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Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party

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Long before QAnon, Ronald Reagan and the GOP purged John Birch extremists from the party

Erick Trickey (Washington Post “Retropolis,” 15 January 2021). Genre: popular history article, published nine days after January 6. Retells the standard “Buckley purge” narrative as a guide for what mainstream Republicans should now be doing to QAnon. The wiki preserves it as the canonical statement of the myth that Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley (Dallek, 2023) demolishes.

Core Argument

Trickey’s framing is explicit and contemporary: the post–January 6 Republican Party faces a choice “much like” the one Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan faced with the John Birch Society in the early 1960s. The piece presents the 1961–1965 sequence as a successful precedent: the leaders disciplined the conspiracist fringe, the JBS went into “steep decline,” and the conservative movement was protected for decades. The implicit argument: the GOP could and should do the same with QAnon if it has the will.

Key Claims (the standard “purge” narrative)

  • The 1962 Palm Beach meeting. Goldwater met William F. Buckley Jr. and Russell Kirk in a hotel suite at the Breakers in Palm Beach. Kirk (per Buckley’s 2008 Commentary recollection) said the JBS “should be renounced by Goldwater and by everyone else… with any influence on the conservative movement.” Buckley told Goldwater the society was a “menace” to the movement.
  • Goldwater’s pushback. “Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society… I’m not talking about commie-haunted apple pickers or cactus drunks. I’m talking about the highest cast of men of affairs.”
  • The compromise. Buckley and Kirk agreed to attack Robert Welch personally without criticizing rank-and-file members, giving Goldwater political cover.
  • Buckley’s first editorial. A 5,000-word National Review editorial criticized Welch’s views as “so far removed from common sense.” Goldwater followed with a published letter calling Welch’s views “far removed from reality and common sense” and denying that they represented the JBS membership.
  • Initial failure. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” — Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech, plus the convention’s rejection of an anti-extremist plank, contributed to his landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson.
  • The 1965 escalation. Buckley denounced JBS’s American Opinion in his syndicated column for calling Selma civil rights protesters “a horde of termites” and accusing State, Justice, and the Supreme Court of communist control. Hate mail and subscription cancellations followed; Buckley “doubled down.”
  • Reagan’s “I am not a member.” September 1965, at a Republican fundraiser before his 1966 California gubernatorial run: “I am not a member. I have no intention of becoming a member. I am not going to solicit their support.” A “lunatic fringe,” he said, had infiltrated the JBS.
  • The institutional break. A week later, Republican congressional leaders Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford jointly denounced the JBS. Buckley’s National Review ran a 14-page anti-Bircher special section in October 1965. Goldwater wrote a new letter calling on conservatives to leave the JBS if Welch did not resign.
  • The claimed result. Quoting Carl T. Bogus’s 2013 biography of Buckley: “No fig leaf of respectability remained. The society went into steep decline. Recruiting new members was exceedingly difficult. … Even highly visible members quit.” Trickey concludes: “The conservative movement had excommunicated the Birchers’ conspiratorial, unpatriotic hostility — for the next few decades, at least.”

Why the Wiki Treats This as the Foil

The Trickey piece is internally honest — it credits Goldwater’s reluctance, notes the Reagan reversal as buzz-driven rather than principled, and qualifies the result with “for the next few decades, at least.” But its overall frame — gatekeepers held the line, the line eventually broke — is the standard mythologized history that Matthew Dallek takes apart in Birchers (2023).

The piece is preserved here as the clearest statement of the narrative the wiki rejects, useful as a foil. It also documents key facts (the Palm Beach meeting, the chronology of editorials, Reagan’s exact wording) that survive Dallek’s revisionism — Dallek does not deny the editorials happened, he denies that they accomplished what the standard story claims.

Where Trickey and Dallek Agree

  • The Palm Beach 1962 meeting happened (Buckley, Kirk, Goldwater).
  • Buckley targeted Welch personally rather than the JBS as such.
  • Goldwater sought to preserve Bircher rank-and-file support throughout 1964.
  • Reagan’s September 1965 disavowal was politically motivated (the gubernatorial race and growing buzz, not principled rejection).
  • Buckley’s October 1965 NR special intensified the attack and lost subscribers.

Where They Diverge

  • What the campaign accomplished. Trickey: a real “excommunication” that pushed the JBS into “steep decline” and protected the movement for decades. Dallek: a public-relations cordon around Welch personally, while the rank-and-file, the magazine subscriber overlap, and the substantive Bircher politics (anti-civil rights, conspiracism, anti-UN nationalism) remained inside the tent.
  • What it means for now. Trickey: precedent for an effective post-January 6 GOP purge. Dallek: warning that even the canonical purge wasn’t really a purge.

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