Then-Sen. Barry Goldwater speaks to the House Ways and Means Committee in 1995 about tobacco tax. Birchers to birthers: a GOP quandary

They’ve been christened the “birthers,” and they ask, “Is Barack Obama the left’s very own Manchurian Candidate, come out of Darkest Africa and smuggled into the New World to assume the presidency as Citizen of the World, ushering in an era of post-racial, big-government socialism?” As many have been asking, is the GOP being pulled under by its conspiratorial fringe?

This is not the first time the Grand Old Party has had a problem with conspiracy theorists who threaten to undermine the broader conservative agenda. In its infancy, the conservative movement faced a serious problem with extremists who threatened to discredit the integrity and seriousness of their political project. These were the “Birchers,” members of the John Birch Society, a far-right organization that originated the myth of the U.N.’s black helicopters, of fluoride poison in our drinking water and of communists hidden in every corner — even the Oval Office. Yes, they argued that Ike Eisenhower was a Commie.


Back then, leaders like the late William F. Buckley Jr. were thinking strategically about the future of conservatism in the postwar era. They wanted to get beyond the legacy of isolationism that had branded their party and led it to defeat after electoral defeat. Buckley and his associates made the decision to split with the Birchers and to do so in no uncertain terms. They cut them off. Publicly, in print and for the record.

And to be fair, the modern National Review has taken a similar attitude toward the birthers, writing them off in an editorial July 28. But NR is not the powerhouse it once was, and in the age of the blogosphere and 24-hour news coverage, it bears little resemblance to the institution built by Buckley.

The modern GOP doesn’t seem to have the stomach or integrity of those earlier conservatives. Confronted by loony conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of the president’s citizenship, too many conservatives are either silent or stammering, hemming or hawing when asked if our first black president is an illegal alien. The situation is sad and does not bode well for the future of the GOP and the conservative movement. Such as it is.

“This is a period of transition for conservatism,” said Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation, himself a veteran of the Buckley-Goldwater era. “There is no political leader, or intellectual leader, who could step up and say ‘Basta!’ ‘Enough!’”

Can you imagine William F. Buckley countenancing the know-nothing evasion of this current crop of conservatives? Seeking shelter, as they have been, behind rhetorical figments when asked about the president’s citizenship: “There are questions”; “I couldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles”; “I haven’t seen the original documents” and so forth. The fact of the matter is that Republicans are kowtowing to the extreme wing of their party.

Old-guard conservatives would be jettisoning these flim-flam “birther” panderers, just as they jettisoned the Birchers. Buckley and his colleagues had serious policy goals: They sought to defeat communism, not contain it. They sought to roll back the New Deal’s regulations in favor of the free market. They had a serious agenda to pursue. They had no time to dabble with the candy-man, Trilateral Commission conspiracies of the Birchers.

And they found their champions in Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Today, there are no comparable figures on the conservative right. There are no intellectual dynamos like Buckley, no political icons like Goldwater or Reagan.

In short, the problem faced by today’s conservatives is that there is no one of sufficient stature, and no group of serious political operatives, to tell the “birthers” to cut it out — to disown them as they deserve to be disowned. It’s a sad state of affairs. The entire political process suffers as a result.

Jonathan Riehl is a writer and political consultant in North Carolina. He is working on a book about the history of the conservative movement.

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