The New Republic

Interesting piece. I, for one, am surprised about once a decade to learn that the Birch Society still exists.

But I fear that Kirchick may not be old enough, or have deep enough roots in conservatism, to avoid falling for the myth that there is a popular conservative movement that is neither Rushian nor Birchian -- or even that such a movement is possible in the future. The conservative movement that coalesced around the Goldwater movement and the "National Review" from the late 1950s descended directly from the bipolar worlds of Birch-style lunatic paranoia and Father Coughlin-style populist authoritarianism. They were joined by a narrow political center of anti-communists with no particular investment in either the Birch or the talk radio camps (and yes, talk radio was a huge influence on the political right in the 1960s). But the Goldwater/Buckley center has always been a minority in the conservative movement -- an elite minority to be sure, but never really in control of the issues agenda of the movement. The Birch and Rush wings of conservatism have always defined and driven the bulk of the conservative issues agenda, joined after 1973 by the third leg of Fallwell-style Christianism.

Wishing for conservatism not to be dominated by various shades of Linbergian ugliness is as reasonable as wishing for the authentically humane face of Stalinism to be revealed. It is a mistake of understanding, a failure to recognize that conservatism is what it is and not what one wishes it to be.

- rhubarbs

February 27, 2009 at 5:30pm

More like this, please.

- jfelliott

February 27, 2009 at 5:41pm

Have to wonder what the low IQ Kirchik knows about the JBS. Did his Red Diaper folks tell him it was bad? He should be specific about why he thinks just saying the name Birch makes him wet his panties. And has he ever read the "Blue Book" by JBS founder Robert Welch? Or is he just a mudslinger? Does he know that Welch identified Castro as a Communist when the NYTimes Hebert Matthews was caliing him a freedom fighter? Does he know that the JBS has had black & Jewish members, or did his pink/red relatives assure him it was antisemitic? If so, please Mr Kirchik, quote the ant-Semitic Birch literature? Can't? That's because you are a knee-jerk liberal. And there's a raeson why the phrase includes "jerk."  As I understand Ron Paul, he believes in strict construction of the Constitution, which would be congruent with the JBS, but Paul is also a free-trader, while the JBS is protectionist. But this would be to deal in substance, while Kirchik is just a smear-chik.

- jeanag

February 27, 2009 at 6:17pm

Modern conservatism is so self-referential, so self-reflexive, so intensely selfish in its world view, that I can't imagine that it will escape its own Narcissus complex. Conservatism will plunge into the lake as it admires its own image and wallows in its own feeling of superiority to everything.

- shaw-man

February 27, 2009 at 8:16pm

Good job Jamie - I noticed some hagiography seeping up around RP since Obama had the audacity to aggresively address the Bush economic catastrophe.  If only we'd listen to Ron Paul, we'd never have debt again. Please!

He's a charming interview and a seemingly folksy sorta guy, but your work has helped out him as a serious wack job whose baseline values and associations are just offensive. He can try and hide all he likes, but thanks to you, he really can't.

We give you shit Jamie, often quite deservedly but on RP you have been a real journalist.

- Wandreycer1

February 27, 2009 at 8:40pm

Oh please, rhubarbs. Jamie surely knows the history - William F. Buckley, Jr. read the Birchers out of the conservative movement. Buckley's animadversions obviously did not cause the Society to autodestruct but it certainly helped to minimize its appeal. You should be aware of the facts before you take someone down who likely knows more than you do on this topic.

