The Birth of the Conspiracy Podcast out of the Spirit of 1946 Progressivism

Space Lasers

I promise I’ll get back to group narcissism soon. Trust the plan.

I recently looked at the sociologist Talcott Parsons’s assessments of the New Right from 1955-1962, which assessments focused upon McCarthyism and the John Birch Society (JBS).

Most see JBS co-founder Robert Welch’s claims about Eisenhower or the Dulles brothers being Communist as utterly fantastical. I’m inclined to agree and side with Parsons’s diagnosis of McCarthyite/Bircher “anti-Communism” as an instance of primitive magical reasoning that wasn’t necessarily even anti-Soviet in effect. No doubt there were self-defined Communists in government, business, and academia at the time, as Parsons acknowledges, but Welch’s broad claims about policy and public figures are simply unbelievable.

Welch used the primitive symbol of Communism to encompass a dataset of behavior and policies, which superficially resembled elements of Marxist ideology and simultaneously caused practical and ideological strain upon the segments of society with which Welch was allied. Using the symbol “Communism” had the unfortunate effect of attaching the political cement shoes of foreign policy conspiracy and paranoia about Marxist dogma to otherwise legitimate or at least real socioeconomic grievances.

Indeed, Bircher concerns about impositions upon local autonomy by New Deal policy, and the goal of global government in general were at least partially grounded in a rational view of reality, as I demonstrated in Relax Southern Western Man. In other words, concerns about a leadership class that wanted global sovereignty at the cost of autonomy for Birchers were at least partially justified.

Recently, I reposted an astroturfed TikTok suggesting that the JBS was alive and well and spearheading a conspiracy:

Second City Bureaucrat @CityBureaucrat

Everything the far right believes was invented by Southern Western men with a mailing list in the 1950s.

This reminded me that both the left and center have also been ensnared by primitive symbolic thinking and the paranoid, conspiratorial behavior that follows.

In fact, the paranoid progressive narrative animated by the primitive symbolism of Nazi and fascist conspiracies that you hear on NPR and conspiracy podcasts today was already well formulated and internalized by American public officials by the end of World War II.

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