American politics in the last few presidential cycles may seem unusual to observers who most likely are well-educated and intellectually sophisticated but are not academic historians.

It might seem as if the center simply is not holding, while the fringes of both parties are fluttering more and more desperately, blown by some unknown wind, as if someone were holding a gigantic tallis in a mountaintop gale and the strings on both sides are trying to escape in different directions.

But they can’t. They’re attached to the same piece of big cloth.

That might feel new — to be fair, it’s hard to think analytically and find patterns in the middle of a storm — but it’s not.

Dr. Matthew Dallek, a political historian who is a professor of political management at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, is interested in how ideas that sound extreme and often extremely odd move from being political outliers to near or at the center of a political party. He’s particularly interested in how such ideas move through the political right and influence the Republican party.

The most recent of his four books, “Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right,” traces the evolution of the John Birch Society from its birth through its zenith to its gradual withering, and it shows how the group’s ideas, which still might sound outré to outsiders, now are part of the party’s standard thinking.

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