Trump is little more than the John Birch Society in action

In 1962, Bob Dylan gave us “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a wonderful ditty that tragically reverberates today. Among the lyrics: “Look behind the cloths, behind the chair/Lookin’ for them Reds everywhere/I looked way up my chimney hole/Even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.”

The song echoes for me now because of the revival we are seeing in the John Birch Society approach to Washington, the national economy and the rest of the world. Consider those attacks on “the deep state,” the tens of thousands of government workers being fired, the influence of conspiracy theorists such as the loony Laura Loomer, and, perhaps surprisingly, the tariffs that make the notorious Smoot-Hawley levies look like small change.

Allow me to get personal on this. In high school, I was privileged to have an American History teacher who was a chapter leader in New Jersey of the John Birch Society. That group, popular in the 1960s, maintained that communists had infiltrated the government up to and including President Dwight Eisenhower, that they were eroding U.S. culture with pollutants such as rock and roll and drugs, that higher education was filled with dangerous lefties, and that the only solution was for internal purges and for the U.S. to wall itself off economically, becoming self-sufficient. Tariffs were a good thing to them.

For Birchers such as my teacher, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 were not to blame for deepening the Great Depression, as just about all economists now maintain. Indeed, he would argue, the U.S. was better off ignoring the freezing of world trade and cheering on the isolationism that tariffs led to, especially since this would force us to develop our own independent economy better. And, by the way, the only legitimate level of government was at the county level since Washington was corrupt and in the thrall of the Reds.

Does any of this sound familiar?

My classmates and I were privileged to have had that teacher – whose name, I kid you not, was Schreck (German for fear) – because that insufferable year with him at the dawn of the 1970s gave us insights into Donald J. Trump and his acolytes that we would otherwise not have. Consider Trump’s bizarre conspiracy theories such as Barack Obama’s noncitizenship, the overrunning of the U.S. by Mexican drug dealers and rapists, the involvement of Ted Cruz’s father in the Kennedy assassination, the evils of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the fraudulent and fixed 2020 election, and on and on.

Such ideas don’t arise in a vacuum.

My classmates and I got insights into what a well-regarded Columbia professor, Richard Hofstadter, called “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.” In fact, because so much of Schreck’s blather seemed so off-the-wall, one chum and I sought out an academic for explanations and he turned us on to Hofstadter’s work.

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” the professor wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.”

Referring to Birch society founder Robert H. W. Welch Jr., Hofstadter wrote: “Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”

Messianic? Sure. False. Absolutely.

Recall that in Trump’s mind – or, at least, his rhetoric – God spared him for a mission to transform America. “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump proclaimed during his victory speech early on the Wednesday following Election Day. “And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfill that mission together. We’re going to fulfill that.”

And remember Trump’s frequent references to Marxists and communists. He vowed to bar them from entering the U.S. And recall him labeling Vice President Harris a communist and Marxist.

No matter that economists of all stripes fear that Trump’s policies — especially his economic ones — will plunge us into hard times. No matter that the world is now engaged in a trade war that could easily spiral out of control. Trump, much like Welch, is convinced that he knows best.

Some have written eloquently about the Bircher viewpoints that have coursed through our society like a poison that just won’t quit, a pathology we can’t cure. At times, those attitudes have risen and fallen particularly in the Republican Party, now fully captured by such attitudes as embodied by Trump. Northeastern University historian Edward H. Miller, in “A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, The John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism” in 2021, for instance, had Trump’s number on this.

“Today, all of us are strapped into the roller coaster in the fantastical theme park of Welch’s political imagination,” Miller wrote. “And we can’t get off.”

Welch’s echoes are indeed pervasive in today’s political culture.

“Many of the issues, themes, and causes the Birchers seized upon six decades ago can still be found on the political right today,” book reviewer James Mann wrote in The New York Review. “In an essay titled ‘There Goes Christmas,’ Welch complained that department stores were, in Miller’s words, ‘stocking subversively secular UN holiday propaganda’; because the stores did not have enough ‘Merry Christmas’ decorations, Welch complained, they were trying to take Christ out of the holiday.”

Mann continued: “The Birch Society called for defending the police against charges of brutality, opposed putting fluoride in the water supply with the fervor of today’s anti-vaxxers, and fought efforts at gun control, which they depicted as the preliminary step for confiscation and a Communist takeover of the United States. Much like Donald Trump and his base today, the Birchers refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of political opposition, suggesting that those who disagreed with them were acting in bad faith, if not as part of a sinister conspiracy.”

Can we miss those reverberations today?

It’s far from clear whether the Smoot-Hawley revival now under way in the White House and in Washington will plunge us into recession or worse. Economists at J.P. Morgan and Moody’s Analytics now say there’s a 40 percent chance of such a decline. Those at Goldman Sachs peg the chance at 35 percent. Whether they are on target or not, many economists expect to see lower growth, at least. Yale’s Budget Lab, for instance, expects higher prices and a substantial decline in growth both for the U.S. and the world.

Trump’s attitude seems to be that all the pain his efforts are causing are short-term problems. As The New York Times reported, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said Trump’s policies are “worth it” even if they cause a recession. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has said the economy may need a “detox period” after becoming dependent on government spending. And Trump has said there will be a “period of transition” as his policies take hold.

But others, including some traditional conservatives, think this is pablum.

“The idea of short-term pain for long-term gain is not a crazy idea in and of itself,” said Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, told the Times. But Trump’s trade policies, he said, are “short-term pain to get more long-term pain.”

Welch died in 1985. His ideas, however, are living on. With the market collapses and the expectation of economic strain, we already are seeing just how crazy they were. Buckle up, friends, it’s likely to get worse.