In the standard origin story of the modern U.S. right, today's conservative movement was born with an excommunication: when William F. Buckley, the erudite, upper-crust founder of the National Review, turned on his onetime ally, Robert Welch of the John Birch Society, driving Welch and the rest of the conspiracy-hunting "Birchers" out of the respectable right. The truth, as always, is much messier, as historian and Northeastern University professor Edward H. Miller demonstrates in his new book, "A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism," published this month by the University of Chicago Press.
"Like the fundamentalists of the 1920s, many Birchers did disengage when it became an embarrassment to be associated with the Society," Miller writes. "Welch's followers were seen as crackpots, deplorables, losers who did not fit into the modern world." But rather than disappear, the Birchers just assumed a lower profile. And today, the ideas they promoted "are everywhere — even in the White House. Even in your own house."
