Consider the Cranks (w/ David Austin Walsh)

Historian David Austin Walsh joins to discuss his excellent new book Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right — a fascinating re-description of the relationship between the far right and the American conservative movement from the 1930s to the end of the Cold War. How did figures like William F. Buckley, Jr. relate to figures on the further right fringes of right-wing politics, people like Merwin K Hart, Revilo Oliver, Russel Maguire, and George Lincoln Rockwell? And how should we make sense of Buckley and others' furtive efforts to sanitize the right of its more explicitly racist, anti-semitic, and conspiratorial elements? In this conversation, Walsh makes the case for viewing the conservative coalition, from National Review to the John Birch Society to white power movements and neo-Nazis, as embodying a "popular front." That is to say — like the American left in the 1930s — these groups thought of themselves as part of a unified movement with a common enemy; and despite their differences over strategy, tactics, and rhetoric, they shared a fundamental worldview and vision of the good. What's more, as Walsh demonstrates, figures of the fringe and mainstream…