The Texas roots of America's far right

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To find the most reliably conservative area of the United States, look no further than West Texas. Jeff Roche, professor of American history at the College of Wooster in Ohio, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how “cowboy conservativism” spread across the nation, its origins in Christian settlers to the region, and how the towns located in the rural plains influence the rest of the nation. His book is “The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Ira Flato here from Science Friday. Each episode we give you surprising facts.
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0:24.6	get a new view on the world around you.
0:26.6	That's Science Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:29.6	We often think about big things, starting in places with lots of people, with plenty of
0:44.8	opportunities for creative collaboration and chance meetings that spark relationships
0:49.5	and ideas across distances. Think Renaissance Florence, Baroque era Vienna, Silicon Valley from the 1980s on.
0:57.5	Well, today we're going to talk about the enormously influential rise of the modern American
1:02.1	conservative movement, which has a very different origin story. From KERA in Dallas, this is think.
1:09.9	I'm Chris Boyd. My guest is a political historian, and in his new book, he makes a strong case that the way the conservative movement works in this country today, what it values, how it thinks, who it fears and reveres, all that has roots in the rugged, wide open spaces and towns and small cities of the plains,
1:29.8	specifically and especially West Texas.
1:33.0	It sounds preposterous, given that the leader of the movement today is a New York City guy through and through.
1:38.3	But once you hear Jeff Roche's argument, the pieces of that puzzle come together in a way that's hard to unsee. Roche is a professor
1:46.0	of American history at the College of Worcester and author of the conservative frontier, Texas,
1:51.2	and the origins of the new right. Jeff, welcome to think. It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
1:57.5	For people outside the state of Texas, can you give us a sense of the geographic area that we're talking about?
2:04.5	Because this is a land area that is more than just the part of the state that sits to the left of the straight line between Texas and New Mexico.
2:14.3	Sure.
2:16.3	I guess the best way to understand it is that it's the southernmost section of the Great Plains.
	...

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