The John Birch Society likes to point out that its members were tea partiers before the tea party existed. And indeed, some of today's conservative fears—from a socialist president to a United Nations-driven "one-world government"—wouldn't have sounded out of place in the early 1960s, when Birch Society leader Robert Welch commanded a right-wing movement that Republican establishmentarians viewed as a mortal threat. The connective tissue linking the Birchers of the past to today's tea partiers meanders through the libertarian movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and detours into the tobacco wars of the 1980s and the Hillarycare battle of the 1990s.