Birch Ain’t Beer
As the judicial system of the United States narrows in on Donald Trump from several simultaneous sides, not surprisingly and sticking to form, he is further revving up his anti-establishment rhetoric to save himself and in so doing he is predictably getting the full support of his base. That base had shrunk over the course of the last three years, but sure enough, there are signs that the impending legal battles are re-galvanizing his latent support. It must be astounding to the ambitious Republican candidates like Nicki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and others that this man who was an unlikely candidate in 2015, an unlikely winner in 2016, an defendant in two impeachment trials in 2019 and 2021, a loser in the 2020 election, a further loser via endorsement in the 2022 election, and generally a man that no one except the uninformed or deliberately ignorant thinks highly of keeps finding himself in the lead of his crumbling party. The most recent venomous social media commentary from Trump has clearly stated his belief that all of the prosecutors who are purporting to be leveling their judicial guns at him from Alvin Bragg, to Leticia James to Fani Willis to Jack Smith, the Special Council appointed by Merrick Garland to investigate Trump on various potential federal charges, are all off-base and part of the deep state conspiracy against him. This tactic is not falling on deaf ears and seems to be resonating with his supporters. And here’s the thing, this is not the first time this level of vitriol has infected a part of the American electorate.
The post-war anti-Communist movement in the United States was stoked by fear and loathing and after the McCarthy Un-American hearings in 1954, despite the leadership of the country being in the hands of a staunch conservative Republican in the form of Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of the WWII European Theater, there was a boiling rage under the surface of a prospering economy that was suburbanizing and keeping up with the Jones’. In 1958, a group of businessmen in Indianapolis, Indiana, who felt particularly threatened by the collectivist threat of Communism, formed a group that they named after a little-known conservative and religious Christian war hero who died at the hands of some rogue Communist Chinese in 1945, during the turbulence of the Japanese surrender. That soldier’s name was John Birch and the birth of The John Birch Society (JBS) came to pass with immediate impact. It’s first initiative was to push to get the U.S. out of the United Nations. All during the 1960’s and most of the 1970’s, JBS grew and had more and more influence on the American political scene. In many ways, the JBS hate and fear rhetoric, aimed ostensibly against collectivism and Communism, was the precursor of the extremism that has now become the mainstay of the Republican Party, and specifically the MAGA movement that rules the Republican Party.
What William F. Buckley, the prototypical Republican conservative said about the JBS approach was that it was “far removed from common sense.” Even Ayn Rand, the arch-conservative author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged came out against JBS by saying that their anti-Communistic stance was futile and that “No country can be destroyed by a mere conspiracy, it can be destroyed only by ideas” and the JBS was decidedly devoid of ideas. Does that sound familiar? Sounds a lot like today’s Republican Party platform…or rather, the lack thereof.
People say that the seeds of the current MAGA movement were sown by JBS and that after several decades of wandering in the obscure political wilderness of the extreme right, it has come back into the mainstream of conservative politics since 2010, when it co-sponsored the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that has so much taken the political center stage of the annual political process. That was the first year that Trump spoke at CPAC.
But here’s the thing about fear and hate, people have a hard time keeping it up. It’s exhausting. And it’s only fun for a while, while you are shocking people and getting headlines for doing so. Sooner or later, someone is going to notice that all you are doing is making noise and spouting conspiracy theater rather than solving their problems. Ultimately, the electorate actually notices a lack of viable solutions from its party and its candidates. But then again, the core constituency of the MAGA movement is not really known for such traits as common sense and ideas about how to make their own lives better. Joe “Six-Pack”, as he is often referred to, likes the drama, the scathing insults, the balloons, and sometimes even the violent protests ala January 6th. But what Joe really wants is to relax and enjoy a beer. He may be ready to put in a hard day’s work and wants no handouts, but when work is done, it’s Miller Time and that means that Joe has limited interest in thinking about the geopolitical environment, trade policy, fiscal budgets or even defense strategy or intelligence conundrum.
The John Birch Society was the topic of one of the Sunday morning cable news shows this morning. The commentary went something like this…the extreme right in its current state was created by the John Birch Society except that where the JBS moment came and passed, the current extreme right doesn’t seem to be coming to an end. That view was based on the recent reinvigoration of the Trump political prospects and the recent Waco rally that had red jackets and hats emblazoned with MAGA on full display like nothing has changed in the past eight years. And that is when I found myself realizing that MAGA and JBS were not different at all. JBS was a fringe group that got center stage for a while and then faded into the obscurity of being a crackpot joke. Did anyone notice that CPAC was not well attended this year? Did you notice that the list of people who chose NOT to speak at CPAC was longer than the list of those who did? Every time Donald Trump gets caught dragging another piece of toilet paper on his shoe, whether a trivial bit of idiocy or a dastardly deed against our nation and its people, the list of politicians and even lawyers that are prepared to risk their status and freedom by being caught holding his hat, as they say, gets shorter and shorter. The reality of life has not changed in millennia, much less in the last thirty or forty years. Self-interest has not only not gone out of style, it is perhaps as central to the reality of the right as anything could be.
So, my take-away from my Sunday morning trip down political memory lane has been to ask myself if Joe “Six-Pack” is going Birch on us or whether he has the staying power to be extreme in the extreme. The conclusion I have reached is that Joe just wants his beer and that MAGA and Birch ain’t beer at the end of the day. In other words, this too shall pass and we are coming to the end very quickly now. The reason the strongest political supporters are still onboard is because they have their own legal liability as accomplices or they fear an inability to get elected without all the Joe’s voting for them. In 1958, while the JBS juggernaut was begun, the renowned Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe said it all when he wrote his first novel, Things Fall Apart. And that’s the point, this extremism of the right is just another thing and it too shall fall apart and is on the verge of doing so right now.