- liberal reformer

February 27, 2009 at 9:08pm

Jeanag: Your post is idiotic even by the standards of the idiocy we bloggers are inflicted with out here, i.e., anything by walton. Jamie is to the right on the political spectrum, a fact that you seem blithely unaware of. R. Welch identified everyone as a communist; do you really believe Ike was a Red (Russell Kirk delivered the consummate putdown - "Eisenhower isn't a Communist, he's a golfer")? There is substantial evidence that Fidel Castro - though a leftist - was not a doctrinaire communist until he needed the Cuban Communist Party as a legitimizing institution backing his charismatic rule. Further, strict constructionism was not the ideology of the Founders. The conservative federal judge Richard Posner wrote a devastating piece on originalism in TNR that appeared last year. That article would surely be far over your head. The reigning mode of legal interpretation in the 18th century was loose construction. Not the William Brennan umbra-penumbra loosey-goosiness but a flexible, pragmatic legal approach exemplified by the great British jurist, Blackstone. But I may as well stop because I am sure that I have lost you well before now.

- liberal reformer

February 27, 2009 at 9:29pm

l. r.: Thank God Castro wasn't a Communist. Or Alger Hiss. And the Soviet Venona documents prove theire were never any Communists in the Roosevelt Administration. And thank God TNR published an essay saying the Constitution doesn't exist. I'm devasted!  And of course if Ron Paul overlaps today with a patriotic organization, he has to defend anything written by Robert Welch BEFORE the JBS was founded, just as current TNR supporters must defend anything ever written by various TNR owners in its long left/center/left history. Great logic. And thanks for showing publicly the "liberal" mindset that can only call idiot anyone who knows more than you do.  

And Kirchik, about that NYTimes premier status as the paper of record: The record includes Walter Duranty, Herbert Matthews, and current 15% owner Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim; and slim is the size of each edition as the Times bleeds readers, ads, & inches toward bankruptcy

- jeanag

February 27, 2009 at 10:10pm

Let the record also show that Ron Paul gave a positive blurb to the neo-confderate "Politically Incorrect Guide to American History."

- Lymon1

February 27, 2009 at 10:54pm

Note that Ron Paul's position on foreign policy is pretty much identical to that of the American left:  opposed to the liberation of Iraq, opposed to opposition to the Taliban in Afghanistan, anti-Israel.  Extremes meet.   In foreign policy the Birchers are much closer to the left than they are to the mainstream right.

- bulbman1066

February 28, 2009 at 12:43am

Jeanag's post is spot on.  The New York Times has a long history of supporting the enemies of freedom at home and abroad.  May it die soon and be tossed into the ashcan of history.

- bulbman1066

February 28, 2009 at 12:44am

I clipped Welch's obituary when it ran in the LA Times, and saved it with my copy of "The Illuminatus trilogy", which I was reading at the time. Why? Not because of any sympathy for his politics, but because the founder of the John Birch Society also believed that secret societies, including the Bavarian Illuminati, were plotting to control the world. His loony bin beliefs were not limited to the paranoid fantasy that Eisenhower and everyone else was a Communist. Welch indulged in a number of paranoid fantasies, and today's extreme right carries on that proud tradition.

- JEFF FREY

February 28, 2009 at 1:37am

Today the John Birch Society belongs to history.   The paranoid right is still around but it is small and has little influence.  Meanwhile the left peddles all sorts of paranoid fantasies. You know the drill: Saddam Hussein was not  a threat.  The neocons (read "Jews") tricked us into invading Iraq.  Bush wanted to invade Iraq so he could steal the oil and so Dick Cheney could make money on military contracts.

Unfortunately the left is not small.  It controls Congress and the White House.  That is not a paranoid fantasy.  It is the terrifying reality this country faces today.

- bulbman1066

February 28, 2009 at 3:49am

Kirchiik's franchise on Dr. Paul has always been pretty superficial guilt-by-association. This topic is best addressed on the basis of ideas Paul himself is currently espousing, many of which look a lot better post-meltdown than they did during the campaign. On foreign policy, what Bulbman said.

