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74 Chapter 3 Extremism As the campaign season formally got under way at the end of August 1964, the New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis predicted that whether the contenders liked it or not, there would be three key themes in the fastapproaching presidential election: civil rights, the nation’s nuclear policy, and extremism.1 In reality the three issues were closely intertwined. For example, the Democratic Party nominee, Lyndon Johnson, was seen in many quarters as an extremist for having successfully achieved the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while his Republican counterpart, Senator Barry Goldwater, was regarded as an extremist for having voted against it (on the basis of states’ rights rather than any racist grounds, the Arizonan attested).2 The Democrats also worked especially hard—and very effectively—to suggest that Goldwater was too unstable and too dangerous to be given the opportunity to put his finger on the nation’s nuclear button. This was exemplified by probably the most famous campaign advertisement in American politics, the “Daisy ad,” which managed to damn Goldwater without even mentioning his name by depicting a sweet little girl innocently picking flower petals in a meadow as an ominous male voice counted down to the explosion of a nuclear device.3 This approach by the Democrats was made all the more plausible by Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Republican national convention in San Francisco on July 15, with its especially damaging declaration that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”4 Indeed, in Lewis’s view the question of political extremism had not really been an election issue until Goldwater made his speech. This, though, is to ignore the extent to which the “extremist” label had dogged Goldwater— and conservatism more generally—for a considerable time prior to the events at the Cow Palace. Goldwater may have played into the Democratic Party’s hands with his “defense” of extremism, but the issue was already sitting squarely on the table, as the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, had more than demonstrated during the Republican primaries, and the Democrats were always going to use it against him. The John Birch Society played a crucial role in the various debates taking place about extremism in American society during this time, not only with respect to the Goldwater campaign, but also in terms of broader discussions about the “legitimacy” of conservatism as a political philosophy and its effectiveness in achieving practical political power. This chapter examines these Extremism  75 debates and contestations, including the fallout from the assassination of President Kennedy and fears that Birchers were secretly maneuvering to achieve a takeover of the Republican Party (as California attorney general Mosk had warned about back in 1961). Throughout, as we shall see, the participants in them often struggled to arrive at a clear understanding of what “extremism” actually was—other than a highly partisan, polemical label that could be deployed to discredit the positions of your opponents while adding luster to your own. Who Speaks for American Conservatism? William F. Buckley Jr., National Review, and the Question of Robert Welch Conservatism in the United States was at a very low ebb at the end of the Second World War because of the combined achievements, electoral as well as practical, of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition and the new warfare state, both of which transformed American political culture in the years between 1933 and 1945.5 By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, owing to the intellectual efforts of a diverse group of thinkers (including Friedrich A. Hayek, Whittaker Chambers, Richard Weaver, James Burnham, Peter Viereck, and Russell Kirk), changing domestic and international circumstances (not the least of which was the onset of the Cold War), and the considerable energies of the movement’s activists and popularizers, the situation was beginning to be turned around. As the grand chronicler of this oft-told story, George H. Nash, points out, the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s were important years of “selfdefinition ” and “preparation” for the conservative movement in the United States—the years when the American Right made “its first significant forays out of the wilderness.”6 Although the John Birch Society, along with other members of the radical Right, is usually pushed to the margins of this story as conservatism’s “lunatic fringe,” it actually played a crucial role in conservatism’s revival...

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