Claire Conner
Shortly after the election of 2008, I cleaned my office and turned off my computer. “I don’t have to do this anymore,” I told myself. “I can stop writing and researching. I can stop uncovering and documenting. My parents are dead. And, thank God, their ideas are dead, too.”
Two years later, I realized I was 100% wrong. My parents were back.
- I recognized them in the “stop socialized medicine” crowd protesting healthcare reform.
- I recognized them in 2010 Republican politicians dreaming of voting against the landmark 1964 civil rights bill.
- I recognized them in the effort to cut and dismantle safety net programs.
- I recognized them in the pundits decrying the imminent destruction of our constitution and the imposition of a socialist America.
- I recognized them in the branding of the president as un-American and dangerous.
- I recognized them in the new laws to limit access to the polls and dismantle public unions.
- I recognized all of this because I lived it inside the John Birch Society, the right-wing populist insurgency of the 1960s.
I’m not an historian or a political scientist. I’m not a politician or a think-tank analyst. I didn’t study extremism in school or write articles analyzing its root causes or sociological outcomes.
I know radical because my father was a radical. I know fanatic because my mother was a fanatic. I recognize true believers because my parents and their Birch allies were true believers.
My parents were determined, dedicated and very, very wrong and they seeded the rhetoric that’s poisoning American politics today and destroying any chance for effective government.
I want to warn anyone who dismisses the current Republican stampede to the right as harmless: we have to say “no” to this new radical agenda before we wake up in a country controlled by big-money corporate bosses, no-government libertarians, radical Christians and John Birchers.
I lived extremism and finally got away from it.
Now I’m able to share my story with you.