- Robert Powell

February 28, 2009 at 6:17am

The day that you know more than I do will be the day that I have a brain event that renders me cognitively incapacitated. And even then what you "know" will not be worth knowing. On the Venona intercepts, you actually are wandering into reality. Ales was almost certainly Alger Hiss; TNR has - mostly - a proud tradition of liberal anti-Communism, not that you would know this fact. TNR did not publish an article saying that the Constitution does not exist. Only a loon would interpret R. Posner's article in such a fashion. You are like the religious nutballs who believe that every word of the Bible is literally true and typecast everyone who disagrees as denying the scriptures. So too with you constitutional fetishists. The hilarious thing is that you fanatics  - just as with the biblical literalists - disagree with others of your kind as to what the "true" interpretation is. You and your kind live in a cognitive universe that could not even grasp the arguments of a Posner. Further, what does "original intent" even mean when it comes to, say, broadcast communications? There weren't too many radio and television stations at the time of George Washington. And concerning the First Amendment, on the right there is a wide spectrum of interpretations, from Hugo Black-like absolutism among the libertarians to a belief in considerable limits on the part of at least a segment of social conservatives. Which is correct?  As my mentor,  the late, great Richard Rorty,  said of relativism (it is self-refuting), so with Bible literalism and constitutional literalism and any other literalism, as well.

Dimbulbman: Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews were blots on the Times but that was forever ago. Only an ideological cretin of the right would cite them, to the exclusion of everything else, as emblematic of that august paper. Far more recently, there was Judith Miller, retailing fantasies about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction; Miller was holding court at the Times, arrogant as hell, by many reports and she had the full backing of her editors until .... the actual facts came out. As repellent as Miller was, I do not use her as a synecdoche for the New York Times.

- liberal reformer

February 28, 2009 at 6:58am

I'm with Bulbman - the fact that liberals have screwed up the country so badly, in less than two months in power, shows how fundamentally awful they are. Of course, the libs have had all the real power much longer than that. Those paranoid panty-waist fantasists have always peddled the self-serving piddle that the people controlling the Presidency, Congress and the courts are "running things" when we know that's nothing but an excuse to let liberals off the hook. Their influence is so insidious, perfidious and pernicious that they can ruin things without being anywhere near the reins of "power." How do we know this? Well, things are screwed up aren't they? If it's not the liberals' fault, then whose is it? (If you want to make a liberal's head spin, ask him to explain how the liberals managed to pass so much left-wing legislation these last 40 years when they've only sporadically held "official" "power.")

And just who the hell are you calling paranoid? Is it paranoid to want official documentation of a potential president's live birth in the USA? Is it paranoid to want documentation to prove the "documents" are authentic, and official confirmation that the "officials" providing the documentation are official (and that the officials providing the confirmation that the officials are official are official)? The question answers itself - if every document just leads to a request for another document, if officials' words can't be trusted because their stories line up so perfectly they must be rehearsed, then obviously something is going on. Look, you're not paranoid if someone really is out to get you, and the best proof that someone is out to get you is how difficult it is to prove. Again, I cite the fact that liberals screwed things up while seemingly miles away from the scene of the crime. They may be dumb, but they're not stupid (or vice versa, I really have no idea what that phrase means).

And talk about rich, the liberal whopper that the neocons were wrong about Iraq takes the ever-loving cake. Of course they were wrong, the liberals set them up. As Bulb notes, liberals are major league anti-Semites, but two prominent members of the politburo, "Barbra Streisand" (real name - Mary Jane Flaherty) and "Stephen "Speilberg" (real name, Sean O'Flaherty - no relation) pretend to be Jewish to avoid being tagged as bigots. They cozied up to the neocons and fed them misinformation about WMDs and being greeted as liberators and how we could probably turn a profit on the war if we did it right since the Iraqis would be so grateful for the attention they'd give us their oil for free. It took a lot of persuading, but they finally came on board, only to have the rug pulled out from under them when none of the lies fed them turned out to be true. Can you think of a better example of liberals discrediting conservatives while keeping their own cloven hooves squeaky clean?

