then it has its own history of ideas which has yet to be written.

There is one author who in 2009 suggested a framework in which to analyze the Birchers’ far-right ideology. In his dissertation “Shouting at the Rain,” Samuel Brenner developed five pillars of what he calls Americanist ideology, of which the JBS is the leading proponent. The most important are conspiracism (“the belief that conspiracies are a driving force in history” (Brenner 2009: 127)) and anticommunism. These are justified by other beliefs, namely libertarian individualism, traditionalist constitutionalism, and religion. Years before the third wave, Brenner realized that the Birchite far-right ideas he was tracing were “a coherent political ideology” (Brenner 2009: 16).  Not stopping there, he made a first attempt to structure this ideology thereby broadening our understanding of the Cold War far-right and – which he of course could not have known – the politics of early 21st century America.

But there is yet to be serious scholarly engagement with Brenner’s model. This is especially unsatisfactory now that the JBS could be key to understanding the contemporary American far-right. Brenner’s work is a valiant starting point for anyone interested in better understanding the ideology now shaping the Republican Party and the United States. Future scholarship has to not only trace the organizational and institutional continuities and breaks in the development of the far-right since the 1960s (as Dallek has done), it needs to do a better job of closely tracing the ideas themselves and how they changed or did not change since the 1960s. How, for example, did the anticommunism of the John Birch Society transform over time so that it was able to survive the death of communism as a world phenomenon (remember that Trump called Kamala Harris a “Marxist” during the presidential debate in 2024)? What are the lines between mid-20th century far-right anti-statism, the Milita movement, and recent efforts to overhaul the federal workforce? Is there one dominant conspiracist narrative on the American far-right that transforms itself anew now and again? Or are there multiple competing conspiracy theories fighting for prominence?

I cannot answer these questions here or provide a full theoretical model of far-right ideology. But I can try to suggest some changes to Brenner’s model that could help get a better grasp of these questions. The most important change one has to make is to get away from characterizing the JBS and in turn the Cold War far-right as simply anti-communist. They were much more than that. They feared the impact of government and the state on individuals and society. In the Society’s founding document, founder Robert Welch writes: “The increasing quantity of government, in all nations, has constituted the greatest tragedy of the Twentieth Century” (Welch 1961: 107).  Subsuming anti-communism under the larger idea of anti-statism makes it easier to explain the longevity of Americanist thought beyond the Cold War. An empirical test of this shift in the theoretical framework is of course lacking today. Even more than Brenner, one also has to center the validity of conspiracism – the belief that history is a conspiracy – as an epistemology, which in turn leads the adherent to a specific conspiracy theory as an ontology. Splitting these two aspects of what has been called simply conspiracy theory makes it easier to explain changes in conspiracy-driven ideologies by identifying conspiracism as a constant.

If the mission of recent scholarship has been to establish recognition for the far-right as its own political tradition in the US, then this promise cannot be fulfilled by only tracing its organizational development – as Dallek has done. Only by providing a history of ideas that stands entangled with the organizational analysis of the far-right from the Cold War to the White House, can the third wave claim success. Motivated by understanding the phenomenon of Trump(ism) within the context of long lines in American history, a history of far-right ideas will lead to critical insights not only on how American society  got here, but on the structure of Trumpist thought itself.

Keywords: American History, Right-Wing Extremism, Donald Trump, American Politics

About the Author

Yanic Dollhopf studied History and Political Science at the University of Freiburg and Michigan State University, completing his Bachelor’s degree with a thesis titled “Anticommunism and the End of the Cold War – The John Birch Society’s View on Gorbachev and the Fall of the Soviet Union.” He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in History at the University of Heidelberg, specializing in contemporary United States history. E-mail: yanic.dollhopf@gmail.com

References

Brenner, Samuel. “Shouting at the Rain: The Voices and Ideas of Right-Wing Anti-Communist Americanists in the Era of Modern American Conservatism, 1950-1974.” PhD diss., Brown University, 2009.

Dallek, Matthew. Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. Basic Books, 2023.

Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. First Vintage Books edition, 3–40. Alfred A. Knopf; Random House, 1967.

Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790 – 1977. 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 1978.

McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. New edition, with a new preface by the author. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Miller, Edward. A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Schoenwald, Jonathan. A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Walsh, David. Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right. Yale University Press, 2024.

Welch, Robert. The Blue Book of the John Birch Society. 7th printing. Western Islands, 1961.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Yanic Dollhopf (October 24, 2025). Discovering A Far-Right Political Tradition: Revisiting Scholarship on the John Birch Society. HCA Graduate Blog. Retrieved May 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/151az


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