Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-44% $17.81$17.81
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$12.04$12.04
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: gatecitybooks
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right Hardcover – March 21, 2023
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Purchase options and add-ons
At the height of the John Birch Society’s activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society’s extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life. Conservative leaders recognized that these affluent voters were needed to win elections, and for decades the GOP courted Birchers and their extremist successors. The far right steadily gained power, finally toppling the Republican establishment and electing Donald Trump.
Birchers is a deeply researched and indispensable new account of the rise of extremism in the United States.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBasic Books
- Publication dateMarch 21, 2023
- Dimensions6.4 x 1.4 x 10.05 inches
- ISBN-101541673565
- ISBN-13978-1541673564
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Dallek’s book is quick-paced and well researched. However troubling, it is a joy to read.”―Guardian
“Dallek’s account — of the 'halting' and clumsy effort by conservatives to simultaneously exploit and contain Bircher energies — is both well-told and depressingly familiar.”―Washington Post
"Dallek’s history is valuable for anyone who wants to understand where the conspiratorial and apocalyptic bent in today’s right-wing politics came from... A central lesson of [Dallek's] book is: Don’t assume that just because a group is isolated, kooky, or fringe it will never penetrate the halls of power...Kooks should not be underestimated."
―Nation
“[W]ell-researched work, whose details lay out a society worth remembering, and a history that is relevant for today...”―National Review
“Impressive new history…You do not have to agree with Dallek’s thesis to find his book worth reading.”―Financial Times
“What makes Birchers so enthralling, ultimately, is Dallek’s willingness to hold up a mirror to the political establishment, if not his own readership. Birchism’s triumphant return, he suggests, is itself an indictment of the broader liberal project: quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan have bred a deep distrust of the federal government, while galloping inequality across Democratic and Republican administrations alike has helped create an opening for the Right’s ersatz populism.”
―Jacobin
“Matthew Dallek’s excellent new history, Birchers, argues convincingly that this ‘movement from the 1960s, long thought dead, is casting its shadow across the United States’. Dallek offers not just a definitive history of the John Birch Society but also an insight into how we got to where we are today."―Irish Times
"Dallek...has waded through thousands of documents to offer a compelling and richly detailed account of the society’s activities in the 1960s...Dallek deserves high praise for disinterring the history of the movement in such minute detail. He amply demonstrates that the conspiracism and hate propagated by the Birchers helped lay the groundwork for the MAGA movement decades later."
―Washington Monthly
“Highly readable.”―Jewish Book Council
"[A] compelling treatment of the origins, evolution, and integration of a fringe movement into the heart of American conservative politics... Fascinating... Important."
―Bucks County Beacon
“A timely, critically important contribution to the history of our present political and constitutional crisis.”―Kirkus, starred review
“In this crisp history of the John Birch Society (JBS), [Dallek] details its influence on the radicalization of the modern Republican party…Based on extensive archival research, this timely account of the John Birch Society is essential for readers interested in U.S. political history and far-right extremism.”―Library Journal, starred review
“Comprehensive and enlightening…This is a treasure trove for political history buffs.”―Publishers Weekly
“In Cold War America, no organization on the right was larger or more influential than the John Birch Society. Matthew Dallek’s perceptive, engrossing narrative reveals as never before how a group funded by wealthy businessmen and organized at the grassroots level changed the Republican Party—and the nation. Birchers is one of the best and most essential histories of modern conservatism that has ever been written.”―Michael Kazin, author of What It Took to Win
“The John Birch Society was once considered so far out on the paranoid fringe it was synonymous with kookiness. In his fascinating and scrupulously researched narrative, Dallek shows how the Republican Party’s extremists took over the GOP. Revelatory and readable, Birchers is essential history for anyone trying to understand American politics.”―Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money
“Before MAGA, there was the John Birch Society, an organization known to many but understood by very few. Dallek has penetrated the fog. His superbly researched and well-written history shows us exactly who the Birchers were and why they mattered—and still matter today.”―Sam Tanenhaus, author of The Death of Conservatism
“A fascinating and much-needed look at the strange but vital history of the John Birch Society. Long dismissed as a fringe movement, the Birchers and their conspiratorial style have found new life in the Trump-era right. This is just the history we need to understand today’s political predicament.”―Beverly Gage, author of G-Man
“Birchers is an eye-opening account of the decades-long struggle to organize the radical right in the United States—and to bring the far-right into electoral politics. This deeply researched account exposes the inner workings of the secretive organization, the deep-pocketed and high-powered activists who joined its ranks, and the everyday Americans drawn into its conspiratorial web.”―Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Basic Books (March 21, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1541673565
- ISBN-13 : 978-1541673564
- Item Weight : 1.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.4 x 1.4 x 10.05 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #348,229 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #145 in U.S. Immigrant History
- #795 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Matthew Dallek is a historian and professor of political management at George Washington University’s College of Professional Studies. The author of The Right Moment and Defenseless Under the Night, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and other publications. He lives in Washington, DC.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Antonio Gramsci was the top Marxist fighting Mussolini for control of Italy in the 20’s. The Nazi’s won and Mussolini threw Gramsci in jail to die, but let him have a pen. He knew America’s strengths were our Judeo-Christian culture and ground up nature of political power filtered through those damn checks and balances of our Constitution, and realized if they infiltrated our education system the republic would eventually topple. The vile but brilliant plan, detailed in his “Prison Notebooks,” would have died with him, but a decade later the Marxists in Germany at the Frankfurt School were studying it. They ADMIT they fled Germany when the Nazi’s defeated them again, taking Gramsci’s plan and heading to Columbia University’s Teachers College.
Herbert Marcuse inflicted arguably the worst carnage. Scrolling down to the Marxists’ brief bio of him on the page from the first paragraph above reveals he set up shop at Columbia (but fails to note it was Columbia’s teachers college) so he could pollute the minds of the people who would be teaching the next generation of teachers! (They understood Archimedes’ principle that with a long enough lever one could move the earth; it took a few generations but they completely changed the mindset of more than half of Americans.) Reagan later tried, but failed to have Marcuse tossed out of UC San Diego; Marcuse personally mentored some of the most destructive radicals of the 60’s such as Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman, et al.
I’ve been researching this for 45 years and am happy to share the fruits of my labors, which include the simple solutions we can, must, and will ground to reverse the decay of our republic. (One critical aspect is that we desperately need the old JFK wing of the Democrat Party back at the table; JFK – who was dear friends with Barry Goldwater despite their political differences – would be a card carrying member of the JBS today!) Feel free to add “Comcast.net” after my last name if you want to dialogue, especially if your instinct is to disagree with me. (My perspective is much more nuanced than a quick read of this might indicate; we need healthy, honest debate if we are to heal; the competing news echo chambers mindset that prevails today is cancerous!)