But I'm afraid Bulbman, in a surfeit of reasonableness reflecting his devotion to the principle that we ought to treat others as we ourselves wish to be treated, understates things wildly when he says "the left is not small." Well, yes, in the sense that a 747 parked on your chest would not be "small." Like a blue whale in your bathroom is not small. No, it's huger than huge.

The left has so infected our brains that we can't tell up from down, dry from wet, truth from fiction, paranoid fantasy from some kind of fantasy that does not indicate serious mental illness.  The effort involved in ferreting out their evil schemes is intended to exhaust us, the mental gymnastics required to continually criticize them even though the evidence that would back up the criticism is buried so deep no one can find it is intended to drive us crazy. Well, congratulations liberals, it worked.

- Geoff G

February 28, 2009 at 8:14am

I'm always curious to see how people will bash Kirchick. I've got to say, though, "knee-jerk liberal" is probably the funniest.

- epicciuto

February 28, 2009 at 8:38am

Still milking that Ron Paul exposee, are we Jamie?  I was living in Africa when that came out, so that'd make it summer/fall 2007.   Here's a clue: NO ONE CARES ABOUT RON PAUL.  

- aeromonas

February 28, 2009 at 8:43am

Bob Dylan's, "Talkin John Birch Society Blues"  [aka Talking'Ron Paul Libertarian Blues]

==========================================

Well, I was feelin' sad and feelin' blue,

I didn't know what in the world I was gonna do,

Them Communists they wus comin' around,

They wus in the air,

They wus on the ground.

They wouldn't gimme no peace. . .

So I run down most hurriedly

And joined up with the John Birch Society,

I got me a secret membership card

And started off a-walkin' down the road.

Yee-hoo, I'm a real John Bircher now!

Look out you Commies!

Now we all agree with Hitlers' views,

Although he killed six million Jews.

It don't matter too much that he was a Fascist,

At least you can't say he was a Communist!

That's to say like if you got a cold you take a shot of malaria.

Well, I wus lookin' everywhere for them gol-darned Reds.

I got up in the mornin' 'n' looked under my bed,

Looked in the sink, behind the door,

Looked in the glove compartment of my car.

Couldn't find 'em . . .

I wus lookin' high an' low for them Reds everywhere,

I wus lookin' in the sink an' underneath the chair.

I looked way up my chimney hole,

I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.

They got away . . .

Well, I wus sittin' home alone an' started to sweat,

Figured they wus in my T.V. set.

Peeked behind the picture frame,

Got a shock from my feet, hittin' right up in the brain.

Them Reds caused it!

I know they did . . . them hard-core ones.

Well, I quit my job so I could work alone,

Then I changed my name to Sherlock Holmes.

Followed some clues from my detective bag

And discovered they wus red stripes on the American flag!

That ol' Betty Ross . . .

Well, I investigated all the books in the library,

Ninety percent of 'em gotta be burned away.

I investigated all the people that I knowed,

Ninety-eight percent of them gotta go.

The other two percent are fellow Birchers . . . just like me.

Now Eisenhower, he's a Russian spy,

Lincoln, Jefferson and that Roosevelt guy.

To my knowledge there's just one man

That's really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell.

I know for a fact he hates Commies cus he picketed the movie Exodus.

Well, I fin'ly started thinkin' straight

When I run outa things to investigate.

Couldn't imagine doin' anything else,

So now I'm sittin' home investigatin' myself!

Hope I don't find out anything . . . hmm, great God!

Copyright © 1970 Special Rider Music

- iambiguous

February 28, 2009 at 9:26am

Geoff - awesome!

- Wandreycer1

February 28, 2009 at 10:11am

aero - agreed. I would go fruther and say that too many of the people TNR covers constantly are meaningless to most people, even people who follow politics. Do I care what Newt effing Gingrich says and does?  I can't imagine why anyone would.  Ron Paul even less so.  

