Matthew Dallek is Professor of Political Management at George Washington University. In his most recent book, he identifies the John Birch Society as the vanguard of an insurgent right-wing extremism in American politics. Known for their early embrace of conspiracy theories, wild accusations, violent rhetoric, and big donor funding, the Birchers doggedly pursued the future we inhabit today.

The end of World War II rolled a wave of American triumphalism and prosperity, effectively launching an (at least) eighty-year stretch that we now know as the “Great Acceleration” and lifting the United States into global superpower status. At the time, these developments were generative of broad optimism. As Walter Lippmann put it, “What Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to the modern world, America is to be for the world of tomorrow.”

And yet, for some on the far right of the nation’s politics, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations warranted only alarm. They were too soft on communism, too indifferent to the free market, too deferential to the nation’s poor and racial minorities. Their investments in national health care, civil rights, the progressive income tax, and education suggested a bipartisan endorsement of the New Deal agenda and a troubling tolerance for collectivism. To the well-heeled right-wing, this was all an American apostasy.

And so, in 1958, candy millionaire Robert Welch set to work organizing a network of rich, white, conservative men—not demographics he specified, necessarily, but those he drew—committed to defying communist infiltration with free market principle. From that initially small circle of wealthy elites, Welch expanded into the grassroots, drawing tens of thousands of “white, upwardly mobile, change-fearing, mostly Christian, often suburban men and women,” who devoted their time, energy, money, and talent to spreading the gospel of what he called the “John Birch Society” (JBS).

(John Birch, incidentally, was not affiliated with the Society—he was an Army intelligence officer and Baptist missionary who had been killed in China immediately following World War II, and who Welch selected as patron saint of the anticommunist cause. There’s no way to know what Birch would have thought about his posthumous immortality, crafted by others using his profile without his consent, but it is interesting to wonder.)

In the early years, the Birchers were mocked and maligned, recognized—when recognized—as a bunch of kooks and crackpots who saw communists in every corner. Perhaps mostly famously, Welch hoisted the disgraced banner of McCarthyism, accusing even Dwight David Eisenhower of being a tool of the communist conspiracy. In the pages of National Review, William F. Buckley dismissed Welch on these grounds, closing the gate on Birchism and so declining to escort American conservatism into the realm of fever-brained conspiracy. By 1964, when the JBS championed Barry Goldwater’s extremism all the way to a landslide defeat, there was good reason to believe—perhaps to hope—that the right’s great experiment in paranoid delusion had run its ignoble course. But the Birchers disagreed.

Matthew Dallek’s Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right tells this story and its aftermath, recounting the JBS in both activity and legacy. The activity was primarily situated in the long 1960s, between the founding of the JBS in 1959 and its supposed decline in the early 70s. Dallek is thorough on these details, providing what is likely the most comprehensive look at the movement in its heyday. Manned by an odd mix of wealthy conspiracy theorists, anti-statist lunatics, avowed racists, and concerned “little old ladies in tennis shoes,” the JBS became a political force of the Cold War era, motivated by a portfolio of distinct but overlapping fears—communism, civil rights, feminism, secularism, etc. The Birchers were dedicated activists, tireless recruiters of new membership, merciless harassers of their foes, and unflappable true believers in the kaleidoscope of conspiracies alleged to have shaped the disordered world in which they lived. A useful foil for the left, they also provided a buffer for the more respectable right, which held them at arm’s length to stake a claim on the center.

The legacy has suffused everything after, from the end of the Vietnam Conflict and Nixon’s resignation through the Reagan Revolution, Newt Gingrich’s 1990s, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, Citizens United, and a pair of non-consecutive Trump administrations. Dallek argues that, even in apparent defeat, the Birch Society proliferated and persevered, dispersing into parallel movements and ingraining its postures, assumptions, and methods deeply into the psyche of the American right, such that its unmistakable influence would still be felt for decades to come. Here, too, he is detailed, noting the particulars within a broad set of trends that speak loudly for themselves. One needn’t squint too sharply to see Robert Welch’s spirit moving amid the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, or the Concerned Women for America, to say nothing of the National Rifle Association, the Tea Party, or the Moms for Liberty. It enveloped the Capitol on January 6.

Dallek’s book has many strengths, but perhaps the strongest is his deft way of capturing the devil’s bargain made between the mainstream- and far-right between 1960 and 2025. Even Buckley’s critics have been happy to acknowledge his rejection of the John Birch Society during the Kennedy Administration, citing the move as evidence of some core commitment to moderation or sense. But as Dallek is careful to document, Buckley didn’t reject the JBS as a package—he rejected a politically toxic association with Robert Welch while working to harness the toxic political energy that Welch had unleashed in his legions of call-making, door-knocking, money-donating followers.

In microcosm, this is the story of how Republican elites have interacted with every extremist element that has arisen on their right horizon in the decades since—keep it at bay, withhold official support, and make quietly clear, through nods and dog whistles, that interests might be shared, agreements might be reached. But with time and incentives a flirtation becomes a marriage. By now most of the old elites are gone—dead or primaried, cowed or converted, and the fringe is at the helm. In Trump 2.0 we witness the culmination of six decades, the final triumph of an improbable, marginal, paranoid, right-wing, anti-statist, extremist movement that never gave up.

Joseph Darda is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. The author of several books about race, culture, and politics, Darda is here concerned with how white men responded to the civil rights and feminist movements in the years following the Vietnam War. He argues that the veteran was made to serve as a competing identity category, available to white men whether or not they had served.

