Wrapped in the Flag: A Personal History of America's Radical Right - Political Memoir & Conservative Movement Analysis | Perfect for History Buffs, Political Science Students & American Culture Enthusiasts

WRAPPED IN THE FLAG is a well-written, compelling memoir of a political movement that most Americans know almost nothing about. During the Cold War, the John Birch Society defined the far-right wing of American politics. Born in the aftermath of the McCarthy Hearings, it was originally organized to continue McCarthy's work--to oppose communism in all of its forms and to root out communists and communist sympathizers in American government and culture. As the group developed, it folded more and more conservative causes into the general umbrella of the "International Communist Conspiracy"--a highly organized and well-funded superorganism that included labor unions, civil rights organizations, universities, public schools, the news media, and, minimally, two American presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.The essential facts about the Birch Society are now part of the historical record. What Conner gives us are the feelings of a thoughtful, intelligent young woman who grew up in and around the Society and had to learn how to balance family loyalty with her growing discomfort with what the Birchers stood for. Claire Conner had a front-row seat at the birth and development of the John Birch Society. Her parents were personal friends of JBS founder Robert Welch, her father was a longtime member of the organization's leadership team, and much of her life was defined by the extremist politics of her parents and their friends. She writes poignantly of being a high school student and reading John Howard Griffen's BLACK LIKE ME, or of watching Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech on TV, and realizing how inadequately her received opinions had prepared her to understand the role of race in America. And she writes with great compassion about the conflicts that her emerging liberalism (or, at least, her non-ultra-conservatism) caused between her and the parents she continued to love.Conner does a good job of presenting the Birch Society's political rhetoric in a way that makes it easy to generalize to other extremist groups. The JBS had a single narrative through which it viewed all political events--that a global communist conspiracy had infiltrated America and was working to overthrow liberty and the Constitution. They seized on anything that could support this narrative and explained everything that contradicted it terms derived from the narrative itself. Rational reflection, critical thinking, and linear reasoning could occur only within the boundaries of the narrative, which was always capable of absorbing challenges into its structure and neutralizing them. This is how extremists of all stripes see the world--including (quite ironically) the Stalin-era Soviets against whom the Birch Society so firmly stood.Modern readers will, and should, draw comparisons between the Cold War John Birch Society and the modern Tea Party Movement. Conner draws plenty of lines that we can follow. In the first place, much of the original funding for the Birch Society came from Kansas industrialist Fred Koch, whose sons Charles and David now bankroll many Tea Party groups and causes. Furthermore, the JBS support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 created many of the activists who worked for Ronald Reagan in 1980--who, in turn, serves as a primary inspiration for much of the far right today. And, from Goldwater to Reagan to Ted Cruz, many of the core objectives of the far right have remained constant for the last sixty years: scaling back the federal government, supporting state's rights, returning American to its Christian roots, and fighting "the enemy," whoever that enemy might be.One of the most important things that WRAPPED IN THE FLAG shows us, then, is that modern Tea Party conservatism is inherently anachronistic. It is designed for a context that no longer exists. Its obsessive concern for states' rights, for example, traces back to the Civil Rights Movement, during which the federal government had to nationalize guard troops in Mississippi and Alabama to integrate schools. It is entirely out of proportion fifty years later. And the Tea Party's deep Cold War roots cause it to conceptualize "Terrorism" (which is actually a tactic) and "Islam" (which is actually a billion very different people) in the same way that the John Birch Society conceptualized communism: as deep, unified conspiracies that allows us to fit everything that happens in the world into a single, black-and-white narrative. "We" are on the side of freedom, while "they" (which includes most American politicians and especially President Obama) want to destroy what makes America great. And because the Tea Party, like the John Birch Society, can only reason effectively within the boundaries of its own narrative, it, like Claire Conner's parents, cannot seriously engage, or compromise, with views that contradict its core assumptions.Understanding the story of the John Birch Society is essential to understanding the rise and persistence of the Tea Party. Beyond that, the JBS gives us an excellent lens for understanding extremist movements of every era and ideology. Because she has such in-depth experience with her subject, Claire Conner is uniquely qualified to write a book like WRAPPED IN THE FLAG. And because she is both a deep thinker and an engaging writer, we should be grateful that she did.Michael Austin, Ph.D.Author of That's Not What They Meant!: Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America's Right Wing