A CONSPIRATORIAL LIFE

The GOP may be Donald Trump’s party—but at heart, this book argues, it’s really the party of a revanchist John Birch Society.

“We live in the age of Robert Welch—whether or not we know who he is, what he did, or why he matters.” So writes Miller in a sometimes-ponderous but nevertheless meritorious life of Welch, a candy magnate whose conspiracy theorizing foreshadowed today’s QAnon. Welch was an early champion of the isolationist “America First” movement, whose slogan Trump appropriated, and he fomented ideas that ranged from charging that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist agent to asserting that Sputnik was a hoax and the Vietnam War was run by the Kremlin to advance one-world government. As Miller documents, Welch was a brilliant young man who memorized thousands of volumes of poetry, literature, and history. Still, he descended into what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” of interpreting government. By the end of his life, Welch believed that it wasn’t the communists after all but instead the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission that controlled the planet. Despite such bizarre views, the John Birch Society was successful in the age of Joseph McCarthy and even more so in the 1970s, when public trust in government plummeted, in part thanks to Richard Nixon, who espoused some of Welch’s doctrines. Although, as Miller documents to sometimes tedious length, the John Birch Society fell apart thanks to infighting and insolvency, its worldview is alive and well in QAnon, the “truther” and “birther” movements, and the mainstream GOP, the last of which likely embraced it out of sheer cynicism. After all, Miller writes, “Welch was an eccentric, a conspiracy theorist who said zany things, but he had sincerity.” Sincerity is scarcely something one would apply to the current run of right-wing politicians, from Trump on down, who seem to throw out conspiracy theories willy-nilly to see what sticks.

Though sometimes a slog, a welcome contribution to the history of modern right-wing politics at its extremes.