- Wandreycer1

February 28, 2009 at 10:14am

I agree with Bob Powell that Jamie's one trick pony obsession with Ron Paul is a franchise. Still, something about a [rare these days] Kirchick post does bring out the cranks & loons, though in this case, the wafting odor of Ron Paul is probably straw stirring this bizarre cocktail.

Sit back, you have someone calling Jamie, of all creatures, a knee jerk liberal! You have a spirited and revealing defense of the John Birch Society! You have one specimen equating Ron Paul to....terrifying liberals and defending the Birch Defender! You have a golden piece of righteous parody from some new guy named Geoff G (what this guy bill  yard, he is hot on your genius heels) putting both the Bircher and the Birch Defender into appropriate context, you have ol' george rolling out another Bob Dylan song (George, do you ever listen to anything other than Bobby D?) and of course,

you have the on-going Godzilla v. Rodan battle between Ron Paul and Jamie Kirchick, a never ending tussle between two marginal characters, both trying to remain relevant in an insane world.

What a thread!!

- thejauntyboulevardier

February 28, 2009 at 11:33am

Thanks Wandrey - I enjoy being a troll.

- Geoff G

February 28, 2009 at 11:33am

Jaunty - I missed the name check (is that what the kids call it?) - thanks. But, please, don't compare me to Bill Yard. I'd rather be "the New Dylan" (don't worry, George, there isn't one) or "better than Shakespeare" or "like Nabokov, only more erudite" any of which have more chance of coming true than me coming anywhere near Yard. He's the master - I'm just happy to make a small contribution whenever the medication's working full strength (or not working, it's so hard to tell).

- Geoff G

February 28, 2009 at 3:35pm

"Well, congratulations liberals, it worked."

Geoff, I'd like to think that conservatives did their bit too.  But in the interests of full disclosure, if they hadn't been suckered into "discussion" and "exchange" and "debate" by us liberals, we wouldn't have managed it.  The moment a conservative thinks "hm, maybe I *should* look at the facts of the case," he/she's bollixed.

- ironyroad

February 28, 2009 at 6:07pm

holy cow when did TNR start attracting all these trolls?

- achester99

February 28, 2009 at 7:14pm

Irony - "The moment a conservative thinks "hm, maybe I *should* look at the facts of the case," he/she's bollixed." Amen! (though I could do without the poofy British swear word homophones) That's why I don't think, I react. Reacting is great (just when did reactionary become a dirty word?) because it's a lot easier than thinking. Reacting does not require nuance (ugh!) or consistency (the hobgoblin of simple minds, thank you very much), just a quick mind and fluid principles adaptable to exigencies of whatever attack or reaction one chooses  to make (using the word "choose", of course, to mean something more like an autonomic nervous system response).

Also, just about anyone can react, all he/she has to do is react, or at most memorize some cant to spout at the appropriate moment (and all moments are appropriate), but many people shy away from thinking, especially critical thinking, because of the uncertainty. I mean, who the hell would start a journey without knowing where it will end? Well, then who the hell would confront an issue with an open mind, which inherently leaves open the possibility that one might have to abandon a long-held prejudice or agree with something after thought and reflection that seemed ridiculous at first blush? No one the hell is the answer.

Some misguided people talk about democracy as a deliberative process, sorting out good policies from bad through the free and robust exchange of ideas, with each side dealing with the other in good faith to assure good ideas get a fair hearing. It's hard to imagine a bigger, smellier load of hooey. Democracy means rage-blind partisans spewing spittle at each other, steadily escalating as each side ups the volume in reaction to the other's reaction. Then, you don't even have to worry about public policy (what a relief!), just whether you've inflicted as much damage on the enemy as it's inflicted on you. It's like Ghandi said "An eye for an eye and the world goes blind." Amen again. More blindness is just what we need these days - there's just too much ugliness for those whose eyes are open.

I need more sleep and less coffee.

- Geoff G

March 1, 2009 at 9:43am