And yet, to stress the marginality of any American movement committed to white supremacy, free markets, and small government is perhaps to repeat the mistake of those 20^th century liberal historians who wrote these impulses out of the national character without pausing to appreciate their central place within it. The right wing has always tacked a straight line to the center of American politics, its ideas and initiatives enjoying built-in demographic advantages even when they were ugly and bad. Sometimes those advantages have been augmented by events that cast the whole project in a more sympathetic light.

The American triumph in World War II was followed, shortly, by stalemate in Korea, some early losses in the race against Russia, and then by quagmire in Vietnam, the largest and most disastrous of the Cold War proxies. The United States shipped nearly three million soldiers to southeast Asia during the course of that conflict, and nearly 60,000 of these died. Back home, in the meanwhile, a vocal anti-war movement arose alongside the civil rights push already-in-progress, then both were joined by “second wave” feminism and a gay rights movement demanding equality for American women and sexual minorities, respectively.

As the war effort collapsed, the troops—about 90 percent of whom were white men—returned in defeat, disappointment, and often in trauma to a nation undergoing revolutionary social changes that excluded them as a matter of course. According to Joseph Darda, in his How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America, the Vietnam vet and his vocal civilian allies acclimated to this new environment by adopting an identity category of their own—something like the “Veteran-American.” The built-in ethos of this identity allowed white men to reclaim privileged status in the social upheavals of the moment, whether or not they had actually served in Vietnam.

To make this case, Darda observes, first, that the now-pervasive acknowledgement of “trauma” as a formative experience dates to the Vietnam era, when social workers at the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital undertook an ambitious program of interviews with returning veterans, paying special attention to the psychological residues of their combat experience. In 1980, this work culminated in the addition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to the third edition of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the formal recognition that soldiers continued to suffer for their service even after their tours had ended.

A significant event in itself, Darda notes that the establishment of PTSD as a diagnosis participated in a revision of the national mindset toward war, such that the returning veteran was admired “not for his valor, but for his suffering.” Because the majority of suffering vets were white men, the resultant white allowance “confused the real suffering of vets, including veterans of color and non-American veterans, with white racial interests that tended to serve white elites who hadn’t served,” like Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump, to name a few. By loudly claiming to stand for veterans, these and other non-vet, white public figures bought a service ethos on the cheap.

To support his claim that veteran-ness rose to the level of an identity category around this time, Darda notes, next, that it featured prominently in the art that emerged from the conflict, especially in literature, music, and film. These are engrossing chapters that argue a political point via art criticism. In the work of veteran-novelists like Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, Robert Olen Butler, and Philip Caputo, for example, the combat experience captivated the reading public, which bought their books by the millions and turned each into a literary celebrity. Asked in interviews whether their service had shaped their writing, they bristled. More than once O’Brien drew an explicitly racial analogue. “It’s impossible to answer,” he said. “It’s like asking Toni Morrison, ‘What has being black contributed to your being a writer?’” Later, when Heinemann’s short novel Paco’s Story won the 1987 National Book Award—beating out Toni Morrison’s Beloved—the priority of Veteran- over African-American stories in American literature seemed to have been achieved.

For musicians, the post-war years saw the iconic 1960s Vietnam-era soundtrack give way to an ascendant “heartland rock” driven by up-and-coming non-vets like John Mellencamp, Tom Petty, Pete Seger, and Bruce Springsteen. Their hit songs focused on the rural, small town, hardscrabble, implicitly white experience of the American heartland, to which Vietnam vets had returned and from which the working class struggled to rise. Their work depicted a nation in decline, the white American dream broken by the war across the sea and the concurrent social revolutions at home. At the same time, the hard-driving rhythms and patriotic themes of hits like Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” radiated a defiant nationalism that appealed to both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. In this, Darda suggests that heartland rockers—especially Springsteen—helped initiate a white reunion of sorts, as white citizens divided by the war came together again to commiserate in its aftermath.

In Hollywood, finally, the Vietnam experience was rendered by many famous directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, and Stanley Kubrick. But for most Americans, the Vietnam veteran experience was most famously represented by Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo in First Blood. (Another famous non-vet, Stallone had expatriated to Switzerland to avoid the draft.) Part of a larger re-ethnicization of disparate white identities—Irish, Italian, Pole, Slovak, etc—after the war, Stallone’s concurrent roles as Rambo and Rocky Balboa dominated theaters in the 1980s, establishing a type of tenacious, blue collar, white ethnic hero who would beat the sort of odds faced by African-Americans during civil rights. In First Blood, the veteran Rambo becomes the disenfranchised Black citizen of the south, harassed by belligerent police enforcing an arbitrary vagrancy law and blasting him, at one point, with hoses before escorting him to jail. In Rocky, Balboa fights the good fight against Apollo Creed—a wealthy, cocky, and fully established Black anti-hero—losing in the end but proving the white ethnic capacity to out-suffer those supposedly lower on the American caste ladder.

Darda’s book makes a provocative and thoughtful case, documenting how American white hegemony was challenged, sundered, and ultimately re-established during and after the Vietnam war, focusing on the special role of the Veteran-American within this process. As white Americans focused their attention upon white sacrifice and suffering, that of racial and sexual minorities–as well as all southeast Asians–fell quickly out of focus. Like the determined activism of the John Birchers, the rhetorical deployment of the white veteran ethos—sometimes by veterans but very often not—played a critical role in guiding the late 20^th century political and social currents that have brought us here and now in the 21^st. They don’t explain everything, but they explain a lot, and in times like these every bit of